This two-bottle sampler is an introduction to the life of a bon vivant. These two wines – a red and a white – belong at your table. They’re destined to be hits at your next dinner, party, BBQ, or cheese-eating marathon. As an added bonus, they’re guaranteed impress foodies, wine geeks and beer drinkers without discrimination. They’ll make a wine hero out of you.
Wine and life – for many of us, these two things come together around the table in a celebration of whatever it is that needs celebrating. For Catherine and Pierre Breton, wine and life are one in the same. To say that they embrace wine would be incorrect – that would imply that wine is somehow outside of them, that it needs to be pulled close. No, you see, for the Bretons, pulling the cork from a bottle of their wine is like smiling or singing. It’s a generous, joyous gift that comes from within. This may seem like a marketing pitch, but spend even five minutes with Pierre or Catherine and a glass of Vouvray or Bourguiel is likely to materialize in your hand. Before you know it, five minutes has turned in to a couple of hours; that glass has lead to the uncorking of bottles both old and new, and you realize that you’re standing around a table that was once empty but is now covered with an enormous array of cheese, charcuterie, roasted pork, bread, and olives. This little clip of experience – this is the way the Breton’s live. They take the deepest pride in their surroundings; in the cheeses made by a neighbor or the charcuterie made by a friend with a farm a couple of kilometers down the road.
The Breton’s wines are bottled to reflect the many layers of thought that surround living this lifestyle. They bottle natural wines for immediate, happy, unpretentious consumption and they bottle wines that represent their pride in the terroir of Bourgueil with stunning levels of precision and depth (and that age for decades). Happily, because I’m thirsty, it’s the drinkers that are sitting in front of me as I write this.
Vouvray “La Dilettante” 2010, Catherine et Pierre Breton
The chenin blanc that ultimately ends up in La Dillettante is harvested from 40 year old vines sitting on clay and limestone. The result is a juicy, shimmering wine with aromas of white peach, herbs, honey and grapefruit. What a fantastic wine to gulp – it’s loaded with flavors of ripe peach and honeysuckle with a cool bite of minerality and a nice zing of acid. Cheese, scallops, roasted fish – you name it, this stuff loves it.
Bourguiel “Trinch” 2010, Catherine et Pierre Breton
If I had to pick one wine to uncork at every party I throw for all eternity, it would be the Trinch. The definition of easy drinking, the Trinch is a bottling of cabernet franc from vines ranging from 25 to 75 years old. The wine has an intense, happy nose of strawberry, red cherry and rose. On the palette it’s a tart, delicious wine loaded with strawberry, red cherry, red licorice and orange peel. A warning – this stuff goes down easy! Make sure to have a couple of bottles on hand if you’re planning to share. Better yet, do what I do: buy it in magnums. Everybody loves big torpedoes of joy, and magnums this good and this inexpensive are rarities.
There’s no shortage of cheap wine from the Loire – especially bottlings of cabernet franc. Now find a pair of wines this good for less money and I’ll start buying wine from you.
Breton Wine Hero Two Bottle Sampler – $35.00
This sample includes one bottle of each wine. As a warning, two bottles will not be enough! Please note that supplies are limited. We will do our best to fill all orders.
CALL US TO RESERVE YOUR SAMPLER: 802-865-2368
Vouvray “La Dilettante” 2010, Catherine et Pierre Breton $19.50/Bottle
Bourguiel “Trinch” 2010, Catherine et Pierre Breton $19.50/Bottle
