Chateau De Flaugergues 2005 wine review by (PB)

Celebrating my wife's birthday I took her out to a new place on the Maine coast Called "In Good Company." I read about it in Down East Magazine which touted it as a tapas wine bar catering to your desires. When our waitress greeted us it was clear that she was there to actually serve us-- a real switch from the norm these days--so I perused the wine list--better than most restaurants in our neck of the woods and told our waitress I would pick out our wine and build or meal around it.

This was the wine I decided on partly because of experience with other vintages of this producer and partly because it was affordable for a restaurant marked-up wine. this wine will run you $15 give or take a couple dollars depending so the $30 restaurant price was tolerable.

It was served with decent wine glasses. Hurray! (This is a particular sore spot with me and restaurant wine service. viz., Pay an exorbitant price for wine and then you have to drink it out of 3 pound hunk of glass with a bowl that is way too small to swirl and real nice production seam on the stem. Yuck.)

That is the good part; the not so good part is that the wine was obviously kept at room temp which, for this time of year, was about 80 degrees. Much too warm for wine to be enjoyed.

Okay--review: Nice medium black cherry hue with raspberry fruit in the bouquet. This Languedoc is decently made but flavors are a bit thin and unremarkable. Finish is also a bit thin and short lived.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I have previous vintages but it tasted better as I gazed into the eyes of my lover.

We ended up ordering an olive oil sampler with a baguette for an appetizer and then a mesculin salad with molten goat cheese over a lemon and oil vinaigrette. Our "main" was a pizzaetti (or something close to that) and everything was shared between the two of us.

The chef at "In good company" is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and the flavors of everything were distinctive and nicely done. The service was extraordinary as already noted.
If you are in Rockland, Maine it is worth a stop! Raise a glass.