Château Millegrand-Mourral Minervois Grande Réserve - Laithwaites

This southern French Minervois is, as it happens, the wine that persuaded me to give a Laithwaites Discovery plan (now called 4 Seasons) a try. I'd been given a bottle of it a while ago as a thank-you from someone and had been sufficiently impressed at the time to consider that a case of similar-quality wines with an up-front discount should be a good thing.

The Discovery plan works on the basis that you get an ostensibly sizable discount on your first mixed case with some freebies thrown in, and then receive a further case every three months having signed up by Direct Debit. I have to say though, that for various reasons, I've never gone back for any more cases from them,

This wine, whilst enjoyable, turned out to be not quite as good as I'd remembered and, more notably, pretty much the best of the wines in the Discovery case.

Like many Laithwaites wines, it is well-enough made, with a good amount of flavour - lots of ripe, plummy and cherry fruit, some spice and rounded in the mouth from oak-aging. The grapes are Syrah, Grenache, Carignan and Mourvèdre from 60-year-old vines.

It has awards (I don't know of what level) from Les Vinalies Internationales Paris 2009, Challenge International du Vin 2010 and the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles 2009.

At £6.99 (plus delivery), it's probably one of the better-value wines from Laithwaites, but like so many of even their good wines, it has flavour but not texture and is just not that exciting.

Update 25/05/11: having worked my way through quite a few Laithwaite's wines, I find myself unable to face any more. They are not bad wines per se - just samey, oversold and overpriced and my initial enthusiasm has worn off.

See this posting on Laithwaites for more details on how I fell out of love with all this:

http://cambridgewineblogger.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-laithwaites.html

Links

Laithwaites - http://www.laithwaites.co.uk/

4 Seasons, plan details - http://www.laithwaites.co.uk/LW/jsp/templates/ourwines/wineplanoptions.jsp?childCategoryId=cat20090&categoryId=cat20016