2018 Mathieu Cosme Les Promenards Vouvray Sec Loire Valley 750 ml

The 2018 Mathieu Cosme Les Promenards Vouvray Sec embodies why no wine gets us more excited than top dry Chenin Blanc: because it offers one of the most profound, age-worthy, and irresistible values in the white wine world. Today, we caught lightning in a bottle with a rare allocation of this bottling from one of the fast-rising, highly sought-after winemakers challenging the top producers of the Loire.
 
The short version of the story seems like Mathieu Cosme was fated to push a Loire estate to greatness: The fifth-generation grower from the Loire was trained at Domaine Huet, the bar-setting estate for dry Chenin Blanc. During his tenure, Cosme learned the biodynamic practices of Huet, observed the stellar results they produce, and eventually returned to his family’s estate prepared to apply that world-class blueprint.
 
But his family’s story is one of adversity, sacrifice—and resurgence. Because when he was 13 years old, Mathieu’s father died, and his mother had to resort to selling the family’s grapes to the local cooperative so the family could hang on to their prestigious land. It was a huge setback, but the family did what it had to do to make ends meet while Mathieu was in enology school, and serving his four-year apprenticeship with Huet.
 
When his time at Domaine Huet was over, Mathieu returned to the family estate, filled with expertise that he’d learned at the world’s ground zero for fine Chenin Blanc. Little by little, he started tapering off sales to the local coop, so he could again bottle wines from the family estate.
 
Now, Mathieu’s dry Vouvrays are often the first named when professionals talk about what’s on the region’s horizon: Former San Francisco Chronicle critic Jon Bonné named Mathieu Cosme as one of the up-and-coming producers poised to pose some competition to the regions previous untouchables, Huet and Foreau. 

From the fifty-year-old vines planted in the region’s iconic chalky limestone tuffeau, Cosme’s team harvests by hand, ferments using indigenous yeasts, and conducts fermentation and ten months of aging in 400-liter oak barrels.
 
The result is the kind of age-worthy, complex, expression of Vouvray’s classic terroir that competes with some of the finest bottlings in the world—at about half the price.