We’ve written many times about the pleasures that top-tier Loire Valley Cab Franc offers: fresh, fruity, spicy, and bistro-ready. But today's opulent Chinon is a completely different story. This special, old-vine cuvée from a tiny, monopole vineyard is several degrees of magnitude up the Richter Scale of depth, complexity, and age-ability.
Yes, you can compare the notes of rose and violet to Chambolle, or the core of savory, iron-like earthiness to Margaux, but then the umami of mingling green, red and black peppercorns hits with a soft wave of tastebud magic. This is what the very best Chinon can really deliver.
The “Clos du Pallus” is a small vineyard planted in 1962 on a southeast-facing slope that overlooks the family home at the Domaine de Pallus (hence the name). From the beginning this vineyard was meant to convey the potential of the domaine and to epitomize the excellence that Cabernet Franc on the soils of Chinon can achieve. However, it was not until Bertrand Sordais returned to his family estate in 2005 that the true potential of the Clos was realized.
Bertrand’s winemaking resumé is impressive, to say the least. He left Chinon to attend eonology school in Bordeaux, and shortly after graduating in the early 1990s he began working at such famed Châteaux as Léoville Las Cases and Mouton Rothschild before being named vineyard manager at Château Nenin. He then decamped for Spain where he fell in love with Ribera del Duero and went on to establish two award winning wineries there. But with his father’s health failing he returned to Chinon and immediately began to apply his experience to the family domaine. Step one was to convert all the vineyards to biodynamic farming, nursing them back to health and allowing them to produce the healthiest, purest fruit that best translated the classic terroirs of his estate.
Step two was whipping the cellar into shape. Bertrand wants terroir transparency, not flavors of old, unclean barrels. His style emphasizes elegance and refinement over rusticity. But, and this is important, he is not seeking to tame the wide array of savory and wild flavors that Cabernet Franc grown on the chalky limestone of Chinon can produce. With his top wine, “Clos du Pallus,” Bertrand destems all the fruit and ferments in large, open top wooden vats. After a long, slow fermentation of 25-30 days the wine is racked into high quality, 5- to 10-year-old barriques for 18 months of aging before bottling.
The result is a truly mindblowing expression of Cabernet Franc. Deep and richly textured, it is layered with flavors of wild blackberries and cherries, cassis, sage, black tea, and savory peppercorn, all of it framed with ripe tannins and a core of saline minerals. Serve in a Burgundy or Bordeaux stem at 55-60 degrees next to a juicy steakhouse burger or grilled venison loin.
At five years old you can already enjoy this gem with a 1-2 hour decant, but ideally most of these bottles will go into a cellar or wine fridge for another 3-5 years or more. Aged Chinon is one of wine’s true pleasures, and any lover or collector should have a few bottles of this masterpiece stashed away.
