Château Pierre-Bise, 2024 Update
If there is a domaine in Anjou I have been following longer than Château Pierre-Bise then its identity seems to have slipped my mind. I first visited this domaine more than twenty years ago (I seem to recall I made my inaugural visit to the Joly family and the Clos de la Coulée de Serrant that same week) and this was far from my first encounter with the wines. And of course it wasn’t my last, either.
That first visit comprised several hours in the company of Claude Papin, who was extraordinarily generous with his time. These days the domaine is under the direction of one of his two sons, René Papin. René always strikes me as a quiet, thoughtful and methodical character, and this is reflected in his measured and largely unpublicised reworking of the domaine’s portfolio of wines.
In keeping with the sea change from sweet wine to dry we have witnessed in Anjou in recent years, René has culled a number of sweet wines from the Pierre-Bise portfolio, and redefined others, upending the ‘natural order’ of cuvées in the process. This has been a slow-rolling process that René has effected over the last eight or nine years, but now it seems clear that René has completed his reshaping of the domaine’s portfolio to match his vision.
The key development is the disappearance of the majority of the site-specific cuvées of Coteaux du Layon. Said René of this change, “it was interesting to have a range of moelleux wines, from different terroirs yet with the same vinification in the same vintage, but it was difficult for the market,” by which of course René means it was difficult to sell such a broad array of sweet wines in a world which seems increasingly thirsty for dry minerality.
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