Loire 2005 at Five Years
Keen to take another look at what will surely one day be a fabled vintage for the Loire, for the red wines at least, I recently lined up a selection of wines from across the four main viticultural regions. Admittedly two of these regions are very poorly represented here, namely Muscadet at one end, and at the other the central vineyards of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé (or indeed Menetou-Salon, Quincy and so on). This is because this tasting reflects the spectrum of wines I buy for my own cellar, wines which I think have the capability to age, and for this I tend to focus around the more central regions of Anjou and Touraine, with my many predilections drawing me towards the dry and majorly wines of Savennières, the best crystalline and quartz expressions of Bonnezeaux, Quarts de Chaume, the Layon and the Aubance, all that Vouvray has to offer and of course, especially noteworthy in this vintage, the red wines of Chinon, Bourgueil, Saumur and Anjou-Villages. These are the appellations which Claude Papin described in late 2010, over lunch at the RSJ restaurant, as “the real Loire“.
I do buy and drink Muscadet, Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre of course, as regular readers will know only too well. Indeed there are a number of bottles in my cellar which I have held back from this tasting, such as Marc Ollivier’s Granite de Clisson, the Ceps Centenaires from Chéreau-Carré and other François Cotat cuvées, although these pale into insignificance against the line-up of Anjou and Touraine wines not included. These include the 2005 Clos du Papillon from Domaine des Baumard, Savennières L’Enclos from Eric Morgat, sweet wines from Claude Papin, every conceivable cuvée from Clos Rougeard, several cuvées from Domaine de la Bellivière, Le Petit Chambord from François Cazin, Mi-Pente from Domaine de la Butte, Couly-Dutheil’s Clos de l’Echo, Cuvée des Fondraux from Champalou, a host of Huet cuvées and about a dozen others. For the moment these wines will continue to slumber in my cellar, and rightly so I think; many just aren’t going to show at their best right now. Indeed, with such a diverse range of styles, it is I think impossible to find one particular point along their collective evolution when they would all be showing well.
