La Soufrandière - Au Vignerais Zen 2020

Almost every time Riesling comes up, whether here or in offline discussions, I find myself saying, in essence, that when I put a bottle of wine on the table without a specific plan, it’s never a Riesling. But what is it then? For example, something like this. Well, not exactly this one, since we’re having the Zen line for the first time today, but a Chardonnay from the Bret Brothers. I’d already written a bit of background about the winery the last time it came up. It’s located in the Mâconnais, in southern Burgundy, and has been family-owned since 1947, with the current generation in charge since 2000. However, half a hectare of vineyards in the Au Vignerais site have only been owned by the estate since 2016. The vines there stand on a mix of limestone and clay, facing south. The cultivation is certified biodynamic.

In general, I’m in favor of less ink on more paper, but if you’re going to use ink, then please do it this way. The label is packed with information about the wine, and that’s fantastic. And it’s bilingual, so I don’t have to type it out and throw it into the translator (or learn French, let’s face it, with my language skills, that’s probably not going to happen). The grapes were handpicked on August 29, 2020, and spontaneously fermented. This was followed by 17 months in stainless steel and barrel, the wine underwent malolactic fermentation and was bottled unclarified and unfiltered with a pH of 3.23. That makes the info nerd happy. By the way, the green Zen stamp on the label means that only a small amount of sulfur was added at bottling. In this case, it’s 35 mg per liter.

The wine smells grippy, nutty, with a bit of apple peel that’s been sitting on the kitchen counter for a few minutes. It seems reductive and rather lean right after pulling the bark. Only with a lot of swirling do some apples and pears appear. The first sip is smooth. That may sound odd, but I can’t think of a better word to describe the mouthfeel right now. It’s fresh, cool, already tingles on the sides of the tongue, but also, yeah, smooth. That doesn’t mean it slips down quickly. Quite the contrary, what you taste lingers for a long time. It’s juicy and really good. But air surely does it good, since even the first sip benefits enormously from swirling. By the end of the evening, it becomes creamier, more robust, and more structured. At the same time, yogurt and citrus zest appear. But, and this is perhaps the main reason I reach for a bottle like this, it simply drinks well at any moment.

On the nose, the wine opens up overnight, more core fruit, puffed grain, no apple peel anymore. Instead, more of everything else. It was very young yesterday, and that stands out even more with a night’s rest. The Chardonnay is now incredibly juicy, almost like fruit juice in its acidity, with green apples, you smack your lips, your cheeks draw in. At the front of the tongue there’s salt, at the back lots of apple, pear, and citrus. Intense, creamy, and beautifully inviting. I think it will take a few more years of bottle age to achieve complete inner calm that would do justice to the Zen label. It’s still spirited, more so on the nose than on the palate. But I like that. And the way it tastes right now reminds me of another wine, another climat, but also from Soufrandière. It wasn’t Zen, I remember that. But not the exact wine. At Christmas we’re regularly in charge of the wine pairings. Every wine nerd probably knows the feeling, sometimes you nail it, sometimes you don’t. And that bottle of Chardonnay nailed it like few other wines since. It had that too, that gentle yet intense creaminess, core fruit, the zing. How nice that this bottle brings all that back to mind.

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