Domaine Nicolas Réau Anjou Rouge Cuvée Pompois 2009

Today is Cabernet Day, better known as #CabernetDay.  I was torn between participating as I did for Carignan Day in February and Malbec World Day back in April or ignoring it, as I did for Chardonnay Day.  While Cabernet Sauvignon is a fine grape, made into some excellent wine the world over, it doesn’t need any help from me to raise awareness of it.  And so participating according to the letter of the day, while showing complete disregard for the intentions of the organizers, I give you a Cabernet, Cabernet Franc that is, the Domaine Nicolas Réau Anjou Rouge Cuvée Pompois 2009.

Really I have nothing against Cabernet Sauvignon – I respect it as the cornerstone of many great wines, including the Ridge Monte Bello I had for my birthday this past year.  I’ve covered a dozen wines so far in which it was a component, most either as the largest portion of a blend or as a varietal.  But just as I hate it when someone says “Pinot” without specifying Noir, Gris, Blanc or Meunier, people who say Cabernet without specifying Sauvignon or Franc need some reminding that there’s more than one.

I’ve written about the variety before, in particular when I covered another wine of Anjou, the Château Pierre-Bise Sur Schistes.  To quickly recap though, Cabernet Franc is a classic French grape, a traditional component of the red Bordeaux blend and the main red grape of much of the Loire Valley.  Relative to its Bordeaux blending partners, it ripens early, is somewhat light in colour, tannins and body, but can bring fruit to the blend as well as a bit of leaf and stem flavour.

Anjou as well deserves a quick word – a region in the Loire, grouped together with Saumur, it’s in the western end of the valley with Nantais between it and the sea.  The area produces red, white and rosé wines, still and sparkling, which range from dry to very sweet.  If they distilled spirits and perhaps made fortified wines, they would have everything covered.  The climate is continental, though with some influences from the sea and winds down the river valley.  The main soil type is schist, though there are areas of chalk as well.

Nicolas Réau is a native of Anjou, but not from a wine background.  Described as a rugby player and a jazz and blues pianist, he was in his thirties and finishing some commercial studied when he decided he’s rather move into growing grapes and making wine.  He bought a clos in Anjou of a dozen acres and started his new career not long after the millenium.  He also produces wine off property in Chinon, and his range consists of two other varietal Cabernet Francs and a barrel fermented Chenin Blanc.  Vines are grown organically, though apparently not certified as such.  Harvesting is done by hand into baskets, fermentations are not inoculated so wild yeasts do all the work, there is no filtering or fining of the wines, and apparently no sulphites are added to those that occur naturally.

I hate to say this, but the wines of Nicolas Réau are described as ”natural”.  Long time readers of this blog will perhaps remember that I expressed my thoughts on “natural” wine some months ago when I looked at a Pinot Noir from Lucy Margaux.  If you don’t follow the link, suffice it to say that I think that using the term “natural” to describe wine is dishonest.

First off, there’s no strict definition, such that any producer, even the most massively industrial, can call their wine natural.  Second, calling your wine natural implies that people who don’t use that term are making wine which is unnatural.  Finally, compare a naturally growing plot of virgin forest with any vineyard in the world and then try to tell me the vineyard is natural, with its evenly spaced, identical clones.

That said, I can gripe all day about what people say or write about their wine and what they put on the label or in the marketing materials, but what actually matters to me is what’s in the glass.  And if you made it all the way through what I had to write about the Lucy Margaux, I liked that wine.  I think it is dishonest to use the term natural to describe wine, but that influences what I think of the producer, not what I think of the wine itself.

So in the glass this wine is clear and bright, and has a deep purple colour with quick, thick, pale purple legs.  On the nose it’s clean, with medium intensity, a developing character and notes of black fruit, stalks, and sweet spice.  On the palate it’s dry, with medium plus acid, medium body, medium alcohol, medium plus intensity, and medium green tannins.  It has notes of tart cherry, some cranberry, some greenness, a hint of chocolate, and some Red Vines® ( a red liquorice candy).  It has a medium plus length and a black liquorice finish.

This is a very good wine, natural or whatever.  It’s a bit tight – it comes across as almost concentrated and needs time to open up, be it a few hours exposed to air or if you’re more patient perhaps a few more years in the cellar.  The colour is much richer than I would have expected from a varietal Cabernet Franc, but the flavour profile certainly has typicity, and does not lack complexity.

And while the rough theme for this week had been inexpensive but potentially interesting wines from a large wine retailer, this wine was purchased from one of my regular suppliers at a price well within my normal range (not too expensive, not too cheap).

Paracombe Adelaide Hills Cabernet Franc 2007

As regular readers may know, I’ve worked vintage the past three years in the Adelaide Hills, and a few times in between actual vintages I’ve helped out with bottling.  On more than one of those occasions that’s involved a trip to Paracombe where a mobile bottling line was set up, and the good folks there played host while we put our wines into bottle.  So in terms of full disclosure, I know some of the people at Paracombe and am grateful for their help in bottling, but if I didn’t honestly like this wine, their Paracombe Adelaide Hills Cabernet Franc 2007, I’d just write about something else.

I’ve enjoyed a number of Paracombe wines, particularly their Malbec, but as I’ve not written about a varietal Cabernet Franc before, I was drawn to this wine as I try to finish the second half of a century of varietal wines.  However, this is in fact the seventh wine covered which has had some amount of Cabernet Franc, from the small fractions of the Bordeaux style blends to majority of the Anjou blend.

Cabernet Franc is a red grape, at home both in Bordeaux and the Loire, though generally as a contributing grape in the former and as a dominant grape in the latter.  In the Bordeaux red blend, it buds and ripens before Cabernet Sauvignon, and can provide some insurance for when Cabernet Sauvignon fails to ripen.  It’s the primary grape of Cheval Blanc, and is more commonly found in Libournais than in the Médoc and Graves districts.

In the Loire though is where it is most appreciated as a primary grape.  In the central areas of Anjou-Saumur and Touraine it is the dominant red grape.  In Saumur it is the principle component of their red wines, though Cabernet Sauvignon and Pineau d’Aunis may find their way into a blend as minor components.  The same is largely true in Touraine, though blends are more common, again with Cabernet Sauvignon but also Gamay, and Côt (Malbec).  Semi-carbonic maceration is sometimes used in Touraine, which can soften the wine and reduce some of the green character associated with Cabernet Franc.

This is the tenth wine from the Adelaide Hills to be featured in this blog, so if I haven’t said everything I have to say about the Adelaide Hills, then I’ve just been lazy.  Rather than recap, here’s a retrospective – in terms of wines from the Adelaide Hills, I’ve written about three Chardonnays, two Pinot Noirs, a sparkling blend of the two, as well as a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Fiano and even a Grüner Veltliner.  It’s a diverse region, with a range of climates and altitudes, and more importantly an adventurous set of people growing many different types of grapes and making a similarly diverse collection of wines.  In addition to this Cabernet Franc, I could list another 30 varieties being grown, which means I still have a great deal of work ahead of me.

First, my personal impressions of Paracombe.  The first time I visited, I drove up in a rather low to the ground convertible with the top down and I was greeted by two enormous fluffy white dogs.  (In retrospect, they’re about the size of your average retriever, but they were taller than I was sitting in my car.)  Despite their barking, they were friendly and did not leap into my car and devour me.  On their property as your approach it from the road you drive past vines, but behind the main building winery is a paddock with livestock and sometimes the resident kangaroo family (when they’re not in the vines).  My guess is that the dogs approached the kangaroos with the same not unfriendly barking with which they greeted me, and the kangaroos took that to mean it was safe to stay.

Paracombe is a family run producer established by Paul and Kathy Drogemuller in 1983.  They run what I consider a medium sized winery, and by that I mean they have about ten to twenty times the everything (space, tanks, barrels, staff) of the winery where I’ve worked.  They have a range of roughly 15 wines, from a traditional blend sparkler, through Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay in the white category, a Malbec, Rosé, and then a collection of reds including Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, and Shiraz varietals, a Shiraz / Viogner blend and a red Bordeaux style blend with a dash of Shiraz.

I should write something about their vineyards and their philosophy of producing wine based on what’s on their website, but I can’t really approach what I’m reading there in the same way I would with a producer I didn’t know.  Instead, my personal impression of Paul Drogemuller is that he is a generous man of charm and character who produces (with the help of a very astute team) a collection of wines that are both very good and which do put their patch of the Adelaide Hills terroir in a bottle.  The one thing that is a mystery to me is why his wines don’t cost more.  Everything about the wine and winery is correct, the Adelaide Hills have a certain cache as far as regions go (though I have a bias), and the wines are fashionable varietals/blends.  That said, I think that about more than a few wineries I enjoy, so I should really keep my mouth shut and stock my cellars with bargains.

In the glass, this wine is clear and bright, dark ruby with visible legs.  On the nose it’s clean, with notes of spicy blackberry and blueberry – cooler climate influence?  There are also elements of cooked meat and violets – a fairly complex nose.  On the palate it’s dry, with medium acidity, medium plus soft tannins, medium plus alcohol, medium plus body, and medium plus flavour intensity.  There are notes of green peppercorn, ripe, fresh blackberry and blueberry, and more of the meat from the nose with a medium length.

This is a good to very good quality wine.  Very drinkable, but it could certainly enjoy some maturation and emerge with a more complex character.  It was almost sweet on the palate, but from the fruit not residual sugar.  One note which can cause complaints in Cabernet Franc wines is a green stem character, but I got none of it in this wine – only the green peppercorns.  I think this will age well, and I hope to revisit a bottle in a few years.