Domaine de Bablut: Wines
The fruit is picked partly by machine, and partly by hand, an interesting and largely unappreciated facet of life on the domaine. For the Sauvignon Blanc and the red varieties Christophe Daviau prefers machine-picking for the homogeneity the rapid harvest brings to the crop, the characteristics of the first grape and the last more similar than they would be with a longer period of picking by hand. The team first clean up the vineyards and carry out the only significant sorting on the vine, removing any grapillons (secondary bunches which tend not to ripen well) and fruit of lesser quality. Christophe and Antoine tell me they believe machine-picking the most ‘precise’ method to harvest, and that switching to harvesting by hand would bring no benefit in terms of quality or precision for these varieties. This is despite the fact that the sorting on the vine is the only selection of note; the machines used have no on-board sorting and there is no formal sorting once the fruit arrives at the domaine.
The exceptions to this are largely the Chenin Blanc cuvées, including both dry and sweet wines. These are picked by hand, with picking in several tries in order to ensure the fruit is picked at the optimal maturity, the fruit then transported to the nearby cellars in trailer.
Once the fruit arrives it is moved straight into the fermentation process, details of which depend on the cuvée in question, and I provide more particulars of each below. There is a broad variety of styles produced here, as is typical in the Anjou region, but they can be divided into three broad groups, dry wines both white and red, made under the Anjou appellation, and sweet wines, which here come under the Coteaux de l’Aubance appellation. Although the domaine once produced a broad array of sweet wines, perhaps three or four cuvées of Coteaux de l’Aubance in a favourable vintage alongside the dry wines, in recent times this practice has of course been curtailed. The domaine also has an admirable heritage of producing age-worthy demi-sec and moelleux Cabernet d’Anjou, again a style now rarely seen, if at all. Today there is likely to be a single moelleux cuvée, and perhaps a simple Cabernet d’Anjou for drinking young, a style still popular with the local clientele, while the majority of the harvest goes into dry and sparkling wines.
