2019 Robert Cantin Les Pierblancs Sancerre 750 ml

A sample bottle of today’s wine landed on our doorstep in an unmarked brown box, compliments of our friend Chris—one of the top importers in New York City, and a man who literally tastes hundreds of bottles of Sancerre per year. A lot of them blur together. The electrifying 2019 Robert Cantin Les Pierblancs stood apart—one bottle he said we absolutely couldn’t miss.

“Very hush hush,” Chris had scribbled in pen on the back of a purple shipping receipt. “No one knows about it in the U.S. Remember the Henri Bourgeois La Côte des Monts Damnés bottles we were drinking back in the ‘90s? This is like that, but with pristine farming done up to today’s Burgundian standards. They don’t come fresher than this, or at a better value.”

Chris wasn’t wrong. With a lot of Loire wines moving in a riper direction these days, the gorgeously racy 2019 Pierblancs—fresh out of the fridge and served with a half-dozen glistening Kumamoto oysters—brought back to us in vivid, high-toned clarity why we fell in love with Sancerre in the first place.

Born of the rarest soils in the appellation, this is old-school Loire: outlined with gunflint, dusted with fine smoke, and illuminated from within by a radiant, sensuous, honeysuckle-laced core.

By the time we were halfway through our glass, growing misty from the chill, we were snapping photos of the label and texting it to Sancerre-savvy friends to see if they’d heard of it. None had—an unbelievable fact for an affordable bottling etched with such precise terroir transparency.

This is a huge catch, a discovery we’re privileged to share only with our members—for now. Get in before word gets out, because demand for bottles like this is at an all-time high.

There are three main soil types in Sancerre: Kimmeridgian marls, calcareous (caillottes), and flinty clay (silex). The first two combined form the basis of the vast majority of the appellation’s 15-mile stretch on the west bank of the Loire. The remaining 10-20% consists of silex soils, and includes some of the region’s most coveted and rare vineyards. It’s that geological heritage that informs the 2019 Robert Cantin Les Pierblancs, infusing this wine with a nervy, flinty intensity.

Drawn off hillside slopes in the bucolic town of Thauvenay, 25-year-old vines are tended by a fourth-generation farming family, headed today by Eric Louis. With perfect southeastern exposure, the vineyards soak up sun throughout the day. Farming is organic, without any use of herbicides, using green harvesting and disbudding to keep yields low and grapes pristinely loaded with flavor and aroma compounds. 

Slow pressing of the grapes gently extracts the delicate terroir character, followed by a four-week fermentation in stainless steel and four months of aging on the lees (also in steel) to add richness and body. That traditional Loire script has ended up producing one of our favorite modern Sancerres—and a bargain to boot.