Thrills of a Great White

Vouvray is a thrilling white wine made in the heart of the Loire Valley’s cha^teau country, several miles east of Tours. It may, in fact, be the white wine I’d want to have with me if I were on the proverbial desert island.

Once upon a time, though, I thought I didn’t like Vouvray. I’d sampled only big negociant versions that tasted like dirty sugar water. Then I spent two days traipsing through Vouvray’s compact villages, along its twisting roads and into valleys where farmhouses are tucked into hollows and vines cover the high slopes.

I spent hours with growers in their cold tuff caves (similar to the cellars of nearby Chinon), where over the years vine roots had forced their way through layers of clay and limestone to dangle, threadlike, above old barrels, signaling that a domaine’s best parcel (or at least its oldest) was directly above our heads.

By the time I tasted Gaston Huet’s 1947 Vouvray, I was ready to go over the edge. Tight and shimmering, it was as sweetly luscious as a Sauternes but also fresh and ethereal, with the unique balance characteristic of wines from Vouvray’s chalky soils. To call it complex would be an understatement. The wine was an intricate weave of flavors: honey blended with lemon, hay, mushrooms, chamomile, minerals, cranberries, currants and much more.

I felt I would never get to the bottom of it. That Vouvray made me fall in love with the Loire.

Still, considered from the mass market perspective, Vouvray has everything going against it.

First, the grape that makes it is neither Chardonnay nor Sauvignon Blanc. It’s Chenin Blanc, an unglamorous varietal if ever there was one, a grape guilty of flabby jug wines from the overcropped vines of California’s Central Valley as well as of those vile, over-sulfured, over-sugared negociant Vouvrays.

Next, Vouvray is hard to get to know. It comes in a bewildering array of styles, it’s best with bottle age (necessitating serious delayed gratification) and its most talented producers are tiny even by California mailing-list standards.

Style-wise, Vouvray can be dry (sec), “half-dry” (demi-sec, though “half-sweet” is closer to the truth), sweet (moelleux) or syrupy-sweet (doux or liquoreux). And that’s just the still wines; there are also sparkling Vouvrays. Made by the Champagne method, these are either mousseux or petillant, the latter having a creamier fizz. Both degrees of bubbliness come in two styles, brut (dry) and demi-sec.

An irregular climate (as well as a grape variety capable of making everything from sparkling to dry to unctuously sweet) accounts for the multiplicity of wines produced. Vouvray’s vintners estimate that on average they have two to three great vintages a decade, six that are good and two that are--well, difficult.

The sweetest versions of Vouvray, moelleux and doux or liquoreux, tend to be made in great years. Gaston Huet, author of that miraculous ‘47, made no sweet wine between 1976 and 1985. In ‘88, ’89 and ’90 he made a lot of moelleux and doux. (Unlike the best Sauternes, which are always the result of the noble rot, Botrytis cinerea, Vouvray’s sweet wines are often made with merely shriveled or normally overripe grapes.) But in ‘91, when spring frost nearly annihilated the harvest, Huet used what little crop he had left to replenish his sparkling wine stock. The confusion does not end there.

Vouvray is one of the few of the world’s whites that demands to be aged. Certainly, you can drink it as soon as it’s bottled, and it will beguile you with floral aromas and flavors of apple, quince, citrus, minerals and honey. Charming as these baby Vouvrays can be, though, they only hint at the splendor the wine will develop in adulthood.

But soon a Vouvray closes up, entering what the French call l’a^ge ingrat. I translate this as “ornery adolescence,” thinking back on my own teenage years of slammed doors and grunted monosyllables. All you may taste is acid and a kind of vulgar fruitiness.

So do with the wine what you do with a moody teen--leave it alone until it grows up and learns to behave itself. In Vouvray’s case, this could be 10 years, at which point the acid will have melded with developed fruit and spice flavors and you may be rewarded with a wine as ravishing as Huet’s ’47. In a good cellar, Vouvray will also be practically immortal.

Happily, an increasing number of producers are making Vouvray with this kind of promise. Until the mid-’80s, most sold their crop to cooperatives and negociants. As the market for sweet wines recovered from its post-World War II slump and as a new generation of Vouvrillons, many trained in viticulture and enology, set its mind on making Great Wine, there has been a quality revolution in the region.

There’s still a lot of mediocre (and worse) Vouvray, but there are more and more fine handcrafted versions, as growers keep at least part of their crop to bottle themselves and as they adopt ever more rigorous standards in both vineyard and cellar. These start with low yields and harvest by tris, the laborious process of passing repeatedly through the vineyards to pick grapes at optimal degrees of ripeness.

Now for one last conundrum: When to uncork Vouvray? This is really a problem only for the faint of heart. If you’re game, do what I do: I taste a newly hatched Vouvray (’95 and, this spring, ‘96) from Huet or Philippe Foreau (Clos Naudin), Bernard Fouquet (Domaine des Aubuisieres), Didier Champalou, Francois Pinon or Cha^teau de Gaudrelle. If I think it has potential, I buy a case and bury it in the least accessible part of my cellar.

I put cartons of other wine in front of it and my bicycle in front of them. I wouldn’t dream of touching my own Vouvray for at least 10 years.

In the meantime, I drink the wine when I see it on restaurant lists. (Somebody’s going to, so it might as well be me.) I also drink other people’s ‘90s--which never really had a serious a^ge ingrat.

If the Vouvray in question is a moelleux, I’d drink it as an aperitif, with foie gras or with cheese, especially blue. If it’s a sec or a demi-sec, I’ll drink it with almost anything that doesn’t scream for a big red.

And if I find a good wine merchant with well-stored ’76 moelleux, I splurge. I’d drink an aged Vouvray all by itself. Every sip is a discovery.

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Where to Find a Good Vouvray

Vouvray is, admittedly, a bit of an obscurity. Certainly, finding a good one isn’t as easy as finding a Chardonnay or a Cabernet. But there are places around the Southland where they are sold.

Wally’s in Westwood ([310] 475-0606) carries the wines of Gustave Huet and Clos Naudin. The Wine House in West Los Angeles ([310] 479-3731) carries Clos Baudoin and Domaine des Aubuisieres. Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa ([714] 650-8463) has Clos Naudin and Didier Champalou. Northridge Hills Liquors in Northridge ([818) 368-7330) has Clos Naudin. The Wine Country in Long Beach ([310] 597-8303) has Didier Champalou, Clos Naudin and Domaine des Aubuisieres.