Domaine Huet, 2010 Sparklers
The highlight of the Loire tasting calendar – putting visits to domaines and vineyards aside for one moment – has to be the annual Salon des Vins de Loire, held in the first week of February each year.
This year, as a little warm-up to the event for which I travelled down to Angers, and in particular anticipation of the release of the Huet’s 2005 pétillant cuvée, I decided to pull some recent vintages of Huet sparklers from the cellar. None – save for the 2005 of course, which I tasted at the Salon and which I include in my tasting notes below, are new to these pages; this was simply a good moment to revisit these wines and see how they are progressing.
Although when we focus on Vouvray it is often on the beautiful sweet wines of the region, or perhaps the vibrant sec or under-rated and often over-looked demi-sec cuvées, the truth is the vast majority of the appellation is dedicated to sparkling wine, much of it rather lacklustre. This is not true of Huet’s efforts of course, which are based on high-quality fruit rather than the under-ripe grapes which are often channelled into sparkling wines by the region’s less devoted producers.
In recent years Huet has offered two styles of sparkling wine, the first being a mousseux made in the méthode traditionnelle, that is a bottling made à la Champagne, a vin clair bottled with yeast and sugar for the second fermentation. More recently (although on reflection it is actually many years ago now) Noël Pinguet began to experiment with a méthode ancestrale, an increasingly popular practice if the number of examples I encountered from Vouvray producers at the Salon are anything to judge by. In this case the wine is bottled before the primary fermentation is finished, the result being a lower pressure sparkling wine – the pétillant style – because only a portion of the fermentation occurs within the bottle.
