Tour de Loire pt. 6 (Nadège Herbel)
After all these years, I finally got to visit a winery that I've been dreaming about since I first started drinking Fifi's wine. I'll never forget seeing a bottle of Rue aux Loups sitting in the corner pocket of a shelf at Uva wines and remembering one of the most transformative wine experiences of my life, a little dessert wine with the same enigmatic, minimalist label. I was maybe 21 years old, at the ten bells, learning in real time how massive an experience with a special glass could be. I opened so many of those bottles at Uva. Each bottle then, and each one I've had since, rhymes with that evening at The Ten Bells. Walking around the vineyards with Nadège brought all those wonderful experiences into focus, but it did a lot more than that. Nadège's domaine is and has been in transition for a long time, and in this past visit she seemed more confident and sure of her work than I'd seen her before. After many trying years, the future looks bright for Nadège's idyllic winery.
Okay, no barbeque this time, but a lovely lunch in the sunshine nonetheless. We tasted through the past couple of vintages, lots of new cuvées, lots of wines from a barrel room I'd dreamed of for a long time. Nadège was even gracious enough to open fresh bottles to compare with bottles she had opened a couple of days earlier. It was super comprehensive and a top-to-bottom delight. We talked about the idiosyncrasies of different vintages and different plots; each bottle warranting its own deep dive. I'll always remember it as the moment we walked through the door of the old domaine and got a fresh perspective on what would be the future of Nadège's very high concept project. It's fascinating to see what a brand new perspective is able to make with a set of raw materials we've known intimately for so many years.
In terms of this raw material, Nadège's vineyards are full of history and years of beautiful vintages. Much of the domaine is made up of a big, triangular plot with an eponymous plot up at the tip called, "La Pointe." This is a place that grows the Chenin of my fondest dreams. But don't take my word for it, that's what the sweet wine I drank all those years ago was called: "Rêverie"! In any case, this plot (planted in the 1920s) is still producing incredible fruit that finds its way into different cuvées depending on the quality of the vintage. Further down the hill, we have Chenin from the 80's, and then finally a co-planted plot of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. There is another plot of Chenin in Rochefort sur Loire where the "Rue aux Loups" plot makes for an entirely different, historical cuvée of Chenin.
Nowadays, the correspondence between the parcels and the barrels are shuffling for a few different reasons. On top of the domaine wines, Nadège is buying a lot of fruit. This is, in part, because of a litany of difficult vintages that have ravaged the Loire valley the past ten years. It has a bit to do with her desire to grow, mitigating some of the consistent loss. Mostly it has to do with a conceptual change from the historical "Les Vignes Herbel" to "Nadège Wines." The labels are changing, the cuvées are changing... all on the up and up. We've seen lots of these wines in the states already, but they will be a more and more familiar fixture of the portfolio as we are buying up whatever we can get.
Reading through this again, I realized that I used the word "dream" too many times. I'm sorry. I'm just a wine idiot. But it does remind me of driving away from the property in that funny, happy haze we do after a visit like this. I asked Basile, like I often do, which property from the trip would he take over if he had the opportunity. We talked for a long time about this estate and what life would be like here. Dreaming on the long road back to Paris.
