2009 Valdivieso reserva pinot noir

It seemed to me wonderful, but I regret that my perceptions of it are the opposite of what the technical sheet included with it says. My notes read:

very light -- delicate -- 
a delicate fleeting earthiness --
all one -- no fruit stands out -- wine,

and wouldn't you know it, I thought I was on the point of profundity in underlining that last. Imagine! Wine, an integrated whole, a product unto itself instead of an anxiously teased out collection of favorite fruit basket and cookery sensations.

Alas, it seems I'm all wrong. Not only did the other adult at the table find strawberries, richness, and alcohol heat in the glass, but that technical sheet promises "intense aromas of fresh berry fruit, strong cassis character and strawberries with elegant sweet spices from barrel aging; full bodied." The alcohol level, by the way, is 14.5%. Now it's one thing to form "votre propre opinion" on wine, as the women at Video Tasting always gently exhort their viewers to do at the end of each two minute clip. (It's nothing to do with Chile, only do go there and practice your French.) But it's quite another to taste delicacy and fleetingness in a wine whose maker of twenty years' experience says he has made intense, spicy, full bodied, and cassis-like. Is the first dram out of any bottle not to be trusted to represent the whole contents? Is this why God made decanters and air? Has my palate been burned out by years of eating too many dark chocolates and too much cinnamon toast, too heavy on the cinnamon (this is a family joke)?

Anyway, of this Valdivieso certainly I can murmur "je vous le recommend," as the French women usually do of everything they try in their videos. I will also further promise to pay better attention and not get quite so far off the reservation, if I can, with Chilean blogger-tasting wine number 2. It will be a 2009 Vina Casablanca Nimbus Estate Pinot Noir, from Casablanca Valley. We won't even look at the technical specifications yet, shall we? "Au revoir."