Vouvray Tendre Clos de la Meslerie 2018

Vouvray Tendre Clos de la Meslerie, Biodynamic wine, medium wine, 25 grams residual sugar approx, 100% Chenin, 60 year old vines, low yields, quite simply, liquid gold.  The 2018 is a demi-sec style with 12% abv and complex candied fruit married to crystalline acidity and a smooth yet taught palate.  Peter Hahn allows nature to craft his wine every year and as such the fruits of each vintage are unknown until he nears the end of the fermentation and the wine begins to reveal itself.  Grapes are all hand-harvested and rigorously selected. Extremely low yields (20hl p/ha) due to selective picking. There is a very gentle, slow extraction from the 100-year old hand press that Peter uses.  The fermentation takes place in old barrels and is unfined with no treatments or manipulation and just a smidge of sulphur addition.   In 2018, nature decided in its wisdom to bestow upon the wine, 25 grams per litre of sugar and with it, more tropical fruit and intensity on the palate than in drier years.  Every year the wine captures the soul of the Vouvray appellation and the purity, minerality and complexity of the Chenin Blanc.  With cheese (try with Gorgonzola, superb) or some spicy Gambas, or even a classic Loire dish like chicken cooked with plums or quince.

Peter Hahn is an American who bought a tired old vineyard called Le Clos de la Meslerie after becoming disenchanted with his world, working as an investment banker in Paris.

He followed his passion and he had the courage to ditch it all and try to become a vigneron.  From the very start his instincts told him the only way he wanted to make wine was as naturally as possible and thanks to his hard work and natural talent for the craft, he succeeded. It took him several years to breathe life back into this tiny four hectare domaine as two decades of conventional farming had sucked the energy from the soil and the environment.  But he persisted and whilst working to revive the land and the vines, he also had a re-education in Viticulture and Oenology.  In 2008 his first Vouvray Clos de La Meslerie was released and the results were spectacularly good.  

After 20 years at his domaine, he now has this terroir and this wine in his blood.  He is unusual in that he hails from a different world but he has found his true calling and a meaningful life working as a farmer in a small village in rural France . His philosophy mirrors everything that we think about wine here at Buon Vino.  He is an inspirational wine maker.

As well as his 100% hands off approach in the vines, Peter also employs a very rare 100 year old hand press to extract the juice from the grapes. In terms of both production of the wine and emotional pull, the press is the soul of the domaine and has become emblematic of his approach to winemaking - which eschews mechanisation in every way possible.

“The fact that we press the grapes with a manual press is probably taking 'natural' to the extreme… For me, there are two reasons for being as natural as possible: number one, it is more ecologically friendly, and number two, it is the only way to get a true expression of the terroir. The more interventions there are, the more standardised the wine becomes.”

The wine itself is nothing short of pure gold, every year it is different. Some years Le Meslerie is drier, some years sweeter, but always authentic and always delicious.  He follows Biodynamic principles and simply allows the wine to be as nature intends each vintage.  This is brave when the market still always looks for consistency. But however his wine turns out, it is always exciting to taste and extremely easy to drink and enjoy.

‘I am a winegrower, not a winemaker…wine is made in the vineyard, and what happens in the cellar is ancillary at most and irrelevant at best.  Everything is in the grapes.  I am, first and foremost, a grape farmer.'   Peter Hahn