Sometime over the past year I stumbled across a Sancerre that proved addicting, making me fall in love all over again with this beautiful wine from France’s Loire Valley.
The producer is Roger Naudet & Fils and the wine is Domaine des Buissonnes. The current vintage I am drinking (I just purchased a new case) is 2013 and it retails for an average price of $23 according to Wine-Searcher.com.
Like many of you who are enthusiastic consumers of Sauvignon Blanc, my taste runs the gamut. When in Bordeaux I enjoy the richness and warmth and the fresh white peach aroma of top-notch Graves and Pessac-Leognan blanc. At home I savor the freshness and complexity of Sauvignons from Sonoma County, particularly the Russian River Valley. And in general I am a huge fan of the pungent Sauvignons from New Zealand’s Marlborough region, especially when feasting on freshly shucked oysters or steamed clams.
Sancerre has seemed to take a back seat in the face of all the worldwide Sauvignon competition in recent years. The reasons are many, but mostly rooted in the fact that Sancerre producers tend to be small operations and even when imported to the U.S. by a major player, America is a huge market and there is only so much Sancerre to go around.
I discovered Domaine des Buissonnes at one of my favorite neighbrhood restaurants, Brooklyn Girl, owned and operated by my friends Michael and Victoria McGeath. Michael is a true wine aficionado. He’s been in the restaurant business close to four decades and he makes the wine-buying decisions at Brooklyn Girl, which also has a small wine shop for off-premise sales.
Buissonnes is a beautifully balanced, elegant Sancerre that delivers succulent citrus aromas, with inviting minerality and mouth-watering, juicy acidity. By today’s standards the alcohol by volume is low at 12.5 percent, so you can drink more than a glass with lunch and go back to work.
But, more than anything, it reminds me of all that I loved about Sancerre when I discovered it as a young journalist in New York in the early 1970s. I’m still big on other styles of Sauvignon, but I’m finally back to Sancerre and enjoying every last drop of my latest purchase.
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