No theme , just MAD KNOWLEDGE

Hi all,

No theme this week, just some new fun stuff by the glass and by the bottle. It's a long one, read at your leisure, I won't quiz you.

Domaine Pepiere Muscadet 'La Pepie', 'Gras Moutons', 'Clos des Briords'

The fact that producers of great Muscadet like Domaine Pepiere exist at all is a testament simply to the single mania of certain winemakers despite all real world considerations telling them to quit. 

First off Muscadet is huge, almost 10000 hectares, dedicated to producing a single grape, the humble melon de bourgogne. There's no red wine, no way to diversify your offerings, you get to make one white grape and hope you stand out.

Secondly the French have long associated Mescadet as one thing, cheap wine to drink with oysters, and that's what they are willing to pay for. So for producers like Pepiere who try, they still can't charge that much more than the worst producers. 

Third, and most significant, it's incredibly hard to farm in the area, conventionally or organically. The proxi ity to the bay of biscay means a great deal of moisture, both rain and fog, hits muscadet hard, leading to moldy grapes that can destroy if you aren't careful, and a host of other vine illnesses

With all that being said it typically takes the average vigneron to commit to 2-4 times as much land to break even as their counterparts in other regions which is to say anyone who commits to making great wine here is a little off in the best way.

In the right hands muscadet can truly be one of the great wines of france in my opinion. Unlike it's reputation it's not a single mono-terroir, it has a huge varieties of soil types and micro-climates.

Domaine Pepiere, founded by Marc Olivier who recently retired, was one of the very estates to realize that with a little more effort one could make great wines by bottling them according to soil types or single vineyards.

The three we have are the basic bottling, 'La Pepie', a beld of all the parcels, 'Gras Moutons' (fat sheep, the name of the hamlet it's grown) sand, limestone and, gneiss, and the estates top bottling, clos des briords, a selection of the estates oldest vines grown on granite.

All three bottlings have the estates signature style, high acid, crisp, slight texture from aging on the lees (dead yeast, the same process that gives champagne it's brioche flavors, but in less concentartion) but all are true wiens of terroir, reflecting something different and transparent in every one.

Bulli 'Sampagnino' Colli Piacentini Frizzante NV

Bulli is a small fifth generation producer in Emilia-Romagna that specializes in methode traditionale sparkling wines. They are an old school producer, never having made the move from organic farming, and even stranger, have never added sulfites to their wines, even going as far as to advertise it on their bottles in the 1950s.  This wine is a cool blend of whatever they have on their property (some of which I know, some are totally new to me), 40% Marsanne (Uva Sampagnina in the local dialect), 20% Moscato Giallo or Moscatello, 10% Ortrugo, 10% Bianchetta and Santa Maria, 5% Sauvignon, 5% Malvasia di Candia Aromatica and 10% of other varieties like Bervedino and Verdea.

Azimut 'Brisat' Parellada, Macabeo, Xarel-lo NV Spain

Since orange/skin contact wine is a relatively new phenomenon almost everywhere in the world you might have noticed that people have certain preconceptions based on the little wine they've had. If people have lots of say, certain Georgian and Italian wines they often expect that skin contact is equated with the deep amber color and heavy tannic structure of those wines, and get confused when presented with a wine like this that only spends five days on the skins.

This bright, beginner's version of a skin contact wine comes from Penedes where the Suriol family who makes it have been farming the land since the 1600s. There journey towards natural wine is a typical one for many old estates like this, at some point they realized that for all the effort they had put into modernizing their winemaking and farming the results had gotten worse, so in the early nineties they began to roll everything back, starting with becoming certified organic and then going back to low intervention in the cellar.

Like I said this is a perfect wine for beginners of orange wine, it doesn't drink like a fresh white wine, but there isn't enough skin contact to make it taste like a red wine.  

Les Foulards 'Octobre'

(Sorry I went overboard on this one, it's one of my favorite wines from one of my favorite winemakers)

Jean-François Nicq at Les Foulards Rouge in the Roussillon is the real deal in Natural Wine. Back in 1989 when he started his winemaking career there wasn't any definitions of what natural wine was, and instead of the movement it has become today there was just a small group of like minded people who weren't happy with the past fifty years of industrialization in both winemaking and farming and who were looking for ways to make more authentic wines, both by looking in the past and adapting new methods for making wines with less additives. In enology school Jean Francois studied alongside Thierry puzelat, whose wines we've had before, a young punk rock kid obsessed with making wines like the new school Beaujolais producers, who had been using a technique known as carbonic maceration to make impossibly light and ethereal wines with little or no sulfur. After school Jean Francois moved to Tavel, in the southern rhone valley. There he met other like minded vignerons, and started as the winemaker at the now legendary Estézargues Coopérative. Cooperatives at this time (and today for the most part) in France were making some of the cheapest table wines in France. Members of each cooperative, who would often number in the hundreds, would harvest every year, bring their fruit in and then split the money amongst themselves. This was a system that at one point guaranteed payment when the wine was easily sold, but as pressure from foreign suppliers, notably California, Argentina and Australia, started eroding their market share, the response was to double down and produce more wine using less and less sustainable farming, which led to cooperative winemakers becoming synonymous with cheap, terrible wine.

So when Jean Francois started his career he had his work cut out for him. One thing in his favor was that Estézargues Coopérative was comprised of ten or so larger growers, making it easier for him to start pushing them to farm organically, and in the cellar he began cutting back on the number of additives and amount of sulfur as the fruit quality rose. Instead of simply blending all the fruit and only making a red, white, and rose, as was the practice for cooperatives at the time, he began vinifying separate cuvees he found interesting from the individual growers, allowing them to stand out and charge more. In a few years he had transformed Estézargues Coopérative into what is now the model for large scale winemaking, a 500 hectare fully organic cooperative that still turns out some of the best natural wines on this scale anywhere.

So after he started to get burnt out on this and wishing to start a small project of his own him and a schoolteacher friend Bijan Mohamadi started Les Foulards Rouge near the spanish border. The winemaking here has always been strict, no additives at all, no sulfur, just pure fruit. The farming itself is all by hand (or with a mule), steep slopes, and all organic.

The result is everything I've ever loved about natural wine, light, zippy, fresh, not overworked, very little texture, made to be drank, not fussed over.

Domaine la Grapp'a Pere Guy Blanc, Pere Guy Blanc, Savagnin Ouille, Pinot Noir Fut de Chene

And finally I was able to track down some information on the mystery Jura producer Uznea and I. took a flyer on based on the reputation of the importer.

Domaine is a tiny brand new winery (first vintage 2021!) located in my favorite wine region in the world, the Jura in France. The Jura is a very small region located east of Burgundy as you start to head towards the alps. 

At only 1800 hectares (less than one fifth the size of Muscadet for instance) the Jura is one of France's smallest and most unique wine regions. It comprised of five main grapes, Poulsard, Trousseau and Savagnin which are grapes indigenous to the region and Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from nearby Burgundy.

The first wine is the Pere Guy rouge, a blend of Trousseau and Poulsard, two thin skinned red grapes capable of making some the best light red wines in the world, and this is no difference. It has an almost textureless quality to it, a quality I'm always looking for but almost impossible to find. It's n ot a throwaway wine, though, it takes an extremely light touch and lots of care to make a wine like this, and it's ethereal quality is its seriousness (I don't know if this makes sense, I have a hard time talking about these kinds of wine, but know I love them).

The second is a classic Jurassic (the time period is named for the region, where a cross section of earth from the period was first studied) pinot noir. Pinot's from the area share lots in common with Poulsard and Trousseau, they are light on their feet and rarely show the type the structure neighboring Burgundies do.

Next is the Savagnin Ouille. Savagnin is a slightly aromatic, highly acidic wine that makes the most famous wine of the region, Vin Jaune, which is a wine made much like sherry, aged under flor for years and allowed to oxidize but not fortified. This wine is not made like this however, "Ouille" in this wines name refers to savagnin made non-oxidatively. This is a serious brilliant wine, one you could open up and appreciate over the course of an entire evening.

And lastly we have the Pere Guy blanc, a blend of Chardonnay and Savagnin, which is going to be a little less acidic, a little richer than the straight savagnin, but honestly all these wines are magic for coming from a tiny domaine that has only been operating a few years.

If you have any questions let me know, until next time

Cory