Loire 2014 at Two Years
With Bordeaux, having first formed an opinion on the style and quality of the wines in any one vintage, starting at the primeurs, I will then return to them again and again, as they hit two, four or more years of age, reviewing my opinions each time. In the UK we are blessed with multiple tasting opportunities, and as if those weren’t sufficient it is quite easy for me to fly to Bordeaux to retaste, as I did with the 2013 vintage last October. And it is now less than a week before I head out to Bordeaux once again, for the 2015 vintage primeurs, to start the cycle over once again. During nine days of visits I will taste hundreds of barrel samples, my first contact with the vintage.
In the Loire Valley, building an overview of a vintage is a much more complex affair, gathering together notes and opinions in a much more piecemeal fashion. There is no such thing as primeurs week in Nantes, Angers, Tours or Sancerre. Nevertheless, for the past few years I have done my best in this regard, publishing detailed growing season reports backed up with as many notes as I can pull together. Without a primeurs-style though (i.e. there are no huge tastings of embryonic barrel samples), these wines have always tended to be those the vigneron will be bringing to market soon. As a consequence, these earliest reports tend to be weighted towards Muscadet, Cabernet d’Anjou, early drinking reds and whites from Anjou, Bourgueil, Cheverny, Touraine and the like, as well as a selection of wines from Sancerre of course.
What’s missing? Well, more serious oak-aged cuvées from all the Loire heartland appellations including Chinon, Bourgueil and Vouvray as well as Sancerre, not to mention the sweet wines, and any wine from vignerons simply not interested in pouring brut de cuve samples. I have always thought it would be informative to revisit new vintages after just one year, to get to grips with some of these wines. It would not be a huge primeurs-style report featuring several hundred wines; my main method of reporting on new releases would continue to be my domaine updates, featuring new tasting notes on multiple cuvées from one domaine, along with news on the latest developments from the winemaker. It would simply be an opportunity to reappraise the vintage, and to see if tastes of these later-released cuvées mirrored my initial impressions of the quality and character of the year. This, then, is the purpose of this report, which looks at forty-or-so wines from the 2014 vintage.
