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| Manoir de la Tête Rouge “Free Mousse” Pét-nat 2023 Athlètes du Vin Pineau d’Aunis VdF 2024 Domaine Le Briseau “Patapon” VdF 2023 Bertin-Delatte “Rabatière” Pineau d’Aunis VdF 2025 Domaine de la Bellivière “Rouge Gorge” Côteaux-du-Loir 2022 |
| Spend a few minutes at the shop, and you’re guaranteed, most days, to hear a spiel about the grape, pineau d’aunis, and the wines made from it. I credit Eric Nicholas, of Domaine de la Bellivière, and his old, old vine cuvee of this grape, “Rouge Gorge,” for turning me on to this mystical, medieval variety, but also, in part (Jean Foillard is the other drug dealer here), turning me on to natural wine, many years ago. To be sure, Eric’s take on pineau d’aunis, cobbled together from tiny plots of superannuated vines in the Coteaux du Loir, a small appellation north of Tours, is unlike any other iteration of it today—it’s much more oddball, more difficult to wrap your head around, especially when compared to the vin de soif expression we also dig, and often stock, and when you drink it, redolent of an herbalist’s apothecary, it’s not difficult to feel transported back to the middle ages, and expect a soundtrack of crumhorns and sackbuts, and that Friar Tuck is might jump out from behind a pine tree. But what exactly is pineau d’aunis?
The truth is that we don’t quite know. The name, Aunis, is either related to the medieval maritime province of Aunis, or an abbey located in the center of the Loire region. It’s a very old variety, to be sure, and one of the very oldest cultivated in the Loire today, perhaps as early as the tenth century, making it older than cabernet franc and gamay, the other two main red grapes grown there. It’s unrelated to these varieties, and is a member of the messiles family, which includes other relics of bygone days, e.g., menu pineau, petit meslier (today cultivated only in minute quantities in Champagne), but also chenin. Folks ask what pineau d’aunis tastes like, and truthfully, it’s a premodern grape that tastes nothing like any other modern grape variety, so without proper cognates, I use descriptors such as cranberry, rhubarb, and white peppercorn. It’s been in freefall since the late 50s, when there were over 4,000 acres of it in cultivation; today, only about 1,000 acres remain. Why? Part of the reason is that it just doesn’t conform to the simplifying logic of the modern grape, which offers uniform, explicable expression; another reason is that we lost quite a lot of it during the phylloxera epidemic in the 19th century, and when faced with replanting grand pappy’s grape, cantankerous and capricious, or a more reliable, modern variety, a lot of vigneron chose to go with the new reliable. Tonight, we’re starting with a pét-nat that contains a good dose of pineau d’aunis, and then moving on to four wines that are 100 percent of the grape. The first two are two very light, fresh, low-ABV, soif-y versions, followed by a more medium-bodied, yet still not structured wine. To finish, Eric Nicolas’s Rouge Gorge. |