Clos Marie Clairette Vieilles Vignes

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A non-commercial experiment in white too impressive to overlook at Clos Marie is their 2007 Clairette Vieilles Vignes – from centenarian vines. Vinified in a concrete egg, it possessing the grip, meatiness of texture, and tannic structure of a red wine, and mingles elements of roasted pumpkin and winter squashes with turnips and tart, fresh yellow plum. It shares with other wines from this estate both a marine-like and chalky sense of minerality. I hope to be permitted to taste what comes of it after a couple of years in bottle. Christophe Peyrus and Francois Julien had only recently assembled the majority of their 2007 reds when I tasted with them in December, and that collection is as exciting as past experience with Clos Marie and recognition of the potential of this vintage would lead one to expect. “Ripeness came early and homogeneously,” says owner-winemaker Peyrus. “The harvest was very rapid, and the evolution of the wines has been precocious.” Yet even under these conditions, potential alcohol seldom exceeded 14.5% even for the blocks of Grenache, a circumstance Peyrus attributes to his biodynamic methods of cultivation. He is also a partisan of vendange entier (the inclusion of whole clusters in red wine fermentation – in his case generally at least 50%) and says the stems were thoroughly ripe (i.e. lignified) in 2007. It’s a measure of the excitement that within fifteen years, this estate has ascended from obscurity to the top echelon of French wine addresses. There is never a lot of new wood in this dripping-wet cellar, although much of what there is, interestingly, comes from Austrian barrel-maker Franz Stockinger. (The 2007 reds had never been sulfured when I tasted them – that happens here only at bottling, and then only very judiciously.)Imported by Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, PA; tel. (610) 486-0800 and Beaune Imports, Berkeley, CA; tel. (510) 559 1040