Domaine Vacheron Sancerre Le Pavé 2019
Any book that sets out to educate its reader on Burgundy and its wines inevitably relies on maps, and a lot of them at that. Committed Burgophiles rightly obsess over the carving up of the Côte d’Or; poring over the patchwork arrangement of the region’s many parcels, questioning the boundaries that delineate every premier and grand cru. It is one of the many aspects of Burgundy that keeps this region’s fans so entranced, drawing them in as sailors are drawn to the song of a siren. The end results – hopeless infatuation and obsession – are in each case fairly similar.
Sancerre, meanwhile, has long been known for its blends which – in theory – combine the best elements of the region’s major terroirs and fashion them into a coherent whole, the very antithesis of the Burgundian approach. Having a much greater interest in the terroirs and wines of Sancerre than I have in Burgundy, this stark difference always left me scratching my head; why, I wondered, should the vignerons of Sancerre not make more of their individual terroirs? Naturally, not everybody shares this view; I recall one article published only a few years ago in which a Master of Wine decried the complexity of the single-vineyard approach in Sancerre. “Just give me my simple Sancerre,” he cried, written no doubt with a glass of Chassagne-Montrachet Premier Cru Le Concis du Champs in hand. What is good for the Chardonnay goose is apparently not good for the Sauvignon gander.
Happily, a number of leading vignerons in Sancerre see it my way (or rather, I see it their way) and accordingly they have spent the last ten or twenty years (or more) carving out some of the better terroirs from the ‘coherent whole’. Prominent among their number is Domaine Vacheron, who made a splash in the 2010 vintage with a collection of single-vineyard cuvées from the lieux-dits of Le Paradis, Chambrates and Guigne-Chèvres. These three new additions to the portfolio joined their wine from Les Romains, which had first been bottled back in the 1997 vintage.
In 2012 another two cuvées joined the fray, one of which was Le Pavé. The other, for the sake of completeness, was the decidedly esoteric L’Enclos des Remparts, a micro-cuvée of Sauvignon Blanc from within the Sancerre town walls (and therefore, perversely, excluded from the appellation). But that’s a wine for another time; for the moment, let’s stick with Le Pavé.
The lieu-dit of Le Pavé sits just to the east of the town, sandwiched between the town walls and the waters of the Canal Latéral de la Loire, the canal built in the early-19th century to improve the reliability of river transport on this section of the Loire. A parcel of about 6 hectares in size, it is easily identified as it is home to the cellars of Joseph Mellot, around which there are about 4 hectares of vines (on the other 2 hectares there are the aforementioned cellars, as well as a couple of houses and gardens). Of the vines, about 2 hectares belong to Domaine Vacheron.
These vineyards have long been recognised as superior, one of the earliest mentions coming from Vincent Poupard, an 18th-century curé of Sancerre who also found time to pen Histoire de la Ville de Sancerre (Charles-Pierre Berton, 1777) in which he listed Le Pavé among the best sources for white wines. Following in his footsteps was Abraham Malfuson, a historian who wrote his own Histoire de la Ville de Sancerre (Chez Gourdet, 1826); he too rated Le Pavé among a broader list of top choices. One thing is clear; these Sancerre vineyards may not be as well known as Burgundy’s premiers crus, but they are not devoid of cultural and historical precedence.
Nor are they short of geological interest. If you know Sancerre (and if you don’t, may I be so bold to recommend my guide to Sancerre) you will be aware this appellation’s vineyards rest on a plate of Jurassic limestones and marls, its oldest layers dating to the Oxfordian, the Kimmeridgian and the Tithonian (although many locals refer instead to the English stage, the Portlandian, which straddles the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods). And then there is flint too, of course. Le Pavé, however, sits on younger Cretaceous strata, an east-facing slope of iron-rich limestones, marls, clays and fine white and yellow sands from the Hauterivian, Barremian and Albian ages. These are all relatively rare terroirs for the Sancerre vineyard; in fact, I cannot think of another on such ‘young’ soils.
The Vacheron vines are aged between 30 and 50 years, and are rooted into the more marly soils higher up the slope, rather than the sands which are lower down. The fruit is picked by hand before coming up the hill the short distance to the Vacheron cellars, which sit within the city walls. There the fruit is immediately sorted by hand and eye, over a table, after which it is pressed and the juice fermented by indigenous yeasts in large wooden cuves. Once finished the wine rests here on its lees for ten to twelve months prior to bottling.
In the glass the 2019 Sancerre Le Pavé from Domaine Vacheron presents a limpid straw-coloured hue, which is followed by a beautifully bitter precision and expression on the nose, with layers of white flowers, acacia, crushed chalk and lemon peel. This heralds a tense, precise and delicately bitter start to the palate, before it broadens a little in the middle to reveal layers of bitter lime, orange and lemon rind, with fabulous acidity. But it is the tension and the drive which really defines it, its core of bitter citrus fruits swirled with ribbons of crushed and acid-washed chalk, and it lends it such great length. Having largely tasted this cuvée in its youth before now, this is a rare encounter after a few years in bottle, and it is exactly how I hoped it would turn out, precise, driven and deliciously mouth-watering. It is drinking well now, although of course it has many years ahead of it yet. The alcohol on the label is 13%. 96/100
It is only one wine, but this is proof – should it be required – of the value of the single-vineyard approach in this appellation. This is one Sancerre every Burgundy drinker should get excited about, if they could just pull themselves away from the song of the sirens for a moment or two. (11/3/24)
Read more in:
- My guide to Sancerre and the Sancerre vineyards
- My detailed profile of Domaine Vacheron
- My guide to Sauvignon Blanc
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