That’s Sancerre?! Yes, that’s Sancerre. Le Vrai Sancerre.
July 17, 2013 § Leave a comment
Everyone knows what Sancerre tastes like. It’s fresh and elegant. It’s good with white fish. It’s usually pretty good, and every once in a while very good.
And then there are the wines of Sébastien Riffault, a young winemaker in the Loire Valley who makes Sancerre unlike any you’ve ever had. His single-vineyard Sancerres are rich and fibrous, knotty and earthen. Riffault farms biodynamically by hand, with horses to pull his tractors. He harvests his grapes a full month later than most of his Sancerre compatriots.
The single-vineyard wines — Auksinis and Skeveldra are available in Maine — receive no sulfur whatsoever, while his cuvée, Les Quarterons, gets a tiny treatment at bottling. They all undergo full malolactic fermentation, which along with the late harvest endows them with a startlingly rich intensity.
In my Portland Press Herald column a few weeks ago, I wrote
The mineral landscape of the wine is inhabited by all sorts of life forms: meringue, clafoutis, sun-baked straw, bees, strange flowers. Little in the wines is citric, nothing is green; all is amber and almandine, copper, soft yellows.
Wines this special are not to be missed. They’re why I drink wine at all.
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