Domaine de la Pepiere | Melon de Bourgogne | "Clisson" | Muscadet, Loire Valley, FR | 2017

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Pair with: moules frites, oysters and other shellfish, grilled cheese, fondue, anything herbaceous 

🌱 Farming: Organic

🥶 Serve: Cold 

🍇 Grape Variety: Melon de Bourgogne

🌎 Region: Loire Valley, FR

🤓 Geek Out: 8 of the 10 hectares of Pepiere's Clisson Cru go into this bottling. The unique aspect of this cru is the granite de Clisson soil. This particular type of granitic soil is hard and compact with little clay and a lot of quartz and mica over hard granite mother rock providing those mineral notes of crushed rocks and wet slate. The organic vines, which range from 50-110 years old, are hand harvested, direct-pressed in whole clusters and the juice settled naturally for 12 hours. It is then fermented in stainless steel tanks with natural yeasts; the wine is aged on its lees for 2 years in large underground vats until being bottled without fining or filtering. Leesy and cheesy! Marc bottled this wine years before the cru was made official under the label "Granite de Clisson". After the declaration of the cru, he had to drop the "granite" part and as well as the "sur lie" (the latter being true for all cru-designated wines even though they are lees-aged).