Winemaker Notes
A deep and vibrant color. On the nose, subtle floral essences and tasty aromas of jammy apricot sets the tone of this wine. The palate is creamy and pure and a beautiful balance of Chenin, with aromas of rhubarb and a spicy finish.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Notes of baked apple, pear, spices and white fruits preface the 2022 Vouvray Clos du Bourg Moelleux Première Trie, a medium- to full-bodied, concentrated and layered sweet wine. A fine phenolic structure elegantly frames it, and the wine concludes with a fresh, telluric and seemingly endless finish. Long, precise and seamless, this is a standout cuvée and one of the highlights of the vintage at this storied address.
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Vinous
Just 650 bottles of the 2022 Clos du Bourg Premiere Trie Moelleux were made, and it is sweet, gentle and round. It fills the mouth with its sweet caress, exuding pure flavors of toffee apple, caramelized pear and pineapple. While sweet, it is less unctuous than you'd expect from many sweet wines from warmer sites due to the climate and soils, bringing a sense of cleanness and fine texture on the finish. That said, the lower acidity of this year means it's not quite as long and linear. A recent bottle of 2003 with similarly low acidity aged well, so I expect the same here. (105g/L)
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
An important white wine appellation in the Touraine and one of the top in all of the Loire, Vouvray uniquely specializes in a wide range of styles from dry to sweet, and still to sparkling, each with its own definitive character. Vouvray is almost always 100% Chenin blanc (however up to 5% Menu Pineau is theoretically allowed but not often used).
Vouvray is also the name of a pretty little town just east of Tours on the northern bank of the Loire—its vineyards surround it to the northeast. Houses and cellars are carved out of the local tuffeau, a chalky or sandy, fine-grained limestone. Vineyards inhabit clay and gravel topsoil over tuffeau on the plateau, the best of which have a slight slope with a southerly aspect.
Chenin blanc’s high acidity and natural adaptability allow it to produce a wide range of styles with enormous success. Styles under the Vouvray name include sparkling, both Brut and Demi-Sec and still: Sec (dry) and Tendre (off-dry) as well as Demi-Sec (noticeably sweet), Moelleux (very sweet) and Liquoreaux (botrytized). Most can age about five years but the best quality versions will continue to improve over decades.