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| Domaine Huet Vouvray Pétillant Brut 2019 Puechavy “La Rayon Blanc” Vin de France 2021 Precedent Chenin Blanc Santa Cruz Mountains 2022 Vincent Bergeron “Maison Marchandelle” Montlouis 2021 Domaine Gigou Pineau d’Aunis Coteaux du Loir 2020 |
| Tonight’s tasting is of chenin blanc from the grape’s homeland, France’s Loire valley, as well as one exemplary bottling from our own Santa Cruz Mountains: in addition, we are tasting a chenin noir, aka pineau d’aunis. Chenin blanc is grape with 1000 faces, capable acquitting itself admirably across a spectrum of expressions, from wonderfully fresh sparkling wines (we’re tasting an exemplary 2019 brut from Huet) to bone-dry, crunchy, mineral-driven wines that really require decanting (we will decant tonight) as they can be so tightly wound up that they need a bit of air to unwind, sit back, and let their hair down. I often recommend decanting chenin to our customers, and if they cannot be bothered to do that, to try any remaining wine the next day as proof of concept, There are of course sweet chenin wines that range from off-dry, “sec tendre” wines to exquisite, nobly rotten and rich dessert wines, none of which are on the menu tonight but I thought I’d just point that out, as I truly despise the term “dessert wine”— I mean really, do you need more sugar with your sugar? If you are sugar adverse, not to worry, as none of the wines we are tasting tonight has any appreciable residual sugar. Finally, we will finish with a flinty, smoky chenin noir, a synonym for pineau d’aunis but with zero genetic connection to chenin blanc. I think pineau d’aunis got this name when vigneron, using the availability heuristic, decided that it must be a red version of chenin blanc even though the morphology of the vine is quite different. I may be entirely wrong about this analogy, but chenin noir reminds me of an old-fashioned phrase “schwarzriesling” that German growers sometimes use to refer to pinot meunier (one of the primary grapes employed in Champagne). I once asked a German winemaker about this as they have a perfectly good German translation for pinot meunier, “müllerrebe.” He laughed and claimed that without knowing the identity of the grape, German growers pondered, “what the hell is this…I know, let’s call it black riesling!” |