Domaine Huet 2002 Vouvray Demi-Sec Le Mont Loire France 95
by Michael Apstein
Domaine Huet’s stunning 2002 Le Mont Demi-Sec is a masterpiece at 20+ years of age, combining a near magical freshness with maturity. A luminous golden color announces its age, while its vitality belies it. Its complexity—hints of dried fruit, herbs, and a delightful and subtle bitterness—caresses the palate. The finish seems endless. So is the enjoyment you get from drinking it. Drinking window: 2025-2040.
Sarah Hwang, whose family owns the iconic Domaine Huet in Vouvray, states emphatically, “Demi-sec is the strength of Vouvray.” Though the literal translation of demi-sec is half-dry, wines labeled as such will have notable sweetness. What makes Huet’s Demi Sec sing is its riveting acidity that balances the wine and energizes the palate. The acidity also helps explain how their wines, such as this 2002 Le Mont, develop so magnificently with bottle age.
Victor Huet founded the Domaine in 1928 when he purchased the roughly nine hectares vineyard, Le Haut-Lieu. It was Gaston, Victor’s son, who was in charge for 55 years, from 1937 until his death in 2002, at age 92. Gaston revitalized the estate even after enduring four years in a German POW champ during World War II. His leadership catapulted the Domaine to its current iconic stature. Gaston acquired two more prime vineyards, the 7.9-ha Le Mont in 1957, and the nearly 6-ha Clos du Bourg in 1963. Like Le Haut-Lieu, these two vineyards are also located on Vouvray’s Première Côte, considered the finest terroir of Vouvray. The soil of all three vineyards contains varying proportions of clay and limestone, a mixture considered ideal for Chenin Blanc. Gaston started the conversion to biodynamic viticulture in 1988, before its philosophy was widely embraced, achieving certification five years later. Huet bottles the wines from these three sites separately because each site imparts a different character to the wine. Following Gaston’s death, the Hwang family, headed by the Filipino-born New York businessman Anthony Hwang, purchased the estate. Currently his daughter, Sarah, runs the Domaine. Benjamin Joliveau is the winemaker, taking over from Gaston’s son-in-law, Noël Pinguet, who retired in 2012.
I had been under the mistaken impression that each vineyard site was dedicated to one style—Sec, Demi-Sec, or Moelleux—of wine. Not so. Hwang and Joliveau explained to me that Mother Nature, not the site, determines the style of the wine. All three sites can produce Sec, Demi-Sec, or Moelleux, depending on the vintage. Generally speaking, warmer vintages tend to produce more Demi-Sec or Moelleux, while cooler vintages tend to favor Sec and Huet’s minerally and lively sparkling pétillant. Huet also periodically bottles wines with extra intensity: Moelleux Première Trie and, since 1989, Cuvée Constance.
The cellar is where the team makes the decision which style(s) of wine they will bottle in an individual year. Hwang and Joliveau emphasize that their aim at harvest is “to get the purity and pristine crop into the press.” To that end, they harvest selectively, going through the vineyard multiple times. They bring a sorting table into the vineyards. Since botrytis-affected grapes are rare in Vouvray, unlike in Sauternes, Huet’s team is looking for ripe and balanced grapes, not ones affected by botrytis. Hwang explains, “We might ask the cutters to cut certain parts or certain bunches, . . . just to get what we are looking for in terms of . . . good grapes . . . the skins are ripe, the stems are ripe, the seeds are ripe, the juice is structured, there is a good balance between sugar and acidity. That’s the whole point. That’s what we are looking to harvest. Once the harvest goes down to the cellars there is no more sorting.”
After pressing, the juice ferments in a combination of tanks and barrels, with no fixed recipe. Joliveau sums it up succinctly, “… if you have good juice, it’s hard to make bad wine.” As the wine ferments, Hwang, Joliveau and the team taste to determine which batches will wind up bottled as Sec, Demi-Sec, or Moelleux. Joliveau explains, “(By tasting) we’re getting a sense of what the vintage is giving us . . . the nuances. . . Sometimes we taste every half hour to be sure everything is ok. When we think the balance is there, we stop fermentation.” They stop fermentation by a combination of techniques: cooling the wine, adding a touch of sulfur, and filtering it, all of which in combination kills and removes the yeast.