Cellar Raid #5: A Le Pavé Quartet
Sticking with wines of youth and freshness, which seems appropriate for the recent run of warm and sunny weather I have been enjoying in Scotland recently, my latest cellar raid takes us to Sancerre.
Domaine Vacheron was the very first domaine I ever visited in Sancerre, way back in the early 1990s. Last century! At the time they had a small tasting room or shop on the edge of the town (distinct from the cellars, also located in the town). Despite having returned to Sancerre dozens of times since, and now knowing the town and surrounding vineyards rather better than I once did, I have never quite figured out the location of that tasting room. The Vacheron family no longer maintain it, and have no recollection of it. Human memory, it seems, has an inevitable fallibility.
It was a time of discovery for me as I visited and tasted in the region for the first time. The wines were delicious, and I remember buying a few bottles of the domaine cuvée, greatly augmenting the size of my student cellar, and sending my student-era bank balance further into the red. Well, one has to have priorities, and owning those bottles was one of mine. I remember telephoning my bank to arrange a larger overdraft; I omitted to mention I was calling from a hotel room in France. I did not think it would help my cause.
At the time the Vacheron family made only a handful of cuvées in white and red; this was before the explosion of parcellaire working the appellation has seen in more recent times took off. These days the Vacheron clan are highly regarded for their adherence to biodynamic viticulture, as well as their range of site-specific cuvées, Les Romains coming in 1997, the remainder introduced in 2010, close to twenty years after my first visit. While most are made in decent volumes and widely distributed, a couple of cuvées are rather more ‘confidential’. One of these is Le Pavé.
