Jancis Robinson rediscovers Savennières

I caught her link on Twitter (@JancisRobinson) this morning. The article can be found here and has a few suggestions for you to try. Sadly, she does not note the prices for the wines; one particular wine, Joly's Coulée de Serrant (apparently meaning, "Casting of Tightening"), was recently listed in Wine Spectator's advanced newsletter as retailing for $100 (2007). To put that into perspective, a particularly renowned French restaurant in Boston's Back Bay (@LEspalier) carries the 2005 vintage (reviews) for that price! By the way, it's currently my favorite white wine and it has retained its #1 ranking for well over a year now.

Value hunting does pay off; foodies and their friends can enjoy a bottle at Silvertone, and also if you frequent this seafood giant at any of their Massachusetts locations, you'll find it there for a even better bargain. If you find it retail, try it out with a Margherita pizza (I recommend Regina's, medium basil, with a crisp crust).

I once purchased a bottle of the 2005 Nicolas Joly Coulée de Serrant at an undisclosed location of the aforementioned seafood giant and after having a glass with a good friend, I took the remainder of the bottle home. It lasted me over the course of 7 days and was stored at room temperature throughout the entire time. I tasted the wine every day at approximately the same time on each day and recorked it immediately after pouring; by the 7th day, the wine was still showing nicely. Additionally, I had another enlightening experience tasting the 2005 Coulèe de Serrant with a group of French winemakers and Erik Johnson, a person I consider as one of my many mentors in the industry and the one who first introduced me to the term Cork Dork. The wide range of opinions that emanated from that group amazed me, some went so far as to say that the wine was oxidized. Ultimately, that moment demonstrated the beautiful, completely subjective nature of wine in general. After all, subjectivity is fundamentally based on one's taste and I always try to stress the subjectivity of tasting notes and emphasize the use of them as a supplemental guide in developing your own palette. Think of it this way, if wine professionals can adamantly disagree over the characteristics of a wine and how one could realistically achieve such results via the winemaking process, this proves subjectivity because it ultimately relies on the winemaker's taste. This is one of the many reasons why everyone can and should enjoy what merely amounts to fermented grape juice.

Joly actually disputes the oxidation claim:

Chenin gets its complexity only when it is fully ripe – deep yellow. And only healthy, sustainable farming can guarantee this without grey rot.

For this reason, all our grapes are picked in four or five passes as each parcel begins to raisin and form botrytis - thereby allowing the mineral flavors of Chenin to achieve their fullest intensity.

Once opened, wines made in this way continue to improve – and are in no way oxydized.
To be sure that the color is not oxydation you can make the test yourself by tasting each day a glass over several days without putting the bottle in the fridge just recork. You will see the wine improving the first days even sometimes over more than a week. If the wine would be oxydized it would be undrinkable.

Snooth.com provides this bit of information on chenin blanc:

Classic descriptors for the flavors of Chenin Blanc include peach, honey, lanolin, marzipan, and quince jelly though the dry style from South Africa, where the wines are known as Steen, often exhibits more tropical fruit notes that recall pineapple and guava.