Jonathan Pabiot, 2016 Update
At the recent Salon des Vins de Loire I was barely through the doors before I made my way over to the La Levée de la Loire, the secondary salon solely for organic wines. And I was barely though the pass-check at the entrance before I was tasting. My eagerness wasn’t out of some blinkered love for organic or biodynamic wines, or some other winemaking dogma. It was because there, near the entrance, stood Jonathan Pabiot (pictured), a very cool character turning out some of the very best wines in the entire Loire Valley. Think Didier Dagueneau, but with less hair and more earrings.
Jonathan started out at the viticultural lycée in Cosne-sur-Loire but he soon dropped out and went to work a stage at Domaine Léon Barral in Faugères before he returned to Pouilly-Fumé in 2006. His father Didier gave him a 2-hectare parcel to work with and he soon put into practice his organic beliefs, increasingly sprinkled with biodynamic methods. With Jonathan’s push-yourself and always-make-the-best-wine-you-can philosophy, it wasn’t long before his father came to realise Jonathan’s wines were better than his own. The natural progression was for Jonathan to take over the running of the domaine completely; he now has 19.5 hectares of vines to his name, which he works with the assistance of his father.
The Wines
The 2014 Pouilly-Fumé is a stunner and is already in distribution (I know, I have been lucky enough to consume a bottle or two already) and tasting it I find it incredible that this is Jonathan’s entry-level cuvée, such is its energy and precision. After that Jonathan poured two vintages each of Aubaine and Prédilection. Aubaine comes from poor limestone soils in Tracy-sur-Loire, and although it has a very classic, tense, acid-defined character in 2013, with fairly well-polished fruit, the 2014 vintage, with its plush fruit substance and peppered acidity certainly has superior potential.
