Gruet Sauvage Blanc de Blancs
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Wilfred
Wong -
Tasting
Panel - Decanter
Product Details
Your Rating
Somm Note
Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The Gruet Sauvage Blanc de Blancs is charming and intense with excellent palate presence. TASTING NOTES: This wine exhibits aromas and flavors of aromatic apples, mineral notes, and hints of chalk. Enjoy it with grilled oysters wrapped in bacon. (Tasted: December 20, 2022, San Francisco, CA)
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Tasting Panel
Clean, rich, and fruity with minerality and depth; an invigorating and tangy wine that is very reasonably priced.
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Decanter
Notes of ripe fruit, brioche and lees. Complex on the palate with mineral, mushroom and a hint of buttercream complementing the creamy mousse.
Founded in 1984, Gruet Winery specializes in Méthode Champenoise sparkling wines. The New Mexico-based winery produces Pinot Noir and Chardonnay-based sparkling wines and a small collection of still wines, with roots originating from Gilbert Gruet’s Champagne house in Bethon, France. More than 30 vintages later, Gruet Winery has achieved unprecedented acclaim - including Wine Spectator's Top 100 - and remains a favorite of the nation’s top sommeliers.
Méthode Champenoise is a method of making sparkling wine by allowing the last stage of fermentation to take place in the bottle. The Gruet family brought this method from France to New Mexico and uses it to make world-class sparkling wines.
In order to ensure outstanding consistency year after year, Gruet sources its grapes from various vineyards in different regions of the United States: New Mexico, Washington, and California.
Just as in Champagne, France, where the grapes are often selected from multiple vineyards in the region, sourcing from several states leads to a more complex wine. Different terroirs bring different components to the final blend.
A term typically reserved for Champagne and Sparkling Wines, non-vintage or simply “NV” on a label indicates a blend of finished wines from different vintages (years of harvest). To make non-vintage Champagne, typically the current year’s harvest (in other words, the current vintage) forms the base of the blend. Finished wines from previous years, called “vins de reserve” are blended in at approximately 10-50% of the total volume in order to achieve the flavor, complexity, body and acidity for the desired house style. A tiny proportion of Champagnes are made from a single vintage.
There are also some very large production still wines that may not claim one particular vintage. This would be at the discretion of the winemaker’s goals for character of the final wine.
New Mexico represents some of the most exciting and successful high-elevation vineyards in the country—many of their best are above 4,000 feet.
New Mexico’s modern wine industry is based on traditional European varieties and claims over 30 successful wineries throughout the state. In fact, New Mexico and Texas were the first US states to produce wine from the Vitis vinifera species, beginning around 1626. They made wine with the Mission grape, which was also prolific among California missionaries.
Today New Mexico produces good reds, whites and can attest to the value of high elevation vineyards, especially with the success of its sparkling wines. In fact the New Mexico sparkling wine producer, Gruet, boasts some of the strongest nationwide distribution among smaller-producing states.