Lifting the Bain

For ages we’ve been accustomed to the notion that Sauvignon should smell like cat’s pee in a gooseberry bush and subscribed to the varietal determinism which insists that any other flavour profile is not a true reflection of the way the wine should be.  Sauvignon is Sauvignon for a’ that; it exists within a narrow flavour spectrum…

I’ve written on another occasion that once when I presented Sebastien Riffault’s Sancerre Akmeniné to a group of wine educators and MWs the consequence was collective reeling, writhing and fainting in coils. For this was not Sancerre as we know it, Jim, Jean-Luc and Kathryn Janeway, but an alien deviation from the sixth dimension. Alexandre Bain, Seb Riffault’s partner-in-vinicultural-crime, if you regard making a Sauvignon in this idiom a crime, started making wine in Pouilly-Fumé in 2007 on seven hectares of vineyards. He immediately started conversion to biodynamic farming, which for him was the precursor of making natural wines.  The main reason to work the vineyard according to these principles, according to Alexandre, is to be able to harvest healthy grapes that contain the living organisms that will play a role in the cellar and give the wine its identity. He considers that organic rules only target the vineyard but exclude the winemaking process and that an integrated organic, natural philosophy should go all the way through to the end product, to the bottled wine itself.

Alex has vineyard both on Portland limestone and Kimmeridgean marl. The white and stony soils of the former are very difficult to work and extremely shallow, with 20 inches of soil before the mother rock. The dual advantages are that it provides excellent drainage and the stones reflect the heat back onto the vines aiding ripening.

No additives are used to adjust the wine, and they will thus reflect the year’s particularities. He aims for maturity preferring wines that are verging on over-ripe rather than the varietal/vegetal style. Picked ripe Sauvignon will give quince and cooked-fruit notes. Alexandre believes that the variety should take the back seat in the wine and you should be able to feel the terroir and the vintage. The elevage of the wines is essential to find the expression of terroir and his Pouilly-Fumé spends twelve to fourteen months in wood on average, before racking in vats and bottling by gravity (no pumps).

The 2009 is a wine of the vintage, as they say in France, being buttercup yellow and sporting very attractive aromas of pink grapefruit and ripe kiwi. The palate encompasses flavours of quince and pear with just a hint of crystallised sweets and the mouth is warm, mellow, a touch sweet and almost spicy on the finish. The acidity is moderate as one might expect of a 2009.

So the thought for the day is this. Is the goosey-grassberry unripe style of Sauvignon with the cultivated yeast ferment, cool ferment, stopped malo, filtered, clarified and given a whack of sulphur le vrai Sancerre/Pouilly-Fumé or does a richer, more textured style with autumnal fruits and wilder back notes more truly strike at the heart of the wine?