Cellar Raid #4: Château Pierre-Bise
Time for another cellar raid now. A bit of light relief after publishing my Bordeaux 2025 tasting notes….all 653 of them.
Recently I pulled a selection of wines from the 1995 vintage from my cellar. Well, at over thirty years of age (I mean the wines of course – I am a teensy-weensy bit older than that), there comes a point when you realise you have to start drinking them.
So I am starting with these two exemplars of top-flight Ligérian wine; both are sweet wines from that vintage, from one of the maestros of the Coteaux du Layon and Quarts de Chaume appellations, the now-retired Claude Papin of Château Pierre-Bise.
Claude was highly regarded for his dedicated approach to viticulture and vinification, but he is also remembered for being instrumental in the move to tighten up the Quarts de Chaume regulations to ensure the wines reflected the true potential of the Butte de Chaume, a site blessed with a propensity to botrytis, but also beautifully exposed to the breezy conditions required for the dehydration and concentration that follows. Claude envisaged that all the wines of the appellation should reflect this potential, and not be made by more technological methods such as cryo-extraction.
