Les Bourgeois: Great views, great wine

The restaurant at Les Bourgeois overlooks the Missouri River.

Les Bourgeois Vineyards markets a wide selection of affordable wines in wine shops and supermarkets across the state. The winery at Rocheport on the Missouri River also makes many premium wines that don’t typically show up in stores. Visiting the winery is a great way to sample these wines by the taste or the glass, especially if they’re beyond your price range.

We tasted a 2008 Chardonnel followed by a Winemaker’s Select of the same vintage, which was decidedly livelier.

We tried the 2007 Premium Claret, a Norton that I’ve seen in shops, then we tasted the Reserve version, which went over really well, though I thought it had too much oak.

Over the years, Missouri winemakers have gradually refined Nortons so that everybody seems to have a good one to offer. The challenge has always been how to tame the foxy-spicy characteristics of the grape. Two decades ago, winemakers didn’t know how to do that, other than to doom the wine to an endless oak soak. The result was vintage after vintage of bizarre, widely despised wines. Over the past 10 years, this problem has disappeared as winemakers have applied more sophisticated chemistry and mellower oak to the process. Now I see a new challenge emerging: Nortons now are nearly as smooth as Cabs, but they are losing the distinctive Norton qualities. The goal should be to achieve a median between bizarre and ordinary. Les Bourgeois achieves this goal, as do many other wineries.