Sancerre

If it's light dry white wine and it sells in January, it must be good and Sancerre has its own punched ticket as the best there is in Sauvignon Blanc.  With its light bone dry, clean fruit flavors and distinct minerality, Sancerre's historic reputation is secure.  Nowhere else in the world comes close to what Sancerre does...unless you look next door at Pouilly Fume.

So what makes the stuff so good?  It's got to be the soils.  As we've reported in the past, this part of northern France was under water for most of the life of the planet resulting in Kimmeridgian marlstone soils for the most part.  This is a limestone/clay soil type that influences the full bodied perfumed roundedness of Sancerre fruit.  Silex (flint) is a secondary soil of the region that provides the Sauvignon Blanc grapes with their steely minerality.  

As we said above, nowhere else does Sauvignon Blanc approach the quality of Sancerre.  Everywhere else the grape shows an herbaceous grassiness to one degree or another and that is fine in itself.  We don't believe the spectrum of flavors a wine can exhibit should be segmented judgmentally into positive and negative categories.  Without sounding too contradictory, however, we do believe in the historic model for each and that's where Sancerre wins out.   

What was to become the Sancerre wine appellation was first planted by the Romans in the first century.  It became a legally defined Sauvignon Blanc wine appellation in the inaugural class in 1936 and has been expanded four times since then.  We mentioned the Pouilly Fume AOC earlier.  Sancerre is sandwiched between Menatou-Salon on the left and Pouilly Fume on the right and for most of us, examples from each appellation would be indistinguishable.  They're all great!