Loire 2015 at Three Years: Demi-Sec & Moelleux
While the 2015 vintage will be remembered by fans of the region for its red wines, I wonder if the sweet wines of this vintage may have slightly broader appeal (only slightly though – we all know sweet wines are an eternally unpopular style). I write this only because friends on the trade side of the wine business tell me that many of their clients, even those staunch traditionalists firmly wedded to Bordeaux and Burgundy when it comes to their red-wine drinking, and who would never dream of drinking a wine from Chinon or Bourgueil, will occasionally open their cellar door to admit a bottle or two of moelleux Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley.
My own cellar is more than 25% moelleux (including one or two or more bottles of Sauternes and Barsac, admittedly), a relatively recent realisation which has prompted me to start drinking these sweet wines with greater frequency (as I wrote in my 2015 Loire whites report, it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it). With this knowledge in mind, you might think in the meantime that I would refrain from adding further bottles of Coteaux du Layon, Quarts de Chaume and première trie Vouvray to the cellar. Of course, if you thought that, you would be wrong! This instalment of my Loire 2015 at Three Years report features 17 demi-sec and moelleux wines, all of which have of course bee added to my cellar during the course of the last year or two.
The demi-sec wines almost all originate from Vouvray, as you might imagine, although a lone representative from outside this appellation hails from the Coteaux du Loir. The 2015 Coteaux du Loir L’Effraie from Domaine de Bellivière is a very good wine – we should expect nothing less from Eric Nicolas, of course – but it is not at the same extraordinarily high level as the 2015 Coteaux du Loir Vieilles Vignes éparses on which I reported in my dry whites instalment. As for Vouvray, not for the first time Philippe Foreau came out on top, his 2015 Vouvray Demi-Sec a masterclass in this style, although the wines of François Pinon and Bernard Fouquet are not to be sneezed at.
