Small but beautiful tasting
A code in da doze has prevented me from appreciating wine for a few days but a relentless diet of garlic and ginger combined with shoving a couple of poky green chillies up either nostril has ensured that most of the germs have fled (as have my friends).
Gave the buds their first wine bath earlier this week. Herewith the wines.
2009 Chablis Vendangeur Masqué, Alice & Olivier de Moor
Who are those “masked harvesters”, kemo sabe? Alice & Olivier de Moor, that’s who. Typical of the warm nature of the vintage this is a light golden Chablis fermented in old barrels with a certain waxy texture in the mouth and notes of dry honey, ginger-spiked butter and cinnamon-spiced apples. The De Moors are one of the few growers who work organically and without sulphur in the Chablis region. Hi-ho, Sulphur and away!
2009 J’en veux, Domaine Jean-Francois Ganevat
Sleuths of recondite grapes, clap the deerstalker on your noggin, scrape out a few tunes on your trusty strad, forego the customary seven percent solution, for the game is afoot. Check out this mystery Jurassic gang.
Ampelographical archivists will lick their lips over indigenous oddities such as Petit Béclan, Gros Béclan, Gueuche (white and red), Seyve-Villard, Corbeau, Portugais Bleu, Enfariné, Argant (that’s what he has the most) which lead the roll call of the who’s? who. There are 17 of these small but beautiful varieties nestling in Jean-François Ganevat’s property. Some are white, like Seyve-Villard, most of the others are red-skinned with white juice. Then, there is Poulsard Blanc Poulsard Musqué… all of which combine to have a party in “J’en veux”, a vin du soif, par excellence.
The particularity of the blend is more than matched by the pernicketiness of the vinification. Ganevat, aka Fanfan, is a man who pinches an inch to make a mile. Or the other way round. Let Bertrand Celce take up the saga. “He destems the grapes by hand and get the vinification done in wooden tronconic vats that can be used both for open-top fermentation and for élevage with sealed lid). For the destemming, they use an horizontal tool made with wicker which lets only the grapes go through. This is a hand-made, careful destemming, but for his cuvée in which he vinifies together the 17 forgotten varieties (the cuvée’s name is J’en Veux), he changed for an even more delicate destemming this year : all his staff gathers on the open, roofed space where the harvest arrives and separate individually each grape from the stem with scissors, leaving just a few millimetres of stem attached to the grape. The goal is to really keep the grapes intact, with not even the bleeding juice from the spot where the grape was connected to the stem. When I say that this guy is bewilderingly serious when he crafts his wines, he surely is. That’s at least what he did this year for J’en Veux, every year he destems a different load of grapes this way. He says that this destemming mode is a very hard-work task, he counted that a 600-kg load of grapes needs 9 or 10 people doing it all day, but the result is also a much better wine with more purity.”
With its amusing label of a bloke sconing liquid from a beer mug this vin glouglou (9.5%) is best served chilled to highlight and enhance the bombinating cherry clafoutis and pomegranate juice aromas and flavours - behind which lurk bubbly-yeasty notes (imagine the smell of earth after rain). And is there high VA; well, is the bear a catholic?
2009 Vino di Anna Jeudi 15, Etna Rosso
Anna Martens (our Anna) trained with Brian Croser for eight years before becoming a flying winemaker and plying her trade in various countries. She eventually settled in Sicily and has been making natural wines from grapes harvested on vineyards about 1000m above sea level in the Etna region.
The red grape of choice is Nerello Mascalese supplemented by a field blend of all manner of red and white grapes including Nerello Cappuccio and Alicante. Nerello combines a certain muscularity with good acid structure from the poor, ash-rich soils. Jeudi 15 is described as a peasant wine and made in a way to enhance drinkability. The grapes are hand-harvested, 2/3 whole bunch and fermented in an open wooden vat, pressed after one week and transferred into stainless steel. The ferment finishes in July. After a period to settle the wine is bottled without filtration, fining or sulphur.
The wine is pale Burgundy-red and wafts gentle aromas of bruised strawberries, baked tamarind, morello cherries and balsam. It has very appealing sapidity in the mouth reminiscent of cranberry and pomegranate before revealing background terroir notes of pepper, roast bay, mushroom and cooked earth with some firm tannins.
2009 Dolcetto d’Alba, Luca Roagna
Roagna works very diligently in the vineyard to ensure that the “autochthonous features” (grape and terroir) play a key role with their strong structure and sensory richness in the nature of the wine itself. Neither chemical nor organic fertilizers are used in the vineyards and grassing is encouraged to ensure biodiversity.
The Dolcetto vines come from different vineyards with a south-south-western exposure of Pajè cru in the Barbaresco area. The grapes are hand-picked and undergo a soft pressing with destemming. Maceration is for 20-30 days, so that the distinctive aromas of this grape are extracted whilst the fermentation takes place in old wooden casks. Not for him though the deep (French) kiss of French oak. Deep purple-red colour, immediate aromas of violets, black plums and dark confit cherries, round in the mouth with some classic tar and underbrush flavours, underpinned by strong spine of ripe tannin and moderate acidity. Seriously good value. Dolcetto e decorum est.