Visiting Our Favorite Winemakers in Sancerre
Next up in our France adventures: Sancerre! The town of Sancerre weaves itself in tight circles up a hillside full of white stone buildings and breathtaking views of rolling vineyards. It’s surrounded by many small villages where the vintners live and work. The Sancerre region is close to the heart of K&L—it’s Kay Beffa (the “K” of K&L)’s favorite wine, and our co-owner Clyde is also a big fan. It’s also the first place that we imported wine from directly, and we are still importing and loving the wines of that first producer, Franck and Betty Millet.
Clyde tells the story fondly: he was traveling in Beaune in 1994, when a young couple named Franck and Betty reached out and asked if they could pour their wines for him. Luckily he said yes: they’d traveled from Sancerre (a three-hour drive) on Easter Sunday to meet him. Clyde was so taken by their wines that he decided to bring them directly to K&L customers. Some 27 years later, the couple is married, has three daughters and is still making amazing wines, including the Insolite, our most popular Sancerre year after year.
We tasted a lot of wine from the last two vintages, from the Millets as well as our several other of our Direct Import Sancerre producers. There are some similarites, and some marked distinctions. The 2020s are round and luscious with ripe fruit, while maintaining a lively freshness. The 2019s are a bit less round and more focused and acid-driven. Two slightly different styles, but both delicious. This year, they’ve all suffered from very bad frost in April, and many lost much of their crop. On April 7, there was frost. On April 8, there was snow. And on April 9, there was sun, which created, as Betty described, an explosion of the berries. They lost quite a lot of crop but not all. There will be wine in 2021, and we can’t wait to see what it’ll be like.
We gathered at the tasting room of Domaine Cherrier, run by Agnes, François, and their daughter Delphine, who showed us their lineup of wines, and slowly more winemakers trickled in with this year’s wares: Aurore Dezat, Marius Tabordet, and Eric Cottat. These are folks whose families have been making wine here for generations, and who, today, are expressing the best of the region: vibrant minerality, racy freshness, and layers of flavor. Even better, these are wines at everyday-drinking prices. We’ll be getting more in stock soon, and I can’t bet they’ll be summer go-tos for you once you try them.
