Loire 2014 at Two Years: Touraine
After three very awkward vintages, I think 2014 must have come as a relief to the vignerons of Touraine. The 2011 vintage had been complex, with some delicious sweet wines in Vouvray, and some very fine reds, both styles from vines that took advantage of a long period of warm weather during autumn. The dry whites have tended to be a bit clunky though, in my experience, the wines a clash of mismatched sugar and phenolic ripeness. The 2012 vintage was mean and meagre in Vouvray; flooding during the growing season didn’t help, and the red wines are similarly lean. There are drinkable red wines, especially from the most dedicated domaines such as Bernard Baudry, but it was far from being a memorable year. The 2013 vintage was blighted by a summer hailstorm that did its best to wipe out livelihoods in the region (but failed, as far as I am aware, thankfully); the whites from Vouvray are decent enough taking that into account, but the reds are petit vins in all senses of the word, with grainy unripe tannins and the ‘normal’ alcohol levels the undeniable result of chaptalisation in the majority of wines I have encountered.
So fingers and toes were crossed for 2014, and in the end things went well overall. The vignerons of Cheverny might not see it that way, this region having been hit by rampant mildew in July, the consequence of some persistent drizzly summer weather that had viticulteurs out spraying every few days, but in the end the sun came out and six weeks of fine weather in late-August, September and into October saved the vintage. Indeed, it did more than merely save it; the reds developed a lovely ripeness, tense rather than rich, and the whites showed a touch of richness combined with a lovely acid tension. Proof, I suppose, that what Pierre Couly of Couly-Dutheil has always said is true; there are only six weeks that really matter when it comes to the Loire, three for the flowering, and three for the harvest. In 2014, the vines had a lot more than three weeks to ripen their fruit in readiness for picking.
The Wines
As I have already noted, I have tasted a lot of wines from 2014 that make clear the quality of the vintage, and I will publish these in forthcoming domaine updates and profiles. The notes presented here are merely a small selection of wines recently tasted, mostly at the Loire Benchmark tasting in January 2016, plus a couple of wines tasted at home, and a couple encountered elsewhere.
