WINE OF THE WEEK:
Altera is great wine in bottle and out
The venerable house of Schroder-Schyler has been negociants in Bordeaux, France, since the 1730s, when the company arrived from Denmark to settle and trade in wines. Its core business has always been to deal in classified growths from the best properties in the region.
In 2001, the company started looking at opportunities in producing great wines from other regions in France. Languedoc-Roussillon in the southern part of France was appealing because it is legal to blend wines from many different grape varietals there. Yann Schyler, the current head of the firm, decided to source some of the top fruit from this region to create Altera.
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The bottle looks stunning and one would believe it is a pricey wine, especially when tasting it. Coming from the blockbuster 2003 vintage, this is one of the greatest wines I have tasted in a long time.
In the glass, Altera is a deep purplish-red color with a semi-opaque, dense-looking core going out into a deeply crimson-red rim definition with high viscosity.
On the nose, there are superripe and explosive freshly crushed blueberry and black currant fruits with violets, raspberry sorbet and herbs de Provence. It has a clean fruit-driven crushed chalk minerality underlying.
In the mouth, the wine overwhelms the palate with rich forward crushed black berries, including cassis, boysenberries, loganberries and a streak of the more rustic form of blueberries called huckleberries. The midpalate is deeply concentrated and has a high degree of pure black fruit extraction, going into a gorgeous finish of untold proportions for a wine of this region. The wine lingers on the after-mouth for a full minute with yet creamier cassis and hints of licorice.
This is a tremendous wine. Try it with beef or lamb on a hot grill. It should drink well through 2008.
