Loire 2019 First Taste: Central Vineyards
This is the final of my four region-by-region assessments of the 2019 vintage in the Loire Valley, for the Central Vineyards, home to what is surely the most famous of the Ligérian vineyards, Sancerre, along with its sibling, Pouilly-Fumé. The story of the vintage in these appellations is quite different to that seen in regions downstream, from the western appellations of Touraine right down to those appellations which border the Atlantic.
The key difference, as I have already alluded in my account of the 2019 vintage in Touraine, is that frost simply wasn’t a major problem here, and thus many in the region enjoyed another fine vintage, one which comes immediately after the bounty and joy of 2018. As a consequence, when discussing the vintage here with the region’s vignerons, the conversation tended to focus much more on the quality of the fruit at picking and the style of the wines rather than the trials and tribulations of the growing season.
Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé
It was close to impossible to find a vigneron with a serious complaint regarding the weather during the early part of the growing season. The only mention of frost I heard was from Sébastien Redde, of Michel Redde; “we had a little touch of frost, but not a lot as some experienced”, he told me. Indeed, Sébastien made reference to the only problem most vignerons in these appellations experienced, which was the same very dry conditions seen along the entire length of the river. “The weather during the summer months was a problem for the younger vines”, he told me, “as from the end of May through to the end of September we had very little rain”.
The Central Vineyards and Muscadet are the spiritual homes of the Loire Valley’s two principal early-picked varieties, Melon de Bourgogne and Sauvignon Blanc, and while the harvest in Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé tends to lag behind that of Muscadet by a week or two, this tendency to pick earlier binds the two regions and their wines together.
