I’ve only drunk one wine that was so good that it made me weep: Nicolas Joly’s 2008 Coulée de Serrant, a Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley in France (96/100). The 2008 vintage hasn’t been commercially released in Ontario, but you can still find the older Nicolas Joly 2006 Coulée de Serrant ($89.00, Vintages #88229 [Ed. Note: No longer available]) in the LCBO.
I started the waterworks before even tasting the wine – the bouquet was enough to set me off. It was utterly unlike anything I have ever smelled: a mixture of fresh peaches, carmelized apples, ginger, beeswax and the crust of a crème brûlée. I grant I’ve employed this sort of list before when writing about wines, but the difference with the Coulée de Serrant was that the flavour of every fruit and food was so vivid that I felt I had a separate bowl of each ingredient before me, like a baker before he starts making a pie.
This wine manages to pull a trick so perilous that few wineries try anymore: controlled oxidation. That is to say, the Coulée de Serrant is given a fair amount of contact with the air, which introduces characteristics resembling a Sherry or a Madiera: rich flavours of nuts, brioche and baked fruit. In decades past, oxidation was more common, but it’s fallen out of fashion because it usually saps a wine of its vivacity. What Nicolas Joly does so elegantly with the Coulée is to use the richness of slight oxidization without losing any of the wine’s life.
Resulting wine is a glimpse of a dying art: complex and rich, but also delicate. It contains layers of mushroom, green almond and pear. Besides taste, another advantage of this kind of controlled oxidization is that it gives the wine a tremendous amount of longevity and durability. This is a bottle that you could drink tomorrow or 20 years from now.
If I sound like I’m waxing romantic about this wine, I assure you I sampled it in a most unromantic setting: the Green Living show at the CNE grounds in Toronto. The most remarkable thing about Nicolas Joly is that he is one of the world’s leading proponents of biodynamic wine. Biodynamic agriculture is like organic wine taken a further step.
The Coulée de Serrant intrigued me so much that I just finished reading Joly’s book, Biodynamic Wine Demystified ($18.95). The book leaves me with only one conclusion: the core of biodynamic wine is a nothing but ridiculous flimflam. Reading it also left me with the suspicion that Nicolas Joly is a lunatic. And yet, all this madness creates such an incredible wine. It’s a mystery I’ll be exploring in next week’s Short Cellar.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.
Photo by Charles Haynes