Winemaker Notes
Firm ruby color, the nose expresses the soil. Here the flinty clay is shown in hints of smoked food and cherries in kirsch, all blended in extremely silky tannins.
Pairs well with poached eggs with a wine sauce, spicy wild duck, pears in cinnamon.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
2012 La Demoiselle is a pure and fresh Pinot Noir from a small plot on flinty clay soils. Red currant, cassis and dark cherry flavors are mixed with fresh raspberry, lime/grapefruit and floral aromas, cayenne pepper and darkly toasted cacao and coffee beans. This powerful, elegant, silky textured and full-bodied red is ripe, sweet and fruit intense, but also refined, fresh and structured by firm, still young tannins and a delicate acidity. It finishes persistently with an animating purity and remarkable finesse and nutty aromas. I would store it for another 3 or 4 years before I start drinking it.
Thin-skinned, finicky and temperamental, Pinot Noir is also one of the most rewarding grapes to grow and remains a labor of love for some of the greatest vignerons in Burgundy. Fairly adaptable but highly reflective of the environment in which it is grown, Pinot Noir prefers a cool climate and requires low yields to achieve high quality. Outside of France, outstanding examples come from in Oregon, California and throughout specific locations in wine-producing world. Somm Secret—André Tchelistcheff, California’s most influential post-Prohibition winemaker decidedly stayed away from the grape, claiming “God made Cabernet. The Devil made Pinot Noir.”
Marked by its charming hilltop village in the easternmost territory of the Loire, Sancerre is famous for its racy, vivacious, citrus-dominant Sauvignon blanc. Its enormous popularity in 1970s French bistros led to its success as the go-to restaurant white around the globe in the 1980s.
While the region claims a continental climate, noted for short, hot summers and long, cold winters, variations in topography—rolling hills and steep slopes from about 600 to 1,300 feet in elevation—with great soil variations, contribute the variations in character in Sancerre Sauvignon blancs.
In the western part of the appellation, clay and limestone soils with Kimmeridgean marne, especially in Chavignol, produce powerful wines. Moving closer to the actual town of Sancerre, soils are gravel and limestone, producing especially delicate wines. Flint (silex) soils close to the village produce particularly perfumed and age-worthy wines.
About ten percent of the wines claiming the Sancerre appellation name are fresh and light red wines made from Pinot noir and to a lesser extent, rosés. While not typically exported in large amounts, they are well-made and attract a loyal French following.