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Domaine Huet Vouvray Cuvée Constance 2002

It was during the early years of the 20th century that a young café proprietor named Victor Huet (Victor François Désiré Huet, to give him his Sunday name) met and subsequently married a young woman named Anna Moreaux. It was a union that would lead, ultimately, to the creation of one of the Loire Valley’s most renowned wines.

Anna was born in 1890, in Plauzat, a picturesque village of close-built stone houses in Puy-de-Dôme, high up in the mountains of the Massif Central. This was where Victor, who was born and bred in Notre-Dame-d’Oé just outside Tours, had settled. The two met – perhaps Anna was drawn to the charms of Victor’s vin de café – and were subsequently married in September 1908. The ceremony was held in Paris, perhaps because this was a little more accessible to Victor’s family (who remained in Notre-Dame-d’Oé), and afterwards they returned to Plauzat, presumably to continue running Victor Huet’s little café. A couple of years later, when Anna was just 20 years old, they were blessed with a son. They named him Gaston.

It was the events of the Great War that would bring the family’s café life to an end. Victor Huet undertook his military service, and during his time in the trenches he was exposed to noxious gases; after returning to Plauzat he continued on with his café but the work for this war veteran was stressful and exhausting. On medical advice he sought a different career, one which would allow him to work outdoors rather than in the café, where the air was no doubt thick with the lingering smoke of a thousand Gauloises. He decided to move back closer to his family, to the Loire Valley, somewhere near Notre-Dame-d’Oé; the region was rich in ancient woodland, and he knew with the right patch of land he could make a decent living in forestry.

Domaine Huet Vouvray Cuvée Constance 2002

It was as they searched for the right property that Anna discovered, and fell in love with, a house on the plateau above the Loire, nestled among the vineyards of Vouvray. The house came with 3 hectares of vines, the estate belonging to one Charles Massé, a well-known vigneron in the region. It was for sale, of course, and seeing the property Victor soon changed tack. He had come for forestry, but if he wanted a life of fresh air and clean lungs, wouldn’t viticulture be just as good? The deal was done late in 1928, and their first vintage on the property was 1929. And so Domaine Huet was born.

With the passing of time control of the property would come to the next generation, the son Gaston Huet, who came with them to Vouvray. And then responsibility would fall to the next generation, with Gaston’s son-in-law, a mathematician-turned-vigneron named Noël Pinguet. Noël took over in 1976, and by the late 1980s he was in the process of converting the domaine to biodynamic viticulture. It was during Noel’s tenure that the third of the three truly great 20th-century vintages came along, 1989 forming a trio with 1947 and 1921. Noël marked the event with the creation of a new label, a moelleux cuvée made from purely botrytised fruit.

The name of this cuvée makes sense, if you understand the Sunday name of that young woman from Plauzat who married Victor Huet was Anna Constance Moreaux. And so Cuvée Constance was born.

I will come to the 1989 Cuvée Constance, and its exact details of its creation (it was more intricately woven together than you might imagine) in a future Weekend Wine dive into Vouvray, but first let’s take a look at this cuvée from one of my favourite vintages in Vouvray during the past few decades, 2002. The 2002 Vouvray Cuvée Constance from Domaine Huet, poured from a 50 cl format, displays an intense orange-gold hue in the glass, typical of this level of cuvée, which carries 115 g/l residual sugar. The vintage is not renowned for noble rot, having ended with four weeks of warm and dry weather (which after a damps summer saved the vintage), but aromatically this does of course suggest botrytis, with layers of dried apricots, toasted praline, crème caramel and honey cake, along with a little touch of oatmeal biscuit. This is matched by a beautifully textured palate, rich in caramelised apricot intensity, with a pithy backdrop to the wine’s velvety texture, pervasive but with a chalky undercurrent and strikingly fresh acidity which is as much malic as tartaric in this vintage, which furnishes the wine with a precise finish. Overall a quite wonderfully composed wine, confident and long, and a fine example of the vintage, with an overlay of botrytis. Perhaps not my favourite 2002 (the Clos du Bourg Première Trie is hard to beat in both 2002 and 2003), but let’s see how it goes over the next fifty years. The alcohol on the label is 11%. 96/100 (23/10/23)

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