Le Clos de la Meslerie, 2013 Update
Excited by recent discoveries in Vouvray, including Sébastien Brunet, Mathieu Cosme and Michel Autran, I have already updated, amended, expanded and enhanced most of my Vouvray profiles this year. Nevertheless I come now, a few months later, to the wines of Peter Hahn, proprietor of Le Clos de la Meslerie. The only reason for the delay is that I met all the aforementioned Vouvrillons when visiting the Loire in February, whereas I met up with Peter a few months later, in May 2013, in London.
Peter (pictured above), who makes a single cuvée from his 4 hectares of vines, had just three vintages on show. Before tasting the wines, however, we talked about the 2012 vintage. It was a difficult one for the vines at Le Clos de la Meslerie. They were hit by “both mildews” as Peter put it, meaning downy mildew and oidium (also known as powdery mildew) but he was grateful that there had been no hail, a somewhat prophetic statement as four weeks after we met Vouvray was visited by a fierce hailstorm, wiping out a large percentage of the 2013 crop (Peter’s vines escaped the destruction, by the way). Then during the 2012 harvest it poured with rain, and he thought the vintage was going to be a complete disaster. He started picking at an alcoholic potential of 13%, but by the time he finished this had fallen to 12.3%, the concentration down as the grapes swelled with all the rain. Happily what he picked was clean, the wine tasting good in his opinion, although it will be – like 2011 – a drier style than we would usually expect from Le Clos de la Meslerie.
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