Domaine de Fenouillet

https://www.domaine-fenouillet.fr/

The best thing about Fenouillet?  You can hit it with a short-nine from the house.  It is on the right as you take the most direct walking route from Impasse Bellevue to the U-Express.  We were, as is customary, met with a very accommodating hostess who was more than happy to give us a short histoire of the Domaine, and suggest a selection of wines based on our preferences.  If you take the suggested walk elsewhere on this site that gets you up to La Roque Alric, you will have walked alongside some of their vines.  

We tasted six wines – a rosé, two reds, two Muscats, and a sparkling muscat rosé!  On our travels, we found some of the muscat-grape rosé to be the wrong type of bitter, but the 2018 Oversant Fenouillet rosé is, to me at least, exceptional for the poolside…  The sparkling was unlike anything we had ever tested and, while we agreed we liked it, we could not pair it with a suitable occasion so passed at that time.  Of the two Muscats, we had an altogether younger and sweeter variant, more suitable as an aperitif or accompaniment to blue-cheese or foie gras, but settled on the second, “Ancestrale” variety, that was subtler but fuller, and allegedly pairs better with chocolate – what’s not to like.