Spurred on by Savennières: It’s all about the stories

I’ve been in wine for over a decade, certainly all my adult life, but I often find myself asking why I got into wine. The reason I almost always land on is because of the stories; the people behind the wine, and those I drink it with. And yet, stories are hardly unique to vino. So it’s got to be more than that. I know that, certainly professionally, folks tend to go down a path and rarely veer from its trail, so when you choose to get into wine, you fall more deeply into it as the years turn over. But I’m a restless personality. I obsess, shortly and sharply, and I like taking risks – starting businesses, standing up on stage and winging a speech, finding myself in a country I know nothing about. If it was just the stories, I am sure I’d be indulging in many things, not just wine.

So it’s definitely more than that.

A revelation (if that isn’t too grand a word) seems to have happened to me twice now. The first time it passed me by a little. The second time I booted up my laptop and started to write whatever this is. I noticed it on round two.

The moment was a Savennières. Not the same one, mind you. And for anyone wondering if I’ve misspelt Sauvignon, no, I am talking about the small French appellation Savennières in the Loire Valley, responsible for some delightful, age-worthy Chenin Blanc.

Last year, I recall tasting a Savennières at one of the weekly wine groups I ran where everyone would bring a bottle of wine, we’d taste them blind, and then talk about them. It’s study prep for the MW, and a good excuse to drink some wines regularly. The wines from Savennières are straw-coloured, dry, racy and full of a waxy, honeyed note. I wasn’t convinced, immediately, if I liked it. The wine I tried was very well aged: 2001 Domaine du Closel Savennieres Clos du Papillon, so some 23 years old by the time I tried it. It was fleshy, golden coloured but green and tart to taste, with a beeswax bittersweetness. The wine grew on me, especially as it warmed in my hand. What vibrancy it had for all that time under cork.

On reflection, the moment I had that first time was special. I’ve always enjoyed trying something new (Novel Wines was all about the weird and wonderful) and Savennières was a region I’d rarely tasted wines from. But I remember the energy I had after that evening. I researched the region widely, before falling down a rabbit hole on Jancis Robinson’s Purple Pages as I jumped from entry to entry on the Oxford Companion to Wine, ending up many miles and varieties away from where I’d started in the Loire. It was the way that new wine experience reinvigorated a deep, passionate desire to learn.

I think we undervalue the power of taste. Our senses of touch, smell, sound and taste are so much better memory-makers than our eyes alone. Sight is, in an ironic way, closer to 2D in experience.

When my wife asked me to write down some ideas for Christmas to send to my parents and in-laws, I thought some new wines might be a nice and easy one. After all, no-one really buys me wine these days as they worry they’ll get it wrong, whereas in reality I relish tasting wines. A friend had recommended and shared wines from a site called 92 or More, which only buys critically-acclaimed wines, and I chose to pick it as, a) I’d never bought wines from there before, and b) it seemed like a reliable place to experiment. I focused on high scores from critics I like (a good bit of due diligence) and selected some wines that were recommended by the likes of the MWs Tim Atkin and Rebecca Gibb, or high scoring Decanter medals. I tend to avoid Suckling and some Wine Enthusiast critics.

Gibb had recommended the 2015 Le Bel Ouvrage Savennières, the very wine I am sipping as I write this and wait for my first attempt at the Levant dish Faoulia B’zeit to reduce on the stove. My mother-in-law had kindly bought it for me for Christmas. While I was going to save it and share it, tonight I had the urge to taste it.

For anyone curious, here’s my note: Golden in colour (to the point where, with Chenin nearly 10 years old, it looked fresh rather than gone in the wind), the wine has a clearly nutty (almond skin, not toasted and off), citrus rind and familiar beeswax aroma. There’s a note of dried red apple and spice, too. The palate is warm with heat (13.5% abv) and full at first before giving way to all that waxy, bittersweet honey and juicy apple. There’s a cinnamon-like sweetness with a wooded hue to the long finish and the acidity, once swallowed, pinches at the corners of your cheeks. The dry, fennel-like note it leaves behind tempts you to go in for another drink.

2015 Le Bel Ouvrage Savennières, Damien Laureau.

It’s delicious. I am, however, pretty sure it’s not going to go with the food. I’m currently drinking it at near to room temp, being the glutton for acidity that I am, so I’m going to pop it back in the fridge and drink it again on Sunday afternoon tomorrow.

Anyway, I suppose the real point is not how good the wine is, although that’s certainly the cherry on the cake. The point is the sheer joy of ripping the cork out of the bottle urged me to boot up the Substack I’ve guiltily neglected and wax lyrical about wine. Just like it energised me to study the time before.

That’s the real power, the real draw of wine. It’s the way taste excites something inside you. The magic of fermentation, perhaps?

2015 Savennières ‘Le Bel Ouvrage’ Damien Laureau is available from 92 or More for £45.00 at the time of writing.