Beskrivning

The golden yellow 2009 Vouvray Moelleux offers an awesome rich bouquet of a full basket of super ripe white and yellow-fleshed fruits with pure and mineral highlighted aromas as well as colored blossoms, yellow paprika, ginger, coriander, white pepper, toasted peanuts and speck. Bottled with 80 grams of residual sugar, this is a full-bodied, complex, and very elegant almost perfect moelleux à la Foreau, a really rich, ripe, sweet and perfectly balanced wine of great finesse and a persistent freshness due to the lingering salinity and piquancy. This great Moelleux is surely made from healthy berries and for all Chenin lovers and their following generations this is a must buy.

Philippe Foreau is a very traditional wine producer. Based in Vouvray, he cultivates 12 hectares of 100% Chenin Blanc vines, from which he bottles dry, sweet and noble sweet wines. The vines are planted fairly dense (6600 vines per hectare) and average 40 years of age. The average vineyard yield 38 of hl/ha gives an annual production of 55,000 bottles. Foreau ferments all his musts spontaneously and slowly in old barrels (predominantly 300-liter-barrels) of which 5% maximum are new. He stabilizes all his wines straight after the alcoholic fermentation to prevent malolactic fermentation even in his dry wines. Bottling takes place already in April or May since he prefers that his wines age in the bottle “to keep their purity, freshness, precision and finesse which is given by the tuffeau soils,” as he explains. Compared with the wines from the famous Domaine Huet property, Foreau’s Vouvrays are less round and rich but very pure, rather lean, vital, straightforward and focused on the palate, with a persistent finish that is always brillant and full of mineral tension. An apricot fruit character is another distinctive mark of Foreau’s wines, which by the way are never chaptalized or de-acidified. Philippe Foreau: “I am striving for wines which are pure, typical in their aromas, show finesse, elegance, balance and a persistent aftertaste. For me this is the tableau d’un grand grand vin.” The moelleux style is quite rare at the Domaine du Clos Naudin and is made from selected berries that reached full maturity. “Either the grapes are golden and slightly dried (but healthy) and bring a classic Vouvray moelleux full of subtilité; or the grapes are already concentrated due to botrytis which are used exclusively for the Moelleux Réserve style,” says Philippe.