Mineral plus!
The Loire Valley, northern France. We arrive in Tour to bright sunshine and a distinct bite in the air. I am with three of the Green & Blue team and four people from the Grove; I am one of the drivers but feel surprisingly calm and alert despite only three hours sleep. Frantz Saumon meets us at the airport and then it is in the car for a five minute drive to a restaurant located on what can only be described as an industrial estate, probably because that is exactly what it is.
Inside, Le Coin de Table is a haven of natural wine and good food. We are the first to arrive but tables soon fill up around us.
Frantz fills us in on 2010 which is, he says, a ‘simple vintage’. The wines will be easy, good for drinking young. There were considerable problems with mould during the growing season and at no point did it get really warm. A more classic Loire vintage then.
The Loire has some of the biggest swings in vintage variations of any French region,
thanks to how far north it is. This can be quite confusing for drinkers. One year (like 2009), the fruit is opulent and the honey aromas on the Chenin are richly spiced. The next (like 2010 will be), the character is all crisp, steely austerity.
Frantz delivers a masterclass on Pettilant Natural (sparkling wine) as we drink a glass of his. Most sparkling wine in the Loire these days is made by the Champagne method; that is, a still base wine is made first and then there is a second fermentation using added sugars and inoculated yeasts, started in a bottle. This is neat, precise and incredibly easy to control. The instructions on a packet of bought-in yeast will tell you precisely how and when the second fermentation is going to happen.
But the growing band of natural wine makers here see this as a highly unnatural approach – the addition of sugar and manufactured yeasts? Non! Jamais! Instead, they chart a far less predictable course: finishing their first fermentation in bottle.
To get a completely dry Pett Nat with fine, soft bubbles, the wine needs to be bottled with approximately 8 to 9 degrees of residual sugar. More than that and you risk ending up with an off dry or medium wine. There's nothing wrong with that but Mon Saumon’s house style is spare and stylish; not for him the curlicues of sweetness taking the edge off.
And the much vaunted ‘problem’ of the risk of re-fermentation (which unnatural wine makers are fond of warning against) is, according to him, not really a problem at all. Once the carbon dioxide levels (a by product of the alcoholic fermentation) in the bottle reach a certain point, the yeasts die off anyway.
What is challenging is the fact that, once the wine has been bottled, all the wine maker can do is peer through the glass at the micro-universe he has facilitated and hope for the best. The natural yeasts will do as they please; taking months or years sometimes to finish their work, going to sleep and waking up with the seasons. You must wait and watch and hope that this year, the juice and the yeast are rubbing along together as they should, making bubbly magic.
His 2010 Pett-Nat-to-be is currently resting. It will be bottled again next February or March, before the weather starts to warm up. In tank, it has been chilled right down, sending the yeasts off into a benign coma. This is done so that most of the tartrates will precipitate. It is not a very good thing if that process happens largely in bottle; the resulting white flakes or crystalline shards cause no end of consternation. The wine is never filtered before being bottled as that will slow the final part of the process down considerably by removing too many of the yeast cells. Also, the more gentle the filtration, the finer the mousse so at Mon Saumon’s house, this is all done as gently as possible, by racking the wine until it is clear.
Once sealed in their small glass coffin, the yeasts will, in their own time and dependant on the temperature (it generally has to reach and stay at about 13 degrees Celsius), get to work. Generally, this part of the process is over within two months but it can take quite a while for it to start up again. For a completely dry wine, you would then leave it in bottle for 12 – 18 months, opening up and tasting every so often towards the end of that time frame in order to determine, by taste, if all the sugar has gone.
The food arrives to interrupt our discussion – whelks with potatoes, seared tuna and ‘little fish from the sea’ (this is what we were told from the menu and this is what arrived - we never got any closer to a more exact description).
Lunch over, we drive through the brilliant afternoon sunshine to Frantz Saumon's winery just outside Montlouis, on the border of Chenin Blanc territory. This is tucked between the Loire river and a band of hills. He is a relative newcomer here, having been a forester before he started making wine in 2001, on the 3 hectares of vineyards he purchased with the winery. He now makes wines from this fruit and some which he buys in, 22,000 bottles in total. This means he is very small indeed; which is just the way we like our winemakers. There is an additional 2 hectares which he plans to plant to Chenin.
Franz is a white wine man and believes that, even more so than with reds, the work is all done in the vineyard. We crunch over his gravel drive and into his tiny cellar, stacked with 228litre barrels of older wood. Barrel fermentations are essential for the style of chenin he loves as they give a much slower ferment than stainless steel. This is turn results in higher levels of glycerol in the wine which is also especially important in a variety that can have very austere levels of acidity. The viscosity of the glycerol helps to take the edge off this, even without residual sugar.
His wines will stay in wood for a year with fermentation often lasting till February or sometimes even longer. It will stop during the winter months but trial and error has taught him not to let the temperature drop lower than 12 to 13 degrees Celcius: this happened in 2005 and the yeasts never woke up again.
The wines were not dry that year and since then he has moved heaters into to avoid premature yeast genocide.
We move outside again to stand in his small courtyard, clutching wine glasses. It is absolutely freezing and eventually we all gravitate towards the road which is not in shadow. We taste first the 07 and then 08 Minerale plus, wines of crystalline purity, all air dried apple and honeysuckle, showing distinct grapefruit acidity and clean minerality. The 07 has 17 grams per litre of residual sugar but wears this well, barely registering as off dry. The 08 is slightly drier, showing an even deeper seam of minerality.
We then move on to Clos du Chen, his top cuvee made only from 100 year old Chenin vines, grown on clay. The 08 is still tasting far too young with grapefruit slightly dominating the pear skin and honey. Both the length and the mid palate weight are excellent though and I look forward to tasting this again once it has had more time to settle.
His Romaratin 2009, at 15% abv, is huge, crammed full of fresh nut and pear flavours, considerably freshened up by pink grapefruit acidity. We try an 09 Chardonnay next, fermented on the skins. No-one believes more than us that more people need to be making more whites this way but at present, this example is not resting easy with itself. Tannin in white is a tricky component to get right. Done properly, the grainy texture it brings amplifies all the good things but it is a very difficult thing to do properly.
For a first attempt though, certainly not bad.
We are taken next to a small room to the right of the main cellar. Here, in a corner, rests a barrel barely discernable under layers of black, white and grey mould. This mould has the appearance of candle wax and has formed weird globules all over the familiar shape. This solitary barrel is the full extent of a 2001 ‘vin de voile’ which took several years to ferment. The yeasts stopped and started and stopped and started until finally, at 15% abv, they quietly expired.
It is utterly fantastic. Or fantastique. Like a particularly fine, fresh fino with the addition of perfumed honey. If Mon Saumon made wines like this every year, we would buy all of it and probably drink most of it ourselves.
Sadly, he doesn’t, but he does have a small and highly enviable portfolio of wines
which are properly natural (only a very small amount of S02 is used at bottling). Pure, clean and complex, these are a great testament to what Chenin can be. He wants to experiment more with skin contact (which is a very good thing) and wants his wines to be always, born of their terroir and the vintage; showing not a trace of his good husbandry once the bottles are finally opened.
