jamie goode's wine blog: Serious Loire Chenin

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Serious Loire Chenin

A new wine for me. It was part of the Les Caves de Pyrene tasting I did on Thursday morning, and I brought the remaining 3/4 of a bottle home to study at length(!). It's a fantastically pure, fresh, intense Chenin of real appeal. It also goes very well with mature Cheddar cheese.

Frantz Saumon ‘Minérale +’ 2007 Montlouis, Loire
From a grower in conversion to organics, working with indigenous yeasts in large and small oak. Intriguing nose shows classic Chenin notes of herbs, apples, lemon and a faint hint of soft cheese. It’s really pure and focused. The palate is pure and minerally with broad, textured herby, appley fruit kept fresh with high acidity. It’s more-or-less dry, fresh, pure and linear, but with a rounded character that presumably is contributed by a bit of residual sugar. A lovely, precise wine with a long future ahead of it. 92/100 (Les Caves de Pyrene in the UK)
Find this wine with wine-searcher.com

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5 Comments:

At 8:43 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

May I suggest reducing your (over-)usage of the adjective "serious"?

 
At 10:04 PM, Blogger Jamie said...

I like it as a descriptor - some wines are serious, some wines are non-serious. This one was serious. Is there a problem with this? It's like the term 'rock' - some wines rock, other wines don't. So a serious wine that rocks is a really really good one.

 
At 8:14 PM, Blogger Douglas Blyde said...

That is a fabulous, unshunnable Chenin. I remember tasting it out of an unlabelled wine. The price recently went up, sadly.

 
At 10:41 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounds fantastic. I'm fairly sure I once tried a dry wine from this guy, which shone. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the cuvee though...

 
At 8:22 PM, Anonymous Doug said...

Hi Anon,

Was it the Montlouis sec Clos de Chenes? It is stunning, but needs to spend a while in the carafe.

 

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