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| Bodet-Herold “Physis” Crémant de Loire 2018 Madone “Sauvignon Gris et Blanc de Madone” IGP Urfé 2021 Madone “Gamay sur Volcan” Côtes du Forez 2022 Paul Prieur “Les Pichons” Sancerre Rouge 2021 Tonight, we are delighted to welcome Paul Wasserman to the shop for a tasting of Loire Valley wines from the import portfolio of his company, Becky Wasserman & Co. Paul’s mother, Becky Wasserman, was an extraordinary figure in contemporary wine culture. She was a pioneer not only as a rare female voice within the male-dominated world of Burgundy wines in the 1970s, but also as an advocate for how traditional winegrowing practices affect the flavors of wine (she was an early believer in organic grape growing and for wines made with wild yeast fermentation and no added industrial winemaking crap). We work with any number of Wasserman wines in the shop and you may have been forced to listen to me opine a bit too long on the brilliance of Sylvain Pataille’s work with aligoté, or Michel Lafarge, whose Volnay blew my entirely unprepared mind many, many years ago. Although Becky was a persistent advocate of traditionally made and increasingly pricey Burgundy, she also worked with an equal passion with well-farmed wines from the Loire, and it is to the Loire that we turn to for tonight’s tasting. Our apéro is a crisp and dry sparkling white wine made mostly of chenin but with a bit of grolleau, too. This wine telegraphs the terroir-centric emphasis of the Wasserman weltanschauung, listing not only the grape composition on the front label but also the varied soil types upon which the wine grows (Turonian green chalk for the chenin; grolleau planted near the Marne river on Cretaceous soil). Next, two wines from Loire gamay specialist Gilles Bonnefoy. One wine is a blend of which the majority is sauvignon gris, an archaic variety that is the genetic ancestor of sauvignon blanc; the other is one of the several gamay-based wines that Bonnefoy produces from vineyards peppered with volcanic basalt. To finish, a pinot noir not from Becky’s Burgundian heartland but rather to the West, from Sancerre. Sancerre rouge can often taste like an underloved afterthought in a region dominated by white wines, but the Sancerre rouge from Luc Prieur demonstrates the error of this assumption. |