Famille Lieubeau: Tasting & Drinking
Although the name of Lieubeau may not immediately trip from the tongue when rattling off a who’s who of vignerons in Muscadet, the names of the many domaines and châteaux they hold tenure of will surely be more familiar. In Wine, A Life Uncorked (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), Hugh Johnson says of Muscadet;
“I glance at the label when the waiter brings the bottle to see that it is a young one. By the summer it should normally be of the previous year. There are so many Muscadet-makers (almost all their names seem to end in ‘ière’: Boutonnière, Bretonnière, Fruitière, Mercredière…) that trying to follow a favourite is not easy – and by the second glass it is not top of the agenda. Would that there were more wines one could treat so casually with satisfactory results”.
Although it is in the world of wine deemed politically incorrect to do so, I disagree with much of what Hugh has to say on Muscadet. Many writers still seem to be struggling with the region moving away from the image it possessed in the 1970s. For example, even when this book was published in 2005 the development of the cru communal system was well underway, and thanks to the likes of the Lieubeau family it had been for at least a decade, but within its pages Hugh denies the existence of any such system. I also don’t think it is difficult to follow a particular Muscadet domaine, any more or less so than it is to follow a favourite domaine in Chablis, or Alsace, or Pessac-Léognan. One simply has to have the interest.
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