Pithon-Paillé, Les Treilles Retrospective, 2014: Tasting Notes
A few months before Jo Paillé led me on a trek across the top of Les Treilles (below), I had met up with the Pithon-Paillé family for a vertical tasting of Anjou Blanc Coteau des Treilles. This tasting, reported on here, took in nine vintages, beginning with 2013, although I have not included my note for this here as I have already inserted it into my Loire 2013 vintage report. The wine was still embryonic at the time of tasting, sweet and perfumed, still showing the residual sugar of youth.
Coteau des Treilles
As it is I begin instead with the 2012 vintage, a sample from cuve, which shows much promise, as indeed does the 2011; both showed an elegant purity and freshness, which might in part reflect the bright and cool character of the vintages in question, but which surely also reflects a shift in winemaking practices chez Pithon. In these more recent vintages the wood used has tended to be older, the vessels larger, with Jo Pithon and Jo Paillé opting to put more of the wine in larger 600-litre barrels. They certainly feel less marked by new oak than the wines made just a few years earlier would have done at this stage.
Both 2010 and 2009 are very good vintages, more concentrated and with a more solid structure than the two vintages just mentioned, with the smaller oak perhaps showing through here. The 2008 vintage, the first vintage in which I was really switched on to the successes of Pithon-Paillé, has also always shown well. Both the 2009 and 2008 vintages were made using 25% new oak, a higher figure than more recent years; and while I applaud Jo Pithon and family for reining this in, a process which Jo says he has undertaken in order to more clearly see “the signature of the terroir”, that hasn’t lessened my enthusiasm for these older vintages, nor my willingness to add some to the cellar.
