Clos la Niverdière: Tasting & Drinking
The style of wine produced by Martine Budé is elegant and linear, with each cuvée providing an honest reflection of the wine’s origin. From alluvial soils the cuvée Renaissance presents an old-school style, light in texture with a savoury flavour profile and a fair lick of tannins. It is a Chinon to drink after donning your cloth cap. More composed is Résilience, from clay and limestone soils, the quality of the terroir coming through in the darker and fresher fruit and slightly more generous texture found here.
While I admire the cuvée Palimpseste, which blends the various terroirs within the Clos la Niverdière and is the only cuvée to come from the vines around the house, it seems to me that Résilience is in reality the lead cuvée, reflecting a more focused origin, a more singular terroir. Having said that, tasting them side by side in the same vintage I have found they offer comparable drinking pleasure.
Looking back to 2015, both Résilience and Palimpseste show well today, Renaissance less so, one reason for which may be the fact that the latter cuvée was left in vat for six years before bottling. There was no Renaissance cuvée in 2016 or 2017 because of frost, but Résilience shows well in the 2017 vintage.
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