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.
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