Part 2 brings us to mid-August. Although it sometimes seems an age ago, they were the heady days of our very short English summer this year. Our drinking definitely has a “holidays” feel to it here. This second batch of wines centres around three exceptional Juras, which I would imagine are no less infrequently opened by anyone reading this, as much as for us. We run the traditional gamut with a very rarely encountered Vin Jaune, an equally rare unicorn Savagnin and a remarkable Vin de Paille. In amongst them there is also one of Annamária Réka-Koncz’s more unusual wines, plus a stunning Loire red. As the Chemical Brothers said, here we go…

Arbois Vin Jaune 2015, Domaine de la Loue (Jura, France)

This small domaine is run by ex-film producer, Catherine Hannoun, who caught the wine bug when working on the seminal Mondovino. Catherine is rather out of the way up near Port Lesney, north of Arbois. Her wines are near mythical, rarely seen, but you can read a lovely profile of her in Camilla Gjerda’s We Don’t Want Any Crap in Our Wine (Camilla has a new book ready to drop very soon, for those like me who loved her first).

On the one hand Catherine has managed to expand her vineyard to a little over 3 hectares (double what she had when she started out), and subsequently she has moved to slightly larger premises. She also made quite a bit of wine in 2022. However, she has been hit by grape theft in 2023 (See Wink Lorch, Jura Wine Ten Years On, 2024, p64) and with other problems such as frost and fungal infection etc. Grape theft, in particular, is becoming a thing in the region. I was first told about it back in 2017 or ’18, by a producer near Montigny-les-Arsures, but back then it was rare. For some reason, as in Burgundy and elsewhere, it is becoming a wider problem.

I believe 2015 was Catherine’s first vintage of Vin Jaune. I would suggest it is incredibly successful, though not necessarily fitting the VJ norm, perhaps. To begin with, it has only 12% alcohol. It drinks very smoothly, and I think it’s the most elegant Vin Jaune I’ve drunk in a long time. I understand she has been working with Manu Houillon? It was aged in a big old foudre that came from Jacques Puffeney.

You get apple, roasted hazelnut and fresh citrus, but it bears repeating…that lovely softness. I guess I’d sum it up by stressing the real purity of each flavour. Fantastic. I wish I could drink this again, or perhaps the subsequent 2017 or 2019. Catherine Hannoun is both a creative and intuitive winemaker, and I sure hope she overcomes the trials of the past few vintages. Sending out good vibes to Port Lesney.

“Liner Notes” 2022, Annamária Réka-Koncz (Barabás, Eastern Hungary)

This is Annamária’s new red bottle-fermented sparkling wine. I drank my first bottle of this back in June, but it is worth me highlighting it again, in part because this was even better with an extra couple of months in bottle.

Liner Notes is a petnat blend of 77% Cabernet Sauvignon with 23% Kékfrankos (aka Blaufränkisch), the grapes sourced from a friend at Mátra in the Nagyréde district, two-and-a-half hours west of her base at Barabás, on the Ukraine border. The terroir is volcanic with a base of andesite (eroded lava flow) covered in a light layer of clay. Cabernet off volcanic soils is reasonably rare.

The grapes are all crushed gently and macerated five days. Fermentation begins in a closed tank before transfer to fibreglass, but ageing is in stainless steel. This has just a minimal sulphuring. The first thing to say is that this is a lightly sparkling wine, bottled at just 1.5 Bar of pressure. Not complex, you get concentrated dark fruits and a bit of spice, riding on a fine bead of tiny bubbles. Its length is assisted by the fruit concentration. Since my first bottle this has settled down, with the Cabernet having perhaps mellowed out, enabling the bright fruit to shine more. If I’m looking to give you a comparison, maybe a Schilcher Frizzante comes closest, though with very different grape varieties.

Imported by Basket Press Wines, where I sourced my bottles. Prost Wine still has some for £32.

Savagnin Arbois-Pupillin 2012, Domaine Houillon-Overnoy (Jura, France)

Very much gone are the days when I could pick a bottle of Overnoy off the shelf at Wholefoods Market on Kensington High Street, and how the world of wine has changed since then, especially The Jura. Pierre Overnoy’s story has been told endless times, but not so much by me. In the past decade I’d say one of his wines every two years is about it, and the time for getting a job as Doug Wregg’s assistant is long past. I’ve just checked and my last was a Poulsard in August 2023, so maybe I’m not doing as badly as I thought.

This may be one of the finest domaines in France (let alone merely Pupillin, or the Jura), whether they make natural wine or not, but these wines are more enigmatic than most. As I drink them so rarely, I never remember which cuvée I am drinking, because the only clue is the colour of the wax covering the cork. This is a good thing. Keeps us all on our toes and the palate sharp. But here we have a yellow capsule and this means oxidatively-aged Savagnin. You also get White wax (Chardonnay), Red (Ploussard), allegedly Green (Chardonnay/Savagnin blend) plus 50cl bottles for topped-up, very long-aged, Savagnin. There are a couple of others (see, as ever, Wink Lorch, supra, p88) but if you can find them, let alone purchase one, you are a better person that I am.

Pierre has been retired effectively since the early 2000s and his adopted heir, Emmanuel Houillon, has been making the wine and running the estate, along with his wife, Anne. Pierre is there in the background, on hand for favoured journalists and dishing out his bread loaves, the making of which it seems he has become no less an expert in than he was at being the inspiration for the the Jura natural wine movement.

This bottle would stand out as sensational on a table full of sensational wines. But it is also unusual, so different from wines most of us habitually drink. It is rare that I’ve ever said that a wine exists almost in another realm, and as you know, I’ve tried an awful lot of wine.

Ripe, clean, fruit is a given. The key to creating fine wine, says both Pierre and Manu. No chemicals, including no sulphur (also a given here), just meticulous hygiene and long ageing in old (but in good condition) oak. Aged under flor, yet perhaps rare among such wines, there is no reduction. Classic nutty notes, zesty orange, curry spices, off-the-scale complexity in a wine which changes almost by the minute.

There is little hint that this wine is twelve years old. It seems timeless. It is always a privilege to drink a wine from this estate, and also a reminder that such wines are, for me, in a class of their own. But where to find one? Once I’d have listed a few shops. Latterly the odd restaurant kindly sold me a bottle, but I should add at a reasonable and not inflated price.

It is the fate that Pierre, Manu and Anne have to suffer that their wines are some of the most hyped wines we know, and are exploitatively resold at many times their original sale price. That makes me feel even more lucky to have drunk this bottle. To corrupt a cliché, I don’t know where my next Overnoy-Houillon is coming from? I say “my”. Just as the producers of this wine would have wished, this was drunk with, and courtesy of, very close friends who are as fanatical about Jura wines as I am. As it should be.

Saumur Rouge “Les Motelles” 2015, Domaine Guiberteau (Loire, France)

Back in the days when you could actually buy Pierre Overnoy’s wines in a wine shop, Domaine Guiberteau was just beginning its own journey to Loire fame, and perhaps fortune. Romain Guiberteau is described as a protégé of Clos Rougeard, whose wines are perhaps no less sought after than the wine I’ve just written about.

Clos Rougeard was one of the pioneers of biodynamic farming in the wider Loire, and specifically in Saumur. It is easy to forget that the movement which fuelled Loire natural wine in the late 20^th and 21st Century was biodynamics, when the voices of people like Nicolas Joly, and the Foucault brothers (of Rougeard) were seen as the crazy ones. Plus ça change in some quarters.

Guiberteau effectively applied meticulous biodynamics to his Cabernet Franc and Chenin vines at his own domaine at Montreuil-Bellay (home to one of the Loire’s lesser-known châteaux, but one well worth a visit). Since the mid-1990s, Romain has seen his own wines reach a similar acclaim to those of his mentors. Except that the wines of Romain Guiberteau are not difficult to find, and some of them are pretty affordable, especially given the quality.

Les Motelles is a 1.4-ha parcel of Cabernet Franc planted in 1955 on complex soils of sandy clay and gravels over limestone. These very old vines see no systemic treatments at all. Grapes are selected for quality and ripeness and destemmed prior to fermentation in cement (using natural yeasts, of course). Ageing is in used oak for a year.

Very low yields contribute to this cuvée’s concentration, yet interestingly I’d not call this dense by any stretch, more elegant and refined. Perhaps that is partly through the ethereal nature of the wine in the glass. Much modern Cabernet Franc aims to be more fruit-forward as a way of showing that the region is now warm enough to put the vegetal reds of the 70s and 80s behind it. This is Cabernet Franc that gives a nod much more towards Pinot Noir than it does its Cabernet Sauvignon cousin, albeit with a different flavour profile. Elegant, refined and very long.

This single site cuvée comes in at £55 from The Solent Cellar, but they have the domaine’s entry red and white Saumur for under £30. In fact, this retailer is becoming an increasingly interesting source for Loire wines in general.

Vin de Paille 2011, François Mossu (Jura, France)

The public face of the Mossu domaine, at Voiteur near Château-Chalon, now tends to be Alexandra, François’s daughter, but the master is still working as he slowly retires in his daughter’s favour. Whilst the domaine will be in safe hands, it is unlikely (given the Catholic Church’s take on women priests) that she will ever be known, as her father is, by the epithet “The Pope of Vin de Paille”.

This remarkable Jura speciality (though if you ever tasted Gérard Chave’s historic version from Hermitage in the Northern Rhône…) may not be a wine we drink every year. In fact, very little is made, and I drink far more Vin Jaune than Vin de Paille, which is saying something. But it always astonishes me when I have a good Vin de Paille.

The name translates as “straw wine”, named after the method where very healthy bunches (selected during an early hand-harvest, no noble rot allowed to get though) were left to dry and raisin on straw, though today you might see them drying out and concentrating their juice in plastic boxes. Thanks to a half-bottle supplied by Jasper Morris at a Jura tasting many years ago, Mossu’s is the one I’ve sought out most.

As an aside, I learnt yet another interesting fact from Wink Lorch’s new book, Jura Wine Ten Years On (supra). I’ve drunk a good few bottles of Alexandra Mossu’s own red wine, “Sang de Gaillardon”. Apparently (I had no idea), Alex did an oenology degree at Changins in Switzerland. Whilst there, she got interested in the disease-resistant crossings we know best under their German acronym, PIWIs. “…in 2013 she and her father were among the first in the Jura to plant [them]” (Wink Lorch, JWTYO p108). This is the wine they go into.

This Vin de Paille (returning from that diversion) is not a natural wine, but applications are very limited when it comes to vineyard sprays, just once a year, if possible, for weeds and once for fungal disease. It is a blend of Chardonnay, Savagnin and Poulsard. The fruit is dried in a windy loft space in wooden crates. You will find a bit more residual sugar in a Mossu Vin de Paille than most, and the wine ferments extremely slowly in tank before being moved to old oak to age for between one and two years. That isn’t the end of the story. It then gets racked into extremely old 60-litre barrels (ie small) where it sits for another three-to-four years, only released when it is deemed ready.

Although undoubtedly sweet, it is also pretty spicy and herbal on the nose. Figs come to mind on the palate, with more spice, a mix of ginger, nutmeg and fainter mixed curry spices. There is acidity to balance the sweetness. I would say it is perfectly balanced. There’s a degree of complexity, though I wouldn’t overplay that part. It is more than elegant and refined though, and very long indeed.

I don’t know of any UK source for this wine, which a friend bought at the domaine.

The rules for making Vin de Paille are very restrictive, so some producers, especially the young ones making natural wines, make sweet wines not labelled as such. I can think of a few, but perhaps the man who began this trend (not that it is large enough to call a trend) was Stéphane Tissot. I’d definitely recommend checking out his “non-Vins de Paille”, which if only seen rarely in the UK can be found in that domaine’s shop on the Place de la Liberté in Arbois. Berry Bros lists Stéphane and Bénédicte’s “Pour Ma Geule” in halves, but you will have to stretch to £175 to secure one. If you ever spot the black label of a Mossu at one hundred metres, grab it.