Domaine de la Pépière, 2018 Update
Arriving at the 2018 Salon des Vins de Loire only slightly jaded after two days of tasting at Renaissance and Les Pénitents, I headed straight through the main hall circumventing a smorgasbord of top Loire Valley wine names to La Levée de la Loire. Here I was confident I would find Rémi Branger, pouring the wines of Domaine de la Pépière. Or at least that was the plan. This is a big tasting, these days an important feature of the Salon des Vins de Loire, with hundreds of exhibitors, so I wasn’t about to wander around expecting to discover him by chance. I picked up a catalogue which indicated his location, on one of about thirty tables (with perhaps ten exhibitors per table), and made a beeline for table four.
Having circled Rémi’s table several times I soon came to the realisation that the catalogue had to be wrong. It was Jules Pinon who eventually rescued me, pointing out Rémi in the distance. I headed over to taste (promising to return to taste the latest from François and Jules of course, a promise I naturally made good on).
The transition here from Marc Ollivier to his young associates continues, and while in previous years I have tasted with Marc and/or Rémi, this year Rémi was manning his table with his colleague Gwénaëlle Croix. Marc, in fact, was nowhere to be seen, and it was Rémi who filled me in on the 2017 vintage here, and other new developments.
The frost in April 2017 destroyed 40% of the harvest, and yet despite this setback the team continue to grow the domaine. They have recently acquired a 1-hectare parcel of vines contiguous with those in the Clos des Briords, which will eventually allow them to increase the production of that cuvée. The parcel was previously managed using conventional methods though, so the team will first convert it to organic viticulture. While they await completion of the process and certification (which takes three years), the fruit will be channeled into a new cuvée which I will presumably get to taste next year.
