Vincent Carême, 2019 Update
It is now several years since I promoted Vincent Carême to the top tier within Vouvray (am I allowed to do that?), based upon the strong performance of his wines in the 2014 and 2015 vintages. These were wines with which Vincent seemed to go beyond the limits of the Vouvray appellation to join the ranks of some of the very best in the entire Loire Valley, putting him on a similar footing as François Chidaine, Claude Papin, the late Didier Dagueneau and his son Louis-Benjamin, Jonathan Pabiot and one or two others. I should point out this list is far from exhaustive, and I am sure most readers would have their own ideas about which vignerons constitute the region’s crème de la crème, but I hope you get the idea.
On this most recent encounter I saw nothing to dissuade me of this opinion. Vincent has been able to take advantage of the 2016 vintage, which looks to be of increasingly high quality every time I pull the cork on a bottle. Sadly for some in the appellation, spring frost tempered their ability to take advantage of what the growing season later offered, but happily this was not the case for Vincent who has made a handsome range of wines ranging from sparkling and sec through demi-sec to moelleux. The two representatives from 2017 were equally promising, and this is another vintage which I suspect will give us delightful drinking in years to come, before we can turn our attention to the joys of 2018, a year bursting at the seams with demi-sec and moelleux styles.
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