A Chauffeur with bottle(s)

One of my daytime duties is to escort visiting winemakers from foreign parts to meet our Cellar & Kitchen staff in Suffolk, Norfolk – and beyond. My most recent bout of chauffeuring has been to drive around two growers, hot from their Loire Valley vineyards, to visit our shops. They wanted to spread the word (despite their lack of any discernible English) and to pour their wines which - given my ever-declining ability to speak much coherent French -therefore had to speak for themselves.

I know we can all read the books and taste the wines, but there is something very much more tangible when the words of wisdom come from the guys who have pitted their wits against Mother Nature, year in, year out, in order to bring us their great wines. It is on these occasions that I realise how important it is for our staff to get it direct from the horse’s mouth, not just from the pages of their favourite wine encyclopaedias.

Serge Saupin’s visiting card has a bespectacled image of Obelix on it, as he maintains they share a similar ‘profile’ (namely Asterix’s rather stout compatriot in the famous French cartoon series if it needs explanation). He rests his hands upon an expensive stomach as if he needed to clarify exactly to which profile he refers. Serge’s Muscadet has, over the past ten years, become something of an institution in our list and on our shelves. One might be forgiven for dismissing the Loire’s most westerly wine as acidic and thin, and to heed the advice not to get it on your hands or spill it on anything remotely valuable or precious! Indeed, this might be the case for most Muscadet, but Serge’s is different.

Unlike his neighbours, he picks his eponymous grapes (also known as Melon de Bourgogne) two weeks later than most, allowing the fruit to ripen to its maximum, retaining its acidity and freshness, but providing plenty of weight of fruit in the wine. Once vinified, he keeps the wine sur lie (i.e. on the deposit of yeast cells and general gubbins that is left in the vat after fermentation), until the time comes to bottle it. The reasons for this are several fold, but the most obvious and outward sign of this is the retention of CO2 in the wine, which gives us that lovely tingling feeling on the tongue, as minute bubbles scintillate our palates, underlining the wine’s youthful character. Monsieur Saupin’s 2007 Muscadet is not the run of the mill stuff that is palmed off on the good old British palate; it is a great glass of dry white wine that could equally be drunk as an aperitif or with fish and/or chicken.

Phillippe Trotignon, on the other hand, cuts a rather leaner figure than Monsieur Muscadet, and this particular trip had more than a whiff of a ‘Little and Large’ tour!  Phillippe’s English is marginally worse than Serge’s tenuous grasp of the language, so there was a lot of dodgy French from me, the driver, and much sympathetic nodding going on in the rear view mirror. Once the corks were drawn, however, Little and Large immediately became animated. Monsieur Trotignon has his vineyards in the Touraine, further up the Loire than Serge’s, where Sauvignon Blanc rules supreme. Philippe and his wife make our Adnams Selection Sauvignon – the most wonderful expression of this Loire grape. Beautiful elderflower aromas come with plenty of flesh on the bones, making this the perfect aperitif or companion for fish and salads. And how does he achieve this perfect balance of weight of fruit and ethereal, summer aromas? His vineyards are spread over two villages, where the soils vary considerably. One is sand and flint, which gives the wine its perfumed aromas, and the other is limestone and clay, which gives the wine body - like Serge! Similarly, like Serge, he keeps his wine in contact with the lie, which really adds flavour and depth. Stunning stuff!

In both instances, it made more sense that the wines should speak for themselves, given that their owners were less than brilliant in the language stakes and the chauffeur – by the end of the day – was dreaming of nothing more challenging than a pint of Adnams East Green with Tweedledum and Tweedledee – or was it Little and Large? Unlike my palate, my memory fails me!

Rob Chase is Fine Wine Manager at Adnams Wine Merchants in Southwold, Suffolk. Visit Adnams Cellar & Kitchen stores in Southwold, Stamford, Saffron Walden, Woodbridge, Hadleigh, Holkham, Harleston and Holt. Alternatively by mail order.