Loire 2015 First Taste: The Nantais
Muscadet should be viewed as a vineyard, or a wine region, not a wine. We can today no more generalise about the qualities we should look for in a Muscadet than we can a Chablis. Is it a Grand Cru Chablis, from the slopes of Valmur or Les Clos, destined for a decade in the cellar and to be savoured one day hence with a rich, mushroom-festooned game bird, or is an entry-level Chablis, crisp and fresh, fine for drinking now with a little fried catch-of-the-day?
It is the same with Muscadet; we have entry-level wines made for chasing oysters, and more polished wines, long-aged on the lees, many of which have taken (or are awaiting the ratification of) cru communal names such as Gorges, Clisson and Monnières-Saint-Fiacre. This not being the Bordeaux primeurs opportunities to taste wines made in the latter style at this stage are essentially non-existent; wise vignerons leave these wines to slumber for now, and they only will start showing them next year or even in 2018, by which time they will be in bottle. There will certainly be cru communal wines made in 2015, and I expect the quality, enhanced by eighteen months or more on the lees, will be good.
For the moment, this report must focus on the more traditional style, which will see out a shorter period of time sur lie. There is a quality that I look for in this level of Muscadet (well, in truth there are many different qualities I look for, but let us stick with just one for the moment) and that is acidity. Hemingway understood the wine’s purpose:
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
– A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, 1964
Crispness in wine owes a lot to acidity, and in very warm, ripe and rich vintages – such as 2015 – acidity is naturally going to be a concern. First, though, some comments from Nantais vignerons.
