My apologies – I could have sworn I published this on Tuesday, the usual day for wine of the week, but it seems to have evaporated. Most mysterious.
As temperatures rise, a wine drinker’s fancy often turns to the Loire with its wines naturally high in refreshing acidity and yet, thanks to increasingly warm summers and much improved practices in the vineyard designed to get those grapes fully ripe, fruit that is rounder, deeper and more satisfying than I can ever remember from France’s northwest limit of viticulture.
Eric Morgat is one of several relatively young vignerons, many from Layon, who is re-energising the Savennières appellation and making wines that don’t necessarily have to be kept a decade before losing their youthful austerity and being fun to drink. The son of the Morgats who recently sold Ch de Breuil in Coteaux du Layon, he made his first Savennières in 1995 and is gradually acquiring more and more vineyard in Savennières, and a little bit in Layon now too, and this particular wine is thoroughly exciting.
Young Savennières, described by Jacqueline Friedrich in her book A Wine and Food Guide to the Loire as “the ultimate dry Chenin Blanc” and “the most cerebral wine in the world”, has traditionally been an exercise in hope: bone dry and notably high in acidity with great extract but as tightly furled as a brand new umbrella. These new richer styles have much more obvious fruit and much better integrated acidity so that they can give enormous pleasure at two or three years old while showing every sign that they will age well too.
Dom de la Monnaie, L’Enclos 2004 Savennières has enormous personality, obviously the product of the vineyard rather than a simple expression of Chenin Blanc fruit, with massive extract and a very positive dry finish – very much the sort of wine that would entertain you as a glass opened up in your hand, with perhaps some soft-rind cheese, Brie even, or a light chicken dish. It has 14.5 per cent alcohol so is probably a bit much to serve as an aperitif alas, and in any case refreshing acidity is not its keynote – in fact oddly both this and the Pierre Bise wines noted below are so delightfully ripe, they almost seem low in acidity – very strange.
In the UK it is stocked by the Wine Society at £12.95, Raeburn Fine Wine of Edinburgh and Lake Wines of Henley-on-Thames (tel 01491 411 100) while winesearcher cites just one US stockist, John and Pete’s in Los Angeles.
I can also strongly recommend Dom Pierre Bise 2004 Savennières, produced from relatively young vines grown on sand and schist which is wonderfully pure and full making its super clean and approachable and the broader, more structured and more dramatic Dom Pierre Bise, Clos de Coulaine 2004 Savennières – both lovely wines and the latter available for only £9.75 from Stone Vine & Sun in the UK.
Richard Kelley MW of Eric Morgat’s UK importers Richards Walford wrote the following useful report this year, as is the wont of this admirable wine company whose two exponents Roy Richards and Mark Walford were memorably profiled in one episode of our award-winning BBC tv series Vintners’ Tales.
Savennières
Eric Morgat, Domaine de la Monnaie
Things are moving at great pace for our Eric. Firstly, he announced his engagement to his Catalan girlfriend Anne-Marie last month, thus breaking the hearts of many in the Richards Walford office. His newly classified site in Épire now has a name ‘La Pierre Becherelle’, after a column of granite that stands proud below the site overlooking the Loire. This is now fully planted and expected to yield an ‘experimental’ crop in 2007. He is about to be evicted from his tiny cellar just outside the town that has been his home for the past decade as the property has been sold and the new owner, a local, wants to develop the house. So, he has just bought a property in La Possonniere, a hamlet to the west of the appellation. This is currently a walled garden, a true clos, of about 5ha that has been used for the past 30 years to graze cattle. Apparently it was planted to vines until the mid 1970s when the then owner decided to grub it all up and build a house in the middle. The land still has planting rights, so he aims to replant this at some stage in the future. It’s situated on a gentle slope over looking a bend in the Loire. A tranquil place, disturbed only by the thunderous hum of the Paris-Nantes TGV every five minutes, or so. He has also bought a plot of land in Coteaux du Layon, just across the road from Chateau de Breuil, the family estate which, incidentally has also just been sold – to a second hand car salesman from Brittany who intends to make a quick fortune in the wine industry (yes, really). Eric has been retained as ‘consultant’.
Given we have been working with Eric now since the 2001 vintage, it seems appropriate, given we are about to have a run of vintages to hand, to offer a resumé of each of his past four years.
Vintage 2006
This was Eric’s most difficult vintage to date. The season didn’t start well as the vines were beginning to show the stress of three previous years of drought. Flowering was normal, but July saw another heat wave, and as with 2003 the nights were as warm as the days. August was miserable with lots of rain and cold weather which started to throw the vines out of balance, so there was plenty to be done this month in the vines to correct this. September and the beginning of October were also cool and wet and the decision to drop half the crop was made, although the juice remained charged with high sugar levels; a result of the ongoing drought, even though the fruit was not technically ripe. The wet conditions meant that humidity was high and the botrytis arrived quickly, and a total of 50% of the fruit was affected. In the cellar, the wines are still fermenting, but the initial impression is that Eric has made a more classic, restrained style of Savennières this vintage – even if one parcel did yield natural alcohols of 16%.
Vintage 2005
The conditions of the season meant that this was the simplest harvest Eric has enjoyed since buying vines here in 1995. There was no triage necessary in the vines as there was homogenous ripening throughout the clusters with no sign of any botrytis and an overall yield of 25hl/ha. The harvest took just four days and the grapes were pressed straight into barrel and fermentation started naturally, stopping again in November as the cellar cooled down for the winter, leaving a worryingly high 30 grammes of unfermented sugar. At this stage, topping up with SO2 to retain the sanity of the wine is not an option as the same natural yeasts are required again in spring to kick start the fermentation. This duly happened as did a simultaneous malo-lactic, and the wine completed fermentation in August. After one quick racking via tank it went back into barrel – at this stage still without any addition of SO2 and is now due for bottling in May and we will ship in September. The 2005 vintage also saw Eric’s first harvest in half a hectare of La Roche aux Moines which was bought in 2004 when a 3ha parcel came onto the market. The current plan is to include this in the existing blend until he is confident that the site is once more capable of supporting itself. Eric says it was completely devoid of life when he bought it through years of chemical abuse. A decision will now be made from the 2007 vintage as to whether it is ready to be a stand alone release.
My note for the 2005 from cask last month reads: ‘Quite lactic in style. Very rich, concentrated and powerful. This is more like Meursault with it’s oatmeal profile. Lovely structure to entry, with still fresh acidity. Very pure. Good balance and length, although the wood needs to come back into balance’. Great potential.
Vintage 2004
This was a challenging year. A cloudy and cool spring threatened, but the truth was that no rain fell for the five months before flowering, leading to a premature yellowing of the leaves in June. The vines then began to shut down at the end of July. A storm in mid August kick-started them, and ideal conditions in September – cool, foggy mornings and warm afternoons, without any rain – helped maturity. There was a little botrytis on the lower, sandier slopes, and the harvest started at the end of September and was safely in by the 9th October, just before the rain, that destroyed any real hopes of making quality wine in the Layon this season, set in. The early drought conditions meant there was little nutrition for the yeasts, so fermentation was longer than usual. Despite the difficulties, Eric has produced a benchmark Savennières with greater typicity than can be found in 2003. Although 2005 may have been a much easier vintage, Eric believes the 2004 to be his best wine to date.
Vintage 2003
Although the 2003 season proved to a hot one (Eric refers to it as his Châteauneuf-du-Pape vintage), there was a little rain consistently through the summer, ensuring a good récolte. Unlike the previous two vintages, there was no botrytis at all in 2003. The harvest, like everywhere, was early, commencing at the start of September. The wines are fermented and aged in barrel – a combination of different oaks – with the different parcels being kept separate until the final blend, and with around 35% of the wine undergoing malo-lactic fermentation. Whilst proving a little awkward in its youth, due essentially to its puppy fat of oak and alcohol, it’s now beginning to open up and evolve a little and come back into balance.