Domaine de la Pépière, 2023 Update
My first port of call in Muscadet country, eager to check out what they had produced in the 2022 vintage, not to mention see which cru communal cuvées were being lined up ready for release, was Domaine de la Pépière.
The retirement of Marc Ollivier is now old news; indeed, I haven’t set eyes on Marc for several years. Of course, during the pandemic, I didn’t set eye on any of my favourite vignerons at all. But even when I called in on the domaine back in 2019 to check out the vineyards and taste the latest, it was Rémi Branger who showed me around. The 2019 vintage was Marc’s last, and all the wines tasted and reported on here (bar one, a sole cru communal release from the 2019 vintage) come from the hands of Rémi Branger and Gwénaëlle Croix. I hope Marc is enjoying his retirement.
The first thing I did was ask Rémi how the 2022 season and harvest had gone.
“It was pretty complicated”, he told me (although, translating from French, I am paraphrasing a little here). “We had frost in April, and as a consequence we lost between 35% and 40% of the crop. We had pruned long to try and ward off any damage, but it wasn’t enough. Thereafter it was better, as we had a dry summer. Then we had a little rain just before harvest, about 30 mm, and this was good for the vines, as it allowed them to finish ripening the fruit. In the end our yield was 40 hl/ha on average, which is good for us. We thought after the frost it would be more like 25 or 30 hl/ha, so we were relieved”.
This is a story that is repeated along the length and breadth of the Loire in this vintage, and one I will explore in more detail in my 2022 Loire vintage report. Keeping it short and simple, there was frost in 2022, but the damage was less than feared partly because it was early (and budburst was barely underway), and secondly because after the poor yields of the heavily frosted 2021 vintage the vines were ready to produce a heavy crop, compensating in advance for the 2022 frost. These are broad generalisations though, and I think it is true to say Muscadet was hit more by the frost than other corners of the Loire Valley.
Anyway, on with the wines.
