 |
| Tonight we’re thrilled to welcome Fred Niger of Domaine de l’Écu back to the shop to pour us a selection of his wines from the very western border of France, where the Loire empties out into the North Atlantic and you can smell the salt and iodine in the air and hear the seagulls calling your name. It can be bone-chillingly cold in Muscadet country in the winter, so cold that you can feel the chill through your boots and wool socks when standing on concrete and tasting the new vintage from the traditional glass-lined concrete tanks below. Fred makes great Muscadet, a bone-dry wine white wine made from the melon de bourgogne grape variety and, as you might imagine from the geographical location of his vineyards, the consummate wine with which to enjoy raw oysters. We have Shucks Oyster Bar in the shop tonight so you can see for yourself what I am talking about. Muscadet is one of the most fucked up appellations in all of France. The French do not give it much credibility, and seem to only care that is crisp, dry, and ice-cold, and best reserved for holidays at the Brittany shore. This poor reputation is a function of industrial farming and winemaking techniques, in which the grapes are over-cropped, picked early, and fermented with added sugar (chaptalization) and inoculated with selected yeasts to create oceans of same-tasting, good enough wine. And yet what many French wine drinkers fail to realize is that with the right love, the ostensibly lowly melon can produce superb, mineral wines that can sometimes age as gracefully as a good Chablis, but at the fraction of the cost. Growers like Fred, and before him Marc Ollivier of Domaine de la Pépière and Jo Landron of Domaine de la Louvetrie, have shown us just how good Muscadet can be. These growers continue to produce at least one inexpensive cuvée (we will taste Fred’s “Classique” tonight), they also produce a spectrum of Muscadet from specific terroirs, and we’ll be tasting one of Fred’s terroir-specific wines tonight (his “Granite”). Melon is a grape that seems, if you farm well and vinify without garbage, to be an immaculate reflection of terroir, and if you cannot detect the differences between a well-made Muscadet grown on mica-schist and one grown on granite, you’re doing it wrong.
Écu “Classic” Muscadet Sèvre et Maine 2018 |