Jean-Max Roger, 2018 Update
Although I have known of Jean-Max Roger and his wines for many years, it was only during the summer of 2017 that I first had the opportunity to call in on the Roger family, to view their capacious (and expanding) cellars in the centre of Bué, and to taste through a complete range of their wines. The tasting included, I am happy to report, several older vintages of white Sancerre, a number of which were tasting very good indeed.
Sadly, we didn’t taste any red wines on that occasion, and yet I knew from a bottle or two of their entry-level red cuvée, encountered at a restaurant on that same trip, that there was a lot of potential here for red wines. The house style seems to tend towards a relatively pale and degraded hue, in truth fairly typical for the region, but with an appealing depth of cherry fruit both aromatically and on the palate, and the wines also have the potential to develop some very classic secondary characteristics given appropriate time in the bottle.
This report describes a more recent encounter with the wines, tasted with Etienne Roger (pictured above), one of Jean-Max Roger’s two stalwart sons. This time, as well as tasting through the full range of white wines, I was also able take a look at their reds, starting with the 2015 vintage, running back to 2010.
Please log in to continue reading: