Minerality of Muscadet

A great Mucadet is an antithesis to modern wines of fruit bombs and full bodies.

Whereas many modern wines are described in fruits of cherries, blackberries, peaches, blah, blah and more blah, a great Muscadet has no desire to fit into a category of a particular fruit.  When tasted in a typical trade tasting without foods, a great Muscadet doesn’t even show very well. 

A great Muscadet is all about minerals and food, especially shell fishes such as raw oysters and steamed mussels.  A great Muscadet without food is like Fred without Ginger, a rose without fragrance, or Leonard Cohen without poetry.  A great Muscadet is for wine and food lovers. 

The qualifier ‘great’ is important when choosing a Muscadet because the majority of Muscadet is merely a mouthwash that is made industrially with chemical farming, lab yeasts and mechanical harvesting selling at supermarket low prices.

The good news is there is still a handful of vignerons who still give a shit.  The vignerons who farm in harmony with nature, who hand-harvest and who only stick to native yeasts.  Two of my favourites are Marc Ollivier of LaPépière and Jo Landron of Domaines Landron.  I can hug these guys! And I do every year by visiting them and thanking them for giving a shit.  Above is a picture of Jo Landron when I visited him January 2012.

The Art of Eating and Muscadet

If you are a foodie and wine lover, I strongly recommend the magazine “The Art of Eating”.  It is issued quarterly.  The magazine feels as though it is from a bygone era. The articles are long and detailed.  There are no one-page or executive summaries.  Oh heck, there are no ads.  The subscribers solely fund the magazine.  The magazine takes a food or wine topic, such as Comte cheese or Muscadet, and takes an in-depth look by going to the source.  I just subscribed the magazine.

I was given a copy of an article of the June 2009 “The Art of Eating” by Joseph Landron when I visited him.  He gave me the copy of the article, along with other documents, so casually that I did not know I had it until I got back home.  The article is written by Jacqueline Friedrich, who is one of my favourite wine writers.  She is an American ex-pat who has been living in Loire Valley since 1989.  In the article, she writes about Joseph Landron Muscadet.  She writes “Muscadet, one of the most exhilarating, food-friendly, and reasonably priced white wines in the world, may be the most underrated.”  She goes on to describe Joseph Landron Mucadet La Fief du Breil: “After being hand-harvested at 3.5 hectoliters per hectare (this is very low yields)…the wine spends 18 months on its lees and is bottled unfiltered.”  Jacqueline continues “The first impression is tactile: simultaneously lush and with a stinging thread of effervescence, characteristics of long aging sur-lie.  The wine revives with its vigour, focus, and utterly dry finish.  Sensations of minerals and every expression of lemon – zest, pulp, plucked-off-the-tree, preserved…”

Jacqueline’s words sum up my tasting experience with Joseph Landron.  I can’t wait till the Joseph Landron Muscadets get to our shores in British Columbia. 

Above is a picture of Monsieur Landron and yours truly, amongst his biodynamically cared Muscadet vines.  Visiting his vineyards with him is just as exhilierating experience as tasting his wines.