Domaine Claude Branger Muscadet Sevre-et-Maine Chateau Thebaud 2018
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Thébaud often has notes of fennel and anise in the nose and tends to be an up-front wine. Full-bodied, beautifully balanced, with an elegant finish. Fabulous Muscadet.
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After four years on its lees, this wine is rich and dense. It has a deliciously creamy character as well as ripe apple and pear flavors. Drink this full-bodied wine now.
A 4rd generation domaine, Claude Branger started with his father, working “derrière le cheval” on 7 hectares. He now owns 26.5 hectares of vines and his son, Sébastien, who arrived officially at the domain in 2007, works right beside him harvesting by hand— and making ripe but very dry Muscadets.
Claude was an early member of Terra Vitis, an organization that sets guidelines for sustainable farming. Subsequently, Sébastien embarked the domain on the road to full-fledged organic farming and by 2019. They were fully certified.
The father and son team prunes its vines for low yields, harvests by hand (a rarity in this land of machine harvesting), and lets its wine rest on the lees until bottling, which is done without fining and with a light filtration—the classic sur lie technique. It’s this technique that gives good Muscadet wine its freshness and lift. There are wines of revelation made here, wines that are soft yet shockingly vigorous, imbued with scents of bread, lemon freshness, and sea salt minerality—a palette of aromas that in the better renditions follows through with flavor intensity and length. This is wine of the north Atlantic coast, the product of Brittany’s great shelf of granite. Good Muscadet is one of the best white wine values in the world.
Made famous in Muscadet, a gently rolling, Atlantic-dominated countryside on the eastern edge of the Loire, Melon de Bourgogne is actually the most planted grape variety in the Loire Valley. But the best comes from Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, a subzone of Pays Nantais. Somm Secret—The wine called Muscadet may sound suggestive of “muscat,” but Melon de Bourgogne is not related. Its name also suggests origins in Burgundy, which it has, but was continuously outlawed there, like Gamay, during the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Pays Nantais, Loire’s only region abutting the Atlantic coast, is solely focused on the Melon de Bourgogne grape in its handful of subzones: Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine, Muscadet-Coteaux de la Loire and Muscadet-Côtes de Grandlieu. Muscadet wines are dry, crisp, seaside whites made from Melon de Bourgogne and are ideal for the local seafood-focused cuisine. (They are not related to Muscat.) There is a new shift in the region to make these wines with extended lees contact, creating fleshy and more aromatic versions.