Weekly Faves: Back home, back to tradition

Tom’s Weekly Faves

This week's picks are a selection of wines from growers who have returned home after travels widening their horizons overseas, bitten by the natural winemaking bug in some circumstances, furthering their knowledge of it in others. The wines this week are a varied flight of delights, a trio of treasures!

Le Breil - Complementerre
After leaving France and working on vineyards in both Chile and New Zealand (as well as a couple stints closer to home in Montlouis) Manu and Marion returned to the family estate. However, instead of simply working with his father, Jo Landron (one of the top producers in Muscadet) and slowly taking the reigns, he and his wife, Marion Pescheux decided to strike out on their own in 2013. 
So with the help of Jo, they pieced together 7.5ha of vines (including some top parcels in the AOC) and began implementing the knowledge they had accumulated whilst working for the likes of Louis Antoine-Luyt, Lise and Bertrand Jousset, and Xavier Weisskopf of Le Rocher des Violettes. They are certified organic and deeply committed to biodynamic farming, as it is almost exclusively what they learned. 
Orthogneiss, amphibolite, and gneiss soils are the building blocks for their wines, and in the cellar traditional underground concrete tanks are used for debourbage (settling) before racking into smaller concrete vats for fermentation and elevage. All of the wines are allowed to go through malolactic fermentation and minimal, if any sulfur is added.
Le Breil is picked from their most prestigious parcel of some of their oldest vines. Arguably the top wine made on the estate.

Drei Freunde - 2Naturkinder
The (urban) family winery was founded in 1843 in the northern part of Bavaria on the river Main. Since 2012 with the return home of Melanie Drese and Michael Völker, the operation has been turned upside down: all 7ha are now farmed organically, the juice becomes wine without additives and is bottled unfined, unfiltered and with no added sulfites. 
Over the years they have developed into a very holistic system. Soil to them is understood as a living being: 
"Together with the whole ecosystem it is part of us, as we are part of it. Breathing the oxygen that the plants produce, attaching yeast from our fingers to the leaves of the vines, enabling the roots to connect to the mycorrhiza network to access nutrition that ends up in our body with the wine we drink." 
The top three planted varieties in Franken are Bacchus, Müller-Thurgau and Silvaner.
The previous vintages have reflected the growing conditions of each season and so does this one. 2018 was the best Bacchus year they have ever seen, there was a lot to go around and it was perfectly healthy.
The three wines going into the blend were fermented and aged separately but similarly: semi-carbonic maceration for a week (whole bunches included only for the Bacchus), pressed and fermented & aged in steel (Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau) and one big old oak barrel (Bacchus). Not quite tipping fully into orange wine territory, but certainly skinsy with that unmistakable aromatic heft and grippy structure.

Santa Cruz de Coya - Roberto Henriquez
A multiple-award winning wine in it's home of Chile, continuously chosen as the top País by critics. 
The País grape settled quickly in Chile's southern valleys when brought by the Conquistadors 500 years ago. Roberto is part of the very small-scale, zero-input agriculture and winemaking community of the Old South: the old farmers work traditionally, having never used chemicals. 
However nowadays, Chilean culture doesn’t pay much importance to historic winemaking, and he felt he had to do something to try and keep tradition alive. In 2015, while working as a wine growing consultant, Roberto started his own winemaking  project: building his own winery and working with traditional methods. Pipeño is a uniquely Chilean style of winemaking that etymologically refers to wine stored in a pipa – a very large ageing vessel made of native Raulí  beech wood. Culturally the terms means wine of and for the people, made rustically from traditional Spanish cultivars, both red and white. Grapes are traditionally fully destemmed, open fermented in lagar (massive foudres of raulí), foot stomped and gravity fed to pipa soon after fermentation so it can be enjoyed quicker. 
This wine is 100% pure País grapes obtained from a 200-year-old vineyard located in Nacimiento, Bio Bio. Vines were managed traditionally without the addition of chemical fertilizers or herbicides. This takes País to another level, full of cherries, softness and delicacy. Even brilliant lightly chilled as an aperitif, and keeps getting better accompanied by light dishes.

Click & Collect or get your order delivered for free within selected postcodes with the code MILKROUND. T&C's here.