Travels with DJ Steve, 2012 Chenin

Collier

Antoine Foucault continues to do fine work at Collier, much in the family style. We tasted 2011 Domaine Saumur, which was ripe and long and mineral with a distinct calcium crunch in the tasty finish. The 2010 was rounder and pushed forward—more fruit up front, but less finish. And a 2010 white cuvee of uncertain spelling had great acidity and length, excellent. Could it be the Chapentrie? Something like that, I couldn’t follow the French. (ETA--Jeff G notes that it is "Charpentrie", it's their VV cuvee) Also, their 2010 Saumur-Champigny was one of many excellent classic 2010 Cabernet Francs tasted during the trip. Good fruit, good acid, good grip. Mmmmmm. Not the Bourg, but it will do very nicely.
Click to expand...

Are these wines available in the US?

Loved reading your reports, thanks Joe.
 
originally posted by pab:
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Leroy was getting his new wood barrels and that drove fear into the heart.
Click to expand...
Since more than 10 years, Richard Leroy got every year new wood barrels.
Best regards
pierre-alain benoit
Click to expand...

And his source is impeccable. He still has some 2010 in barrel which tastes amazing...
 
originally posted by SFJoe:

In 2011 he made a “petit rouge” from his Cabernet wines. He wants to make more serious reds and feels that this light extraction gives an unserious easy drinker. He’s right, except for the easy drinking part. I don’t know whether it’s his terroir or the winemaking, but this guy’s reds are some kind of fierce. It may just be unripe tannins, but he’d be better off making rose. Speaking of which, the 2011 Rosé d’Un Jour (you know the joke) is darker and more tannic than previous vintages, but it remains an extremely appealing wine with a strawberry nose and a bit of rs that will all delight the Olgas. For some reason, he filters this three times. I don’t ask, but I suspect he is doing some old-fashioned but unsterile filtration, so he’s probably beat up the wine more than he would with a modern cross-flow device and yet not made it free from refermentation risk. So keep it cold.
Click to expand...

Thanks for leaving a bottle of this at my house, JD
couldn't find the olgas that came with it.
This is a departure from the classic 2001 rose, and yet it is about as easy to drink at this stage. Don't think it has quite the same balance, despite similar RS levels. It's lovely; just has more mature fruit.
The great thing about the 01 was accidentally losing a bottle in the cellar for about a year and a half, and then finding it to be much drier and far more complex in a floral sort of way than on release.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Travels with DJ Steve, 2012 CheninChenin

Angeli

As you doubtless know, Marc Angeli has vineyards in Bonnezeaux from which he mostly makes dry wines these days. It was my first visit there in 10 years or more. He is a funny guy, but not quite as funny as he thinks he is. There is a bit of a sense that he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He may not always be correct. Anyhow, he works extremely hard in his vineyards (totally Steinerite), with a somewhat perverse idea to thwart the neighborhood’s propensity for botrytis. As one example, he head-trains his vines rather than putting them on wires, because expanding into 3 dimensions gives better airflow and less susceptibility to rot. He mows, mostly, instead of plowing, and has run some hedges through some vineyards to provide highways and resting spots for bugs and birds. He opines that soil should have the texture of couscous, passing handfuls of the clay of Fouchardes around for us to feel. If you find yourself in that situation, don’t take the bait, that stuff is impossible to get off your hands. He also mentions that it is best to avoid poison in the vines. When he does plow, it is only the Cabernet vines near the house that he does with the horse these days, says he’s getting old and lazy. He ties the vines together at the top to limit vegetative vigor, and prunes very tightly to 6 bunches per vine. He averages 30 hl/ha or so, which he thinks helps maintain his quality in off vintages, and I would have to agree.

He also thinks that there is a snowball of organic viticulture coming—the superiority of the method is becoming obvious, and even in Bordeaux everyone is moving in that direction. It seems a little optimistic to me, but what do I know? And last, we spent a lot of time on the superiority of volcanic sulfur as a source of the small amount of SO2 that he puts in his wines over the “regular” stuff. It turns out to be impossible for any conscientious winemaker to use anything else. You can get to very low levels and the wines are still not oxidizable. (I haven’t heard that one in years, I thought it was a thing of the past). He prefers sulfur from Etna, but he also has backup sources in Japan (the southern part, so no Fukushima) and so on. He triumphantly points out that when you burn this sulfur in a little contraption that he has, and blow the SO2 into the wine, that you only find half as much as you thought you’d added, and that this is the result of a biodynamic miracle. I’m sure that’s one possibility, but having done many such miraculous experiments in my day where the numbers didn’t add up, I’d say that other explanations sometimes intrude if you explore a bit.

We also tasted some wines. The 2011 La Lune (blend of 3 fields, 4-75 y.o. vines, and the soils really do change every 30 meters, we walked quite a ways through them) is quite good, particularly considering the difficulties of the vintage. It is logical that it is a bit on the lighter end of the Lunar spectrum, but it’s clean and rich. The Fouchardes shows much brighter acidity and sterner structure than the Lune, but this is not entirely a bad thing. It is perhaps a bit more rustic, but in any case Marc generally advocates 4 or 5 years for the Fouchardes to allow it to open. He also has a Grolleau Noir that was quite tasty (the grape has dark flesh), but there are only 500 bottles of it so it will not be on the table every night. He pulls a bottle of 2007 for us, the first vintage. It has wonderful perfume, a full body, and is just a tiny bit hard on the finish, but in the context of Marc Angeli reds, this is satin. We tasted some older wines that were not really my thing.

In 2011 he made a “petit rouge” from his Cabernet wines. He wants to make more serious reds and feels that this light extraction gives an unserious easy drinker. He’s right, except for the easy drinking part. I don’t know whether it’s his terroir or the winemaking, but this guy’s reds are some kind of fierce. It may just be unripe tannins, but he’d be better off making rose. Speaking of which, the 2011 Rosé d’Un Jour (you know the joke) is darker and more tannic than previous vintages, but it remains an extremely appealing wine with a strawberry nose and a bit of rs that will all delight the Olgas. For some reason, he filters this three times. I don’t ask, but I suspect he is doing some old-fashioned but unsterile filtration, so he’s probably beat up the wine more than he would with a modern cross-flow device and yet not made it free from refermentation risk. So keep it cold.
Click to expand...

If there’s life beyond them mortal coils, you might appreciate some comic relief.

2014 Mark Angeli Le P'tit Rouge 12.0%
Dimitri. 33mg/l volcanic SO2 (smirk). Cabernet Franc, possibly with a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon. Blackcurrant, leather, spices. CO2 ting-a-ling. Lightweight and balanced. Entirely glulgu, but ultimately without further ado. And this particular one not at all fierce, like those you've tried.

2015 La Ferme de la Sansonnière (Mark Angeli) Rosé d'un Jour VdF 10.0%
Dimitri. Cabernet Sauvignon with more than 60 grams of whopping residual polysaccharides kept under control by 32 mg/l of volcanic SO2. In some places I read that this "elixir d'amour" is made from botrytized grapes, for which Angeli has found some use (in light of the above-mentioned struggle against the neighborhood’s propensity), while you clarify (no pun) that it’s filtered three times, presumably to stop fermentation at around 10%. Perhaps a combination. The result is unusual. Dark, with tea-like sediment. Strawberries playing everywhere, though not extremely appealing, but then I’m not an Olga. Sweet, disconcertingly sweet. No CO2 for zip. Zero complexity, like slightly fermented supermarket grape juice, cider style. I had to force myself to down my portion, like a Dickens with his gruel character (not Oliver, of course), or a child who learns to eat it all because of the starving children in Africa. The better half, always more sensible, quit her share early. Besides you, dear friend, several notables speak highly of this syrup, but we just did not warm to it, or take a shine to it, and that’s the long and short of it. But we do not know, for a change, whether the problem lies with the subject or the object. So, our conversations must continue.
 
I wonder how much of the Joly oxidation that is reported is based on tastings at the Domaine. They insist on having the wines open for 2-3 days, and then insist on lecturing the taster/visitor on how they are only good this way (although the freshly opened bottle showed better than the 2-3 day old bottle IMO)...

I subsequently opened a 2010 Joly Coulee de Serrant to see what it was like without 2-3 days of oxidation. That, and I had surpassed my capacity to carry any more wine with me back to the USA (those 6 bottles of Clos la Neore and the magnum of 2010 d'Angerville Ducster put me over the top). I cannot say that I found the wine all that interesting, lacking some in both acidity and complexity, but I don't doubt that a few more years (hopefully without oxidation) would add more to the wine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top