Here’s your next great wine find. Bernard Baudry’s Chinon is a superstar’s bottling — a Cab Franc from the Loire that delivers an enormous heap of value. I remember my first glass of the domaine’s wine.
My friend Big Al — wine geek par excellence — sent me an email from San Francisco. He told me that I needed to find a bottle. On my next trip to New York, I hunted one down at a little bottle shop in Brooklyn. I felt like I was let in on a secret; turned on to bit of underground beauty that I would really like to absorb. Like my first Steve Aoki record; or the first piece of Russ Spitkovsky’s illustration I saw printed in Carrier Pigeon. This was something very cool, and I wanted to share it with my friends. Unfortunately, I had to wait. It took three years to get Baudry’s wines to Vermont. But they’re here now.
Bernard retired in 2000. He passed his winemaking duties along to his son Matthieu — a move which has been almost irrelevant in terms of the quality of the domaine’s wines. Turns out that the son is just as talented as his father. Matthieu is just as exacting, too. He still bottles five site-specific cuvées of Cabernet Franc. In fact, he pays so much attention to the vineyards that vines are de-budded to control yields and harvest is done manually — the old fashion way.
The vines that ultimately give us the Cuvée Domaine are around 35 years old. The result is a dense, aromatic beauty. It’s a spicy wine; a deep, chewy mouthful of cherry, clove and tar. It’s also a juicy wine — with a mean streak of acidity that gets the saliva flowing almost immediately. There’s an interesting dual appeal here.
The 2009 Cuvée Domaine is fantastic right now, but it’s also got what it takes to reward a bit of bottle age. A three bottle investment — or a six-pack if you can swing it — and you’ll get a great deal of enjoyment as the wine gets older. Every time you pull a cork you’ll find something new and even a bit exotic. This will be a fun one to try every six months or so for the next four or five years.
Not a ton of this wine gets produced — and only a small fraction of that total production made it to Vermont. The timing couldn’t be better, though. It’s a wine I’ll be reaching for when I roast a leg of lamb this weekend. It’ll be just a delicious with a hunk of stinky cheese and some saucisson sec.
