Domaine Huet Le Mont Moelleux Premier Trie 2003
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2003 Vouvray Le Mont Moelleux Première Trie shows a brillant dark golden color with apricot-yellow reflections. Very clear, intense and elegant on the nose, where coffee, toast, brioche, nougat and flinty flavors intertwine with super ripe apricot, licorice and lemon zest aromas, this is a very sweet, extraordinary rich, highly concentrated but also elegant and piquant moelleux with a stunning purity and freshness in the mouthwatering, salty finish. This is a very sweet but remarkably elegant and finesse-full Le Mont whose purity and mineral finish will be mind-blowing in some decades. The 2003 is still too young to be drunk this or during the next decade (if you are lucky to own older Huets, otherwise you won't be hurt by drinking a first better today). Compared to Le Haut-Lieu, Le Mont is more focused and defined, less sensual than intellectual maybe. In its elegance, finesse and balance, this 2003 reminds me of the 1945 Le Haut Lieu. But to reach the almost perfect score of the latter, the 2003 has still a long way to age.
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Today, Domaine Huet may be making its most consistently great wines. As was one of the earliest adopters of biodynamic practices, and with years of experience working with the appellation's greatest terroirs, winemaker Jean-Bernard Berthome and his team are achieving a fascinating level of transparency, purity, and knife-edged balance in the wines.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
An important white wine appellation in the Touraine and one of the top in all of the Loire, Vouvray uniquely specializes in a wide range of styles from dry to sweet, and still to sparkling, each with its own definitive character. Vouvray is almost always 100% Chenin blanc (however up to 5% Menu Pineau is theoretically allowed but not often used).
Vouvray is also the name of a pretty little town just east of Tours on the northern bank of the Loire—its vineyards surround it to the northeast. Houses and cellars are carved out of the local tuffeau, a chalky or sandy, fine-grained limestone. Vineyards inhabit clay and gravel topsoil over tuffeau on the plateau, the best of which have a slight slope with a southerly aspect.
Chenin blanc’s high acidity and natural adaptability allow it to produce a wide range of styles with enormous success. Styles under the Vouvray name include sparkling, both Brut and Demi-Sec and still: Sec (dry) and Tendre (off-dry) as well as Demi-Sec (noticeably sweet), Moelleux (very sweet) and Liquoreaux (botrytized). Most can age about five years but the best quality versions will continue to improve over decades.