Two Bruts from the Touraine

There will be no intensely detailed tasting notes here today. Friends and I recently drank these two sparkling Loire Chenin Blancs. We were having a good time, I didn't take detailed notes, and the intricacies are no longer fresh in my mind, just the overall impressions, the broad strokes.

I'm intentionally writing them up in reverse order: oldest to youngest, pricier to less so, opposite to how we experienced them. You'll see why soon enough.

Montlouis-sur-Loire "Almendra" Brut, François Chidaine 1996
$42. 12.5% alcohol. Cork. Importer: Polaner Selections, Mount Kisco, NY.
It's kind of funny, you know, in that way that makes you say, "What the hell...?" I've visited the Chidaine estate in Montlouis, formerly sold their wines for several years, and have been enjoying drinking them for well over a decade. Yet it was only recently that I learned that François makes a sparkling wine called "Almendra," only in the best vintages or so I'm told, that spends 10+ years on its lees before disgorgement. This was my first time trying it. One of my favorite wine blogging buddies, as it turns out, drank and wrote-up the very same vintage of "Almendra" well nigh on three years ago. Turns out our reactions were very much the same, despite the three year and 3000 mile distance between them.

There was an intense mineral character, along with the mushroomy, toasty character that often accompanies sparkling wines that have seen extended lees-aging. The developed Chenin character of the wine sang loud and clear — wool, quince, dried honey, again, some pretty concentrated mineral character. It's that intense Chinin-ness that made appreciating the wine a complicated venture for me, almost as if the sparkling character was sitting off to one side, the Montlouis/Chenin character to another, not quite harmoniously joined. I enjoyed it in the general sense, but not as much as I normally do Chidaine's non-sparkling examples of Montlouis.

The experience made me think about something I hadn't considered in a while. As much as I enjoy sparkling Vouvray and Montlouis from producers such as François Pinon, Foreau, yes, Chidaine, even Poniatowski back in the day, and, more recently, Jacky Blot, I sometimes wonder whether there's any real benefit to be gained from producing Méthode Traditionelle examples of Loire Chenin, other than to satisfy market demand or to yield a product from slightly under-ripe fruit.

Then I drink this and the question again recedes...

Vouvray Pétillant Brut, Domaine Huet 2005
$26. 12% alcohol. Cork. Importer: The Rare Wine Company, Sonoma, CA.
Technically speaking, Huet's Vouvray Pétillant is not made according to the Méthode Traditionelle but rather via the Méthode Ancestrale, in which primary fermentation is stopped before completion (usually by dropping the temperature to a point where the yeast go dormant) and the wine is placed in bottle where fermentation will continue to completion, trapping CO2 in solution (bubbles!) along the way. I'm given to understand that Huet's winemaker, Noël Pinguet, adds a dab of yeast at bottling to ensure that the bottle fermentation goes smoothly, and that he finishes the wine with an small addition of one of the estate's off-day wines in place of the typical dosage used in the traditional method. For the 2005 Pétillant, that finish came courtesy of a soupcon of Huet's 2002 Le Mont Première Trie. (Check out The Wine Doctor's exceptional report on Huet for more details on this and the rest of the wines produced at the estate.)

Technical stuff aside, the Vouvray Pétillant Brut from Huet is consistently delicious wine. As much as I do like the others I mentioned above, I'm really not sure that Huet has a true peer in this context. The 2005 is still a baby, showing nowhere near the nuance of the best bottles of the 2002 I've drunk over the last few years but, like I said, it's still a baby. The wine is showing beautiful fruit, balance and structure, and complete integration between the sparkling and serious Vouvray sides of its personality. Given its balance and purity, I expect the wine to develop quite nicely over the next several years and will certainly enjoy exploring its evolution. I'll be sure to tell you if I was wrong....