Loire 2016 at Three Years
Some vintages and some regions wear their heart and soul on their sleeves. The 2009 vintage in Bordeaux is an easy and immediately recalled example; across the board the wines were lush and textured in their youth, when tasted at the oft-criticised primeurs, and ten years later they still possessed that same opulent if tightening presence.
Other vintages are rather more complex, however, and this is especially true in the Loire Valley. Here vintages which can be summed up in just a few words are rare beasts indeed; only 1990 and perhaps 2018 spring to mind. This is of course a reflection of the region’s protean nature, the multilayered complexity fashioned from climate, terroir, variety and vigneron, among numerous other factors, ensuring that many vintages present us with parallel tales of success and disaster and all other possibilities that lie between. Years with no extant sense of cachet and which at first glance seem destined to be forgotten, such as 2012 with its hyetal harvest, or 2007 and its near-permanent drizzle, will only reveal their secrets to those who are willing to investigate (or at least subscribe to Winedoctor I suppose). The former gave us brilliant Muscadet and Sancerre of course, the early-picked varieties having escaped the rain, while the latter was one of the greatest vintages for Coteaux du Layon and Quarts de Chaume in recent years, that late on-off drizzle fostering the development of superbly concentrated noble rot.
Some successes, such as that seen in 2007, are not always immediately apparent; indeed, it might be argued that, aside from the likes of 1990 and 2018, this is true of many Loire vintages. In part this might be down to the way the region works; with no coordinated primeurs week Ligérian vignerons will usually unveil their triumphs in a staggered fashion; this year you can taste the white and the rosé, and maybe next year the red, but you must come back in two years if you want to taste the sweet wine. At other times it seems to be the wines themselves that are reluctant, at first revealing little, but then later unfurling and unfolding, as they metamorphose from golden chrysalis to vinous butterfly, a creature which once seemed quite ordinary now shimmering and kaleidoscopic. And of course it can also be the taster themselves who overlooks the quality that is apparent in the first few encounters with a new vintage, a failing I will of course quickly gloss over; after all, why would a wine writer admit culpability when they can ascribe new opinions to the evolution of the wines?
