How the '02 Les Clos Sacrés survived....

 
 

 

---I'll never know.

Last night David Lillie read me the riot act on my pathetic wine cellar.

meaning shelves in my living room and boxes under my bed, with no temperature control. I was going to do something about it this year, get a little wine fridge. Found one for about $350. Looked great and I had Fred Tregaskis' approval.

Then Alex Halberstadt warned that I'd probably ruin the wine because of the vibrations unless I got the top models.

Lillie is trying to steer me to off-site storage. I swore off big purchases until I can figure out a way to get health insurance, I might have to do something about...soon. 

But then, when I have experiences like the one the other night ,with a seemingly perfectly intact and utterly delicious nine-year -old Savennieres, I wonder; can I continue surviving on A/C economy control?

Les Clos Sacrés is Nicolas Joly's basic Savennieres,  preciously called Becherelle, presently  labelled as Les Vieux Clos in Europe and Les Clos Sacrés for the US market. (Why?  I have no idea, let me ask Virginie and get back to you.)

The wine is sourced from four separate plots of vines planted on a jumble of quartz, schist and sand soils. Domaine Select is the importer, but back when I acquired the bottle,  Lauber was the broker. That was back in the days when they still had some good wines, before Southern took it over and started to scratch their heads with confusion how to sell wines that weren't 'brands.'

The wine, cracked with my friend Dr. J. was sublime in the way Savennieres can be. Wet wool, honey, old apples in a crate and I kept on coming up to depth, incredible depth. A little miracle. A big miracle. This was sort of a ricola candy without the sweetness and then it was deep into chamomile. Acidity nice and bright. It was also a little young. A true miracle. 

The bottle was stored not in the living room, on the shelves, but in my bedroom, in the dark. I've often wondered if light was more of a threat to the life of a wine than above 56 degrees. Or is it just the indestructiblity of a well-made chenin.

2002 is one of my favorite years for the Loire and at  13.9 alcohol, one to present to those N. Joly naysayers. Just brilliant. 

Comments

[Jonathan Webster]

I love Joly, bah to the naysayers.

I say keep storing your wines as you have been. I have a number of Chenins and Rieslings from the late 90's early 00's and they weather being stored in my closet where is gets up to the high 70's in the early summer, beautifully. Might they advance in age a little quicker due to the temp? maybe? probably? so what. The '02 Joly was an object lesson in "it doesn't really matter".

Vibrations? Someone sounds like a nervous nelly to me.

[Alex Halberstadt]

Jonathan Webster—I may be nelly, but I'm rarely nervous. I, too, was dubious about the vibration business until I opened two bottles—a Closel Savennières and a good Puligny—that I'd kept in a little wine fridge for just over a year. Both were shot—zero aroma, tasted nasty— though not in a way I'd encountered. Even the folks at Chambers Street Wines, where I took the bottles, were stumped. A few months later I heard a "champagne educator" decrying the evils of mini-fridges and their vibrations; no more than six months, he warned. EuroCave makes wine fridges with a decoupled condensers that claim to be vibration-free, but they cost a mint. The $250 Avanti that shook the Closel to death is good enough for me, as long as everything gets drunk.