The Sancerre appellation is not exactly a hotbed of wine experimentation.  You won’t find a lot of wild-eyed young Turks producing skin contact whites, aging their wines in amphorae or making back-to-the-future so-called ‘natural’ wines here.  Most of the local farmers are bound very much to the earth and very protective of the traditions that grew along with their family trees, many of which go back on the Left Bank of the River Loire for many, many generations.  With their familial roots firmly and irretrievably entangled by proximity and marriage, names like Cotat, Reverdy, Vatan, Vacheron and Crochet bear responsibility as standard bearers for an appellation that takes great pride in producing wines that reflect the growing conditions unique to Sancerre; those that make it the epicenter of the world’s best renditions of the Sauvignon Blanc grape.  One of those venerable names, Crochet, needs no introduction here as just about every diehard lover of Sancerre knows the wines of the most famous of that name, Lucien. But lovers of his expensive and increasingly rare wines have gotten to know the name François, too.  Living and working in the important Sancerre village of Bué, François, no newcomer to the game either, organically and biodynamically farms around eleven hectares of his family’s vines, most of them in widely-varied parcels scattered around Bué’s most hallowed vineyards.  There is a large percentage of limestone in the soil here that emphasizes the mineral aspects of his fruit and, as a firm believer of harvesting on the earlier side, a Crochet wine will always have more acidity and verve than most you will find in these days of climate change.  A perfectionist who learned his winemaking chops in Burgundy before returning to the family farm, Françoismeticulously bottles several single-vineyard offerings that get a bit of aging in wood, but it’s the cuvee he creates from the best of all his vineyards that we really love- especially for the money.  The wine is an assemblage of dozens of miniscule parcels that reflect virtually every aspect of the compass, every possible topographic variation and numerous different geological formations, including the hard, silica-based sedimentary rock called Silex, various limestone formations of soft, powdery chalk (referred to locally as grillot), medium-hard chalky limestone (caillottes), and other limestone marls present around Bué.  These elements, when expertly blended, conspire to create a Sancerre that creates a template for how this appellation might adjust as the climate changes- lean but not green, lively but not sharp, focused but not monolithic: Elemental Sauvignon that’s far greater than the sum of its elements!  You can drink it young because it shows plenty of fruit to go with that siphoned-through-limestone mineral,  or you can wait a few years for it all to gel into a more cohesive wine that emphasizes the petrichor slate-y aspects we prize so much in Sancerre.

Like all good Sancerres these days, this is quite limited so please order soon.  And you can try it tomorrow evening at our Open House as it will be one of the wines we’ll feature.