Alphonse Mellot: Wines
The range of wine made at Alphonse Mellot is broad, but most cuvées are quite limited in terms of volume. The largest part of the harvest by far goes into the domaine cuvées, white, rosé and red, all sold under the name of La Moussière. The vinifications are carried out in the Alphonse Mellot cellars, which are within the town of Sancerre, as described on the previous page.
Harvesting is by hand, the fruit picked into plastic crates and loaded into vans for transport back to the cellars. As a rule the red yields are atypically low for the appellation, Alphonse Mellot Junior aiming for 26 hl/ha when many of his peers would go much higher than this. This probably explains, to a large extent, why his red wines are so much better than everyone else’s. The yields for the white wines are much more typical, although still restricted by full commitment to organic and biodynamic viticulture.
On arrival at the cellars the grapes are sorted over two tables des tries, and what happens next depends very much on the cuvée in question. To generalise, all the red fruit is destemmed and fermented in wood, and this is true of most but not all of the whites, where either wood or stainless steel may be employed. Much of the wood used is in the form of large 500-litre barriques but there are also some larger vats as well as various experiments with foudres and oval barrels.
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