Oddly – considering the outstanding success of the 2007 – the new team at Soucherie elected to vinify and age their 2008 Coteaux du Layon Chaume entirely in small barrels, half of them new. “An experiment,” they called it, but I do not find the results encouraging. Half of the normally small production in this site was lost to frost, and there’s no question the resulting wine is concentrated, but it still cannot resist the absorption of resin, vanilla, and lanolin flavors from barrel. Add to the naturally high acidity of the vintage some stiffness and severity from the effect of barrel on the palate, and one has a rather difficult wine (for me at least) to warm up to. Candied lemon rind, honey, and mint candy represent Chenin Blanc and botrytis in these proceedings and the snuffed candle wick smokiness of the variety displays a certain synergy with the toastiness of oak; ditto quinine with lanolin notes from the barrel. But overall, I think the case here is closed and barriques found guilty on all charges, even if the mitigating circumstances extend to a certain juiciness in an impressively long finish. In 2007, the Tijou family sold Chateau Soucherie to industrial magnate Roger Beguinot, whose chosen wine maker, Thibaud Boudignon, is a Burgundian who arrived here via the Languedoc, Bordeaux, and Australia. The vines are now being farmed entirely organically, and have been impressively manicured. The wines I tasted at this spectacularly and from the inside almost unrecognizably renovated property (which I last visited in 2006) seem to be way stations on a journey of stylistic exploration, from wines essentially vinified under the regimen of Pierre-Yves Tijou and his sons, through the transitional vintage 2007, and including two years in which Beguinot and his colleagues took very different approaches in elevage to what were already strikingly different sets of raw material, namely of 2008 and 2009.Importer: Rosenthal Wine Merchant, Pine Plains, NY; tel. (800) 910-1990