by Patrick Ogle
Louis-Antoine Luyt makes unusual wines--this is another, a muscat from Chile reminisent of "orange wines." I bought this wine in a mood for something simple, normal and that I didn't have to think about; It wasn't theright choice. This is a weird wine, even weirder than the pais grape I tried by Luyt earlier.
First of all, just out of the bottle this wine has a sharp grapefruit smell and the taste is also like a smack in the face--tart and with pronounced phenolics. It seems almost like a mead or even a cider. It is rough and weird and, at the same time, sort of charming. The wine mellows with air and should probably be decanted for an hour or more (if only to let the gunk settle).
The grape here is muscat and the style is of the "orange" wines you find in the Balkans (and even Italy). Those wines use different grapes but the common denominator is that these wines are given prolonged exposure to grape skin. This is common when making red wines; it is less common with white.
This wine is quite "farmhouse". It is pure, unfiltered. I was joking that each bottle came with one of Louis-Antoine Luyt's toenails--it sort of looks as if it has tonails floating in it. There is all sorts of gunk in the bottle.
Orange wines are usually expensive and hard to find. The cloudy nature of the wines give them a sort of orange hue. The other versions of these that I've had priced-in at over $70 a bottle. This Luyt version comes in at a hair above $20 a
bottle. It might be a little hard to find but it is worth searching for; keep in mind this is a truly odd wine. It might be one of the strangest I've tasted. What wine production NEEDS these days is more people willing to push the envelope;
discarding tradition OR looking back to old traditions. Always take a swing at wines from Luyt.
Louis-Antoine Luyt makes unusual wines--this is another, a muscat from Chile reminisent of "orange wines." I bought this wine in a mood for something simple, normal and that I didn't have to think about; It wasn't theright choice. This is a weird wine, even weirder than the pais grape I tried by Luyt earlier.
First of all, just out of the bottle this wine has a sharp grapefruit smell and the taste is also like a smack in the face--tart and with pronounced phenolics. It seems almost like a mead or even a cider. It is rough and weird and, at the same time, sort of charming. The wine mellows with air and should probably be decanted for an hour or more (if only to let the gunk settle).
The grape here is muscat and the style is of the "orange" wines you find in the Balkans (and even Italy). Those wines use different grapes but the common denominator is that these wines are given prolonged exposure to grape skin. This is common when making red wines; it is less common with white.
This wine is quite "farmhouse". It is pure, unfiltered. I was joking that each bottle came with one of Louis-Antoine Luyt's toenails--it sort of looks as if it has tonails floating in it. There is all sorts of gunk in the bottle.
Orange wines are usually expensive and hard to find. The cloudy nature of the wines give them a sort of orange hue. The other versions of these that I've had priced-in at over $70 a bottle. This Luyt version comes in at a hair above $20 a
bottle. It might be a little hard to find but it is worth searching for; keep in mind this is a truly odd wine. It might be one of the strangest I've tasted. What wine production NEEDS these days is more people willing to push the envelope;
discarding tradition OR looking back to old traditions. Always take a swing at wines from Luyt.
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