Tag: Loire

Gorgeous Gorges

Published 23. August 2024 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

The tasting of mature Muscadets in our local wine club slowed once again that the western Loire can produce perfectly balanced wines at very economic prices. This wine was among my favourites in the tasting.

The domain was founded by Michel Brégeon in the 1970’s and run today by Fred Lailler. Today Lailler disposes of 8.5 hectares of vineyards. Some are on gabbro soils, an old, blueish-green, igneous rock that imparts complexity, length, and an intense minerality to the wines. The Gorges cru is particularly known for this soil. All of the domaine’s vineyards are planted here.

The wine, from 70 years old vines, is aged on the lees in underground, glass-lined cuves for more than 2 years.

Gorges 2018 (Dom. Brégeon)

Light golden colour. Aroma of apples, saltwater and a touch of lime. Textured, with a stony minerality, a fresh acidity and good length. Well-balanced.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Riffing with Mr. Riffault

Published 24. May 2024 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

I am fully aware that Sébastien Riffault has been in the spotlight for things other than his wines lately. Let’s keep this aside for a while. The quality of his wines can hardly be doubted. Okay, there are people who don’t like the mature style. Some even say they are not typical of Sancerre. Remember that many people believe that the early-harvested commercial yeasted cat’s pee in a gooseberry bush is the real thing. Riffault is, in my opinion, very Sancerre, but clearly a different take.

The sauvignon blanc was planted on limestone and clay some 35 years ago. Akmèniné means “made of stone” in Lithuanian (the nationality of his wife). The grapes were harvested by hand in mid-October, directly pressed without skin contact, 30 percent of the grapes having botrytis. It was then fermented in large old barrels, then aged on the lees. No sulphur added, not fined or filtrated.

Akmèniné 2019 (S. Riffault)

Pale amber. Aroma of mature apples, mango, herbs and yeast. Good volume and concentration, rich, tasty, with ripe fruit and adequate acidity.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Mademoiselle M

Published 3. November 2023 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

Mademoiselle M is a sauvignon blanc from Kimmeridgian limestone soils (marl with oyster sediments), located in the appellation of Pouilly-Fumé. It’s made without added sulphites, aged in used oak vats for 18 months.

Alexandre Bain owns 11 ha in Tracy-sur-Loire. Like his friend and collegue Sebastien Riffault across the river in Sancerre, Alexandre harvests later than most in his region, which gives the wines a darker colour. To retain the maximum acidity in his grapes, Alexandre trains his vines low. Harvest is done by hand, and yields are small.

Mademoiselle M 2015 (Alexandre Bain)

Dark golden, slightly turbid. Aroma of mature apples, flowers, a touch of honey and a flinty minerality. Quite full on the palate, glyceric, concentrated flavours. Rich for a sauvignon blanc. Probably at its peak right now.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Brilliant Loire red at Bellies

Published 4. November 2022 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

Last Thursday I had the pleasure to revisit Bellies, a 100% vegan restaurant in the eastern neighborhood of Stavanger, Norway. Here you are not served “vegan burgers” and such. The focus is on the tastes of the ingredients, and there is a high level of creativity in the presentation. Add to this a select wine list that mostly highlights natural wines and you have got the picture.

I had the “Full Bellies”, a ten servings presentation (dishes of various sizes), accompanied by a package of five wines, plus an elegant champagne, the Les Vignes de Montgueux blanc de blancs extra brut (J. Lassaigne). Among the wines were a stylish, slightly buttered, tropical fruit-scented Saint-Véran, Les Pommards 2020 by Jessica Litaud, a fresh Loire white, Saumur 2021 (B. Stater-West) and an interesting relatively full-bodied oak-treated beaujolais, Morgon Dynamite 2020 (A. & Y. Bertrand). All these were wines that I will keep an eye on, and good enough to be featured.

Our wine came with a dish that I have forgotten the name of, which contains jelly, blackberry, pepper with sea urchin, a.o.

This time I concentrate on a brilliant fruity, earthy, full-of-life red from the Loire valley. Nadège Lelandais can be found in Rochefort sur Loire, a few miles southwest of the city of Angers. There she cultivates 4.5 hectares of cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, and chenin blanc. She has been practicing organic and biodynamic viticulture since the start in 2005.

Our wine Vigneronne is made of cabernet franc, handpicked and fermented in fiberglass vats and aged several months in older barrels.

Vigneronne 2021 (Nadège Lelandais/ Les Vignes Herbel)

Dark purple. Fragrant with raw red fruits (cherry, red currant), blackberry, and with an earthy note. Juicy and fleshy in the mouth with fine tannic structure, herbaceous with fresh acidity. Simply delicious.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Smooth wine ‘de Soif’

Published 21. October 2022 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

Domaine du Bel Air is a producer of fine, age-worthy wines from cabernet franc. Jour de Soif (Day of Thirst) is their entry-level wine, made from younger vines of 20 years.

The Gauthier family is found in Benais, in the Bourgueil appellation since 1600. Today Pierre Gauthier and his son Rodolphe run the estate. It covers more some 18 hectares. Pierre Gauthier begins his winemaking work with a real philosophy. In 2000, the farm converted into organic viticulture.

The wine is a 100% cabernet franc. Manual harvest. The grapes are destemmed and then sorted on the table before being put into vats. Maceration was gentle and lasted 8 days with pumping over and a temperature not exceeding 25% to preserve as much fruit as possible. Ageing was 6 months on fine lees.

Jour de Soif 2020 (Dom. du Bel Air)

Purple colour. Aroma of dark and red fruits (blueberry, cranberry), flowers. Mouthfilling with smooth tannin, medium acidity and long fruity aftertaste. Quaffable.

Price: Low

Food: Thirstquenching, but can also be drunk with light meat, Caesar and other salads and charcuterie

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Wine bars and restaurants and Wine of the Week

Duo at Barcelona’s Garage Bar

Published 1. April 2022 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

The rain in Spain falls… and falls. I’ve come to Barcelona to attend the Vella Terra fair. Walking from my hotel through the square outlined part of the Eixample district, when entering the quiet and pleasant Sant Antoni neighborhood, the sky is wide-open. What is then better than to take refuge in the Garage Bar, that opens right now after the daily break. In the bar I am welcomed by Stefano Fraternali, co-owner. Soon after Ale Delfino show up at my table. Ale is Stefano’s wife and chief organizer of the fair. The theme is thus set.

I let Stefano chose. He served four wines to the small, well-made dishes Pan amb tomate (the Catalan bread classic, here fermented dog 24 hours), marinated olives (own recipe marinade), vitello tonnato (veal with tuna-mayonnaise served cold) and their own burrata (mozzarella on toast, here with champignons, red onions and truffle oil), the two latter maybe a nod to Stefano’s Italian past.

These were Ephraim Mel 2021, a gentle skin-contact garnacha blanca (Sifer Wines, Catalunya), Le Glam Cab du Bled, a fruity, peppery carbonic maceration gamay/ cabernet franc (Laurent Lebled, Loire) and Aldo Viola’s light, raspberry-fresh Saignée Rosso 2019, made from nerello mascalese/ perricone/ syrah (Alcamo, Sicilia).

But first he served this week’s pick. This is born from a duo of grapes, each from their vineyard. The xarel.lo vineyard with the name Cal Tusac, that was planted in 1955, and a macabeu vineyard planted in 1974. We are in Santa Margarida i els Monjos in Penedès, Catalunya. The soil in the first one has marl and chalk, and is northeast-facing. The second, nearby, but over in Vilafranca del Penedès, is south facing, flat with clay and lots of sunshine. Two quite different vineyards, in other words. The viticulture is organic in both. The grapes were hand-picked early September, then very lightly pressed. Then spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeasts, before stainless steel for ten and a half months while doing battonage. After almost a year the two wines were brought together and finally bottled unfiltered.

Cal Tusac Vinyes 55+74 Xarel.lo i Macabeu 2016 (Cal Teixidor)

Light straw. Yellow apples, pears, a herbal touch (thyme). Good acidity, long, and also with a mineral note. A wonderful duo of grapes, fresh for a 16.

Price: Medium

Food: Grilled fish, tasty shellfish, rice dishes, pairing, soft and semi-cured cheeses, a variety of tapas

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Wine of the Week

Mlle. M from Mr. Bain

Published 22. January 2021 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

This part of the Loire is infamous for its use of added yeast to “secure typicity” of grape and place. Alexandre was Bain (along with friend and neighbour across the river in Sancerre) is different, as he lets the grape, here sauvignon blanc, do the job.

He runs an estate of 11 hectares, where he uses natural methods to work the land. As we mentioned, without added yeast, also without chaptalization, or filtration – and with the help of the lunar calendar. This cuvée comes from the type of limestone called Kimméridgien.

Mademoiselle M 2015 (A. Bain)

Golden colour, clear. Concentrated, rich, mature yellow fruits, hint of pineapple, beeswax and honey. Full in the mouth, good integrated acidity, very long.

Price: Medium

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Wine of the Week

Mysterious Muscadet Melon

Published 21. August 2020 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

Melon de Bourgogne can be difficult to get to grips with. Not long ago there was a Muscadet tasting in my private wine club, and after having tasted through some 15 lightly coloured white wines one of the members observed that nobody had yet said a word about citrus.

The other day my student had trouble in describing this wine. And so had I, to be honest. I often start placing the aroma along the “apple scale”. Nothing obvious here. Citrus: Nope. Herbs and spices were difficult to detect, no butter, and wood: not at all. In the mouth it was quite full, but there was no particular acidity to talk about. I was thinking, maybe is this the perfect wine, when words… don’t come easy, but what you have in the glass is just delicious and, yes just wine, and just right.

In the Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine appellation mother and daughter Véronique & Aurore have 75 hectares of vineyards. The Château du Coing vineyard is a south-facing one. Then, it’s a lees-aged wine typical for the area.

Château du St. Coing de Saint Fiacre l’Ancestral 2015 (Günther-Chéreau)

Straw yellow. Mature apples, some bread, white peach and maybe ginger. Full on the palate, a creamy lees character, medium length.

Price: Low-medium

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Wine of the Week

A pét-nat classic of Robinot’s

Published 3. July 2020 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

Jean-Pierre Robinot is for many one of the most classic in the pét-nat style, and his wines are for every producer, call it old or new world, or whatever, to look up to and seek inspiration from.

Robinot used to run one of the very first natural wine bars in Paris called L’Ange Vin, implying that he is from Anjou in the Loire. After deciding that he wanted to make wine himself, and searching all over for vineyards he finally ended up in Chahaignes, Coteaux du Loir, the village he was raised, just north of Saumur.

There he makes many different wines from chenin blanc and pineau d’aunis, some from own vineyards, others from bought-in grapes. Everything is without additions. He makes a number of sparkling wines from the methode ancestral, nowadays mostly called pét-nats.

Fêtembulles is made from chenin blanc, mainly from 60 year old vines in chalky clay and old marine soil. They are located within AOC Jasnières, but the authorities consider the wines to be atypical, so Jean-Pierre label his wines just Vin de France.

The yield is low (20 hl/ha.). It stayed almost a year on the lees, was degorged by hand, and only topped up with more of the same wine. Unfined, unfiltered and without any additions.

Fêtembulles L’Opéra des Vins 2018 (Jean-Pierre Robinot)

Golden, light amber, small bubbles. Mature fruits (yellow tomatoes), mature apples, breadcrumbs and flowers. Quite full mouthfeel and lightly textured, very clean, lovely acidity, mature apples, long.

Price: Medium

Food: Apéritif, fish, shellfish, salads

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Wine of the Week

White Saumur at Vinkontoret, Stavanger

Published 29. November 2019 by Vidar Kenneth Johansen

I went with some musical friends to Vinkontoret, Stavanger. (See also my previous post about the bar.) This is a tradition we have established to shorten the waiting before attending a premiere party for a show (at another place, with a much poorer wine selection).

During the hour or so between the show and the party we had three glasses of wine this time. Vinkontoret (the Wine Office) is a real cathedral of wine, with hundreds of bottles to chose from, and Christoffer Ingebretsen knows more or less what we are after. So we let him chose something, and tasted them blind. The other wines were Heimbourg 2016, a pinot noir from Zind-Humbrecht, Alsace and the Mas la Plana 2015, a cabernet sauvignon from Torres, Penedès. Before this we had this Saumur chenin blanc.

Brendan Stater-West is a young American from Oregon. To make the story short, he was an English teacher in Paris, but had a passion for wine, got married to a French girl, and moved to Saumur in the Loire valley. There he asked the celebrated Romain Guiberteau, whose wines he admired, for a job. Brendan currently leases a one hectare vineyard from Romain, next to his famous Clos du Guichaux in Bizay. It is this vineyard, classified as a lieu-dit, that is Les Chapaudaises. The vineyard’s soil is tuffeau limestone with calcium-rich clay and sand, with many seashell fossils. He has recently met a family who owns an old cellar in Chacé in Saumur. He has begun to renovate this old and magnificent cellar.

This is Brendan’s first vintage, and as such it is very promising. It’s made from indigenous yeast, gently racked from ageing on the lees, and aged for 18 months in old barrel.

Saumur Blanc Les Chapeaudaises 2015 (B. Stater-West)

Light yellow. Vibrant citrus-fruit (mandarin peel), yellow fruits, some white pepper, and also a touch of sweetness on the nose. Slender on the palate, with good acidity and a salty minerality.

Price: Medium

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