The Torbreck 2003 Cuvee Juveniles is a luscious blend of grenache, mataro and shiraz from Australia's Barossa Valley made specifically for Tim Johnston, proprietor of a popular bar and wine shop in Paris called, you guessed it, Juveniles.
Winemaker David Powell asked Tim's 19-year-old daughter Caroline to design the label. (She'd done her first one at the age of 12.) Torbreck is named for a forest in Scotland, hence Caroline's stylized purple trees.
"It makes you understand that eventually, all this will be taken over by our children," Tim told me by phone just now. I could visualize him, standing behind the bar at Juve in the midst of his Saturday night crunch, uncorking bottles, pouring wine, wiping glassware, tasting bits from the kitchen. In the tiny room, adorned with Caroline's precocious drawings, a merry, effervescent crowd: anglophone tourists, international wine makers, journalists, sophisticated Parisians, good wine, tasty tapas.
It just could be the most perfect wine bar in the universe.
