Clos Rougeard Saumur Champigny Le Bourg 2015 750ml

Charly Foucault was in and out of hospital from the 2015 harvest until his death that December, so this Le Bourg comes from the last harvest of his lifetime.

Le Bourg is the plot in the centre of Chacé, directly beside the Foucault family house, and the estate describes it as very old vines on a predominantly limestone base under a shallow layer of clay loam. The Japanese importer Nomura Unison puts the vines at 75 to 80 years and the average crop at 20 hl/ha, half the estate's own figure for Le Clos and a third of the Saumur-Champigny norm it cites. The UK importer Vintage and Vine adds that the cuvée has been bottled separately since 1988, that it began as a single hectare and that part of it was replanted after the 1991 frost.

The cellar work for Le Bourg is the most oak-driven at the domaine. Per Nomura Unison the fruit is fully destemmed, sorted a second time on a table and fermented with its own yeasts in barrel, 20 to 30 percent of it new and the rest one and two years old, with a maceration of 30 to 40 days and no press wine. The wine then stays in the same barrels for roughly 29 months without added sulphur and is bottled unfiltered, before resting for several more years in the tuffeau cellars seven metres below the village. The brothers' own phrase for this was 'laisser le vin tranquille', and the estate still calls its vinifications infusions.

The domaine has sat on the same ground since 1664. Charly and Nady Foucault took over in 1969 and never used synthetic products in the vines; in a generous year the estate makes about 3,000 cases, half sold in France. Charly died on 29 December 2015, aged 66, and the Bouygues family bought the property in 2017, keeping the four cuvées and the 15 hectares across 25 parcels.

In the glass

The estate itself says Le Bourg shows riper, fleshier fruit than Les Poyeux and a dense, full-bodied texture. Stephan Reinhardt of The Wine Advocate, tasting in summer 2018 (as quoted by K&L Wine Merchants), found the 2015 'coolish and fresh on the toasty nose', then 'generous, intense and salty on the palate, with fine tannins and lots of cherry aromas', with firm tannins that still needed time, scoring it 93+. The label states 13 percent alcohol.

When to open

Reinhardt expected the tannins to integrate with age; Jancis Robinson's window, as quoted by vinsgrandscrus.fr, runs 2023 to 2035. Our suggestion: decant an hour and serve at 16 to 17 C.

At the table

Our suggestion: roast lamb with herbs, duck breast with cherries, or aged Loire goat's cheese.

Quick facts

Provenance

Sourced from the Japanese importer.

Sources: Clos Rougeard; Nomura Unison (Japanese importer); label; Wine Spectator; Vintage and Vine; The Wine Advocate (S. Reinhardt, as quoted by K&L Wine Merchants); vinsgrandscrus.fr