Wine Highlight: Savennières

Hi, everybody.  Welcome again to Cèpage et Cuisine, our wine and food blog.  Today, I'm highlighting Savennières, a wine from the Loire Valley in northwestern France.  The village of Savennières is about 200 miles southwest of Paris, not far from the Atlantic coast.  Here's a map to help you get oriented.  Click on it for an enlarged view.  Savennières is indicated by the red teardrop arrow.

The white grape of Savennières is Chenin Blanc.  Wines from this grape are made in a variety of styles throughout the Loire Valley (see our previous post on Bonnezeaux, a sweet version of Chenin Blanc).  Chenin Blanc from Savennières is a dry white wine, sometimes austere and steely.  It is built for aging and although it can be consumed young, it really needs a few years to show itself.  It is not exactly what I would call a beginner's wine, but it can be lovely with wonderful floral, mineral, and tropical notes.  Here's a link to a video about Domaine du Closel, a Savennières producer with a long history of women winemakers from a single family.

http://www.winespectator.com/video/index/playerid/315932961/lineupid/823481591/titleid/876416882

Here in Jackson, we don't have a large selection of Savennières, but we do have some excellent examples.  My favorite producer of Savennières is Domaine des Baumard and this is the wine we're highlighting today.  This is a 2002 vintage from Baumard, just reaching an excellent drinkability after eight years.  It is a straight Savennières, not from a single vineyard, and is an excellent example of the appellation.  The image above is from the Baumard website.  You can see the soil is very rocky.

A dry Chenin Blanc such as this pairs wonderfully with seafood.  One of the ideal pairings is with scallops.  Mary prepares a Provençal scallop dish which is delicious with Savennières. We don't have a photo, but here's Mary describing the basics of the dish.

Large bay scallops are sliced and sauteed in butter with onion. They cook up very quickly and are finished off with white wine in the pan, then Swiss cheese sprinkled on the top and broiled for just a couple of minutes. Served over pasta, it's delicious!

Brian's notes on the wine, Domaine des Baumard Savennières 2002:

I love this wine.  It is austere in its structure with intense minerality and high acidity, very bony, but it is complex in its aroma and flavor profile and pairs wonderfully with food.  The aroma shows lemon citrus, tropical notes of peach and floral honeysuckle, perhaps other flowers, pebbly minerality, and a smoky almond character.  The palate is full, creamy like a white Burgundy, but with a different structure and no evidence of prominent oak.  Lemon, like a lemon creme, stony mineral notes, and something more tropical are there.  The classic profile of Savennières is quince fruit, but I have never experienced this fruit.  It is wonderfully balanced, complex, and long finishing, especially for a white wine.  It needs time in the bottle to show itself.  This was a 2002 and could actually benefit from even more time.  A wonderful wine.  13.0% alcohol.  We paid $25 for this wine.  The current vintage is sometimes available at Colony Wine Market in Madison and Briarwood Wines and Spirits in Jackson.

That's our post for today.  Hope you like the blog and keep coming back.  In the meantime,

Cheers!

Brian and Mary