Domaine des Pothiers, 2018 Update
Although I have been exploring the very upper reaches of the Loire for a few years now, it was only last year that I first tasted the wines of Domaine des Pothiers. The wines at the top end of the portfolio, all Gamay in a wonderfully delineated, perfumed, confident and yet floral style, were simply excellent. This seems to be what the Côte Roannaise excels at; something about the climate, and perhaps more importantly the degraded soils of various shades of granite, engenders the wines not only with texture and substance, but with a rarely encountered sense of honesty in their fruit profiles – the confected berry fruits seen in numerous less interesting examples of Gamay give way here to the scents of dry black cherry and a pretty peony perfume – framed by a definition, substance and elegant structure rarely seen with this variety.
In short, if you haven’t invested in a bottle or two for drinking, you need to. And Domaine des Pothiers is as good a place to start as any.
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