Savennieres a rare gem often hidden in aisle of the whites
When the weather turns hot, sticky and uncomfortable, the white wines of the Loire Valley of France take center stage. Sancerre, Muscadet, Vouvray -- these are the wines many of us turn to for easy drinkability, kinship with summer foods and good value.
As you're shopping or dining over the next couple of months, though, we'd urge you to remember that the Loire also includes a whole bunch of less-familiar names, from Menetou-Salon to Quincy, that are worth keeping in the back of your mind in case you see them on a shelf or a wine list. They tend to be tasty wines that also hold interest because their fruit tastes are restrained enough to let a sense of place, such as the minerals of the earth, shine through.
One name we'd especially urge you to remember: Savennieres.
We aren't foolish enough to walk into any store or restaurant expecting to see a Savennieres (pronounced sah-ven-YARE). Not very much is produced -- just 19,000 cases in 2006, according to the Loire Valley Wine Bureau -- but a Savennieres on the shelf or list is often a sign of a store or restaurant that really knows what it's doing, and it can often be a great deal because it's not widely known. Consider this:
At the California Grill at Disney World, there are two wine lists. One, handed to everyone, includes dozens of wines available both by the bottle and the glass. The second list, which diners generally need to ask for, is the reserve list and includes rare, special and often very expensive wines.
When we looked at the reserve list on our most recent trip, John glanced at the prices and immediately went into sticker shock and closed the book. Dottie, however, took a closer look and said, "Look at this!" We have written before that at many restaurants one of the best buys is the least-expensive bottle on the wine list (the worst buy is often the second-least-expensive, because restaurants know that many people don't want to appear cheap by choosing the lowest-priced wine and therefore order the second-lowest). In this case, the least expensive wine on the big list, and one of the few wines under $100, was a 2001 Savennieres from Baumard, a well-known producer. It was $60, a relative bargain and certainly the perfect wine to have while we watched a thunderstorm move in over the Magic Kingdom on a very hot day.
When the waiter brought the bottle, he apologized that they no longer had the 2001 and asked if the 2002 was OK. We receive letters all the time from readers who ask what to do when the vintage of the wine doesn't match the wine list. It seems so obvious that the waiter should simply do what ours did: Point out the difference and ask if that's acceptable, which it was.
Dottie had indeed discovered a winner. The Savennieres was the single best wine we tasted during our entire vacation, with focused tastes of apples and minerals and the kind of acidity that made every bite of food better. As soon as we returned home, we decided to see if there were enough Savennieres out there for a tasting.
Savennieres is made from the Chenin Blanc grape, which has developed a disagreeable reputation over the years because of all the awful jug wines called Chenin Blanc in the U.S. In fact, Chenin Blanc is a noble grape capable of making some great and long-lived dry and sweet wines. We've recommended some from the U.S. and France over the years, and it's a specialty of South Africa, where it was traditionally known as Steen.
We found enough Savennieres -- in Missouri, New York and Washington, D.C. -- for a small blind tasting. Because these can age beautifully, we bought every vintage we saw and ultimately found them going back to 1995. While a few names appear to be most common, including Joly, Baumard and Domaine du Closel, we found quite a few others. We tasted them in blind flights over several nights.
We were charmed. Savennieres doesn't taste quite like anything else, and if, like most of us, you've become accustomed to drinking Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, your taste buds are in for a tasty surprise. From the first sniff to the long finish, the single most notable characteristic is minerals, giving the wine complexity and a sense of place. The wines offered all sorts of tastes -- nuts, lemon, lychee, peach, white pepper -- but the single fruit taste they pretty much all had in common was apple: sometimes just-off-the-tree juicy Red Delicious apples or tangy, crisp Granny Smith apples, sometimes spiced apples. The yellow-gold color became darker with age, and the wines became richer and somewhat more challenging.
While Savennieres is known to age well for decades, we've always preferred it either at around five years old or quite old -- we had an outstanding, still-fresh 1990 at a restaurant recently -- and we found that again in this tasting. But talking too much about fruit flavors obscures something that makes these wines different: At a time when so many wines seem to be all fruit and forward tastes, these are earthier, bone-dry wines where hints of slate from gravelly soil provide a weighty underpinning on which the restrained tastes of fruit rest.
Our best of tasting turned out to be a wine that was by far the most expensive (yes, we hate it when that happens, too), a celebrated wine from Nicolas Joly ($79.99) from a special area of Savennieres called Coulee de Serrant. It was a wine of great stature and awesome complexity -- imagine a wine that seems both crisp and rich at the same time -- that became more and more interesting as the night wore on. The importer, Vintus LLC of Pleasantville, N.Y., says the winery makes about 1,500 to 2,000 cases a year, of which about 450 cases are imported into the U.S. and distributed in about 30 states.
As we've often written, there are more good wine stores around these days than ever before. Sometime very soon, drop into one of them and ask to be shown to the aisle of Loire whites. If the store offers only Sancerre, Muscadet and Vouvray, get one anyway because you really can't miss. But if they have any other Loire whites, ideally one you've never tried before, pick it up. If it's Savennieres, great. If not, just remember that name. Sometime in the future, you will see it, and when you do, grab it.