Cuvee Jules Chauvet Beaujolais Villages 2014

Sour cherries, of course, but they are in among the bubble-gum and acetone and ethyl-methyl  phenolics of sorghum-spirits, which heads right off towards flowers.  And not the good kind.  The "tea-rose, tea-gown", a mandarin fusty cinnabar cabinet filled with dried osmanthus.  The hand is old but not infirm, the artifice of cosmetics cannot totally hide the smell of drying blood, the bruises too dark, bruised wet flowers, fleshy and thick, the air just above them warmer and more humid than the air two inches further away.  The musk of fresh cranberries, the pungent sour of sumac berries.  She has treated her papery skin with witchhazel.  Its brambly pricks whisper across your lips as you kiss the bruises and abrasions, upholstering the inside of your skull with luxury's own velvet.  You wait at a threshold you dare not cross but are desperate to be beyond, where her shape is seen, and the smells and tastes are fast and thick and there are no more philtres and masks and buttresses.  This is the preparatory peignoir, imagined, alone, humming to herself, puttering through her cremes and powders and arcane tools.  The beauty-things all create an effect, their removal exaggerates their absence.  It is here at her vanity, half-painted that she is herself.  When Donne grew up, did he know better?   Those little red earrings, a gift from whoever, do they smell of sandalwood, or am I imagining it?  The drawer full of flowers, aren't some of them a little rotten?  Jules Chauvet is a lecherous Jacob Marley of melancholic boudoirs, shaking silent chains at the careful application of eyepencils.