Our steadfast partner since 1981, Domaine Lucien Crochet is widely renowned for their expressive, chiseled, and textbook renderings of Sancerre—particularly their well-known trio of Sancerre Blanc: a flagship bottling comprising vineyards throughout their home village of Bué (plus smaller holdings in Crézancy and Vinon); the soil-specific “La Croix du Roy” (from parcels of Oxfordian limestone caillottes and griottes in Bué); and the site-specific “Le Chene Marchand” (an Upper Oxfordian caillottes terroir in Bué). The late Gilles Crochet also indulged his experimental side on occasion, producing a broad, rich, barrel-aged “Cuvée Prestige” from his oldest vines in years that merited it, and even an unorthodox botrytis-influenced late-harvest bottling (“Vendange du __ Octobre”) a handful of times.
In 2023, the family wanted to try something different: a true single-vineyard bottling that prioritized the expression of terroir above that of élevage or ripeness level. La Louisonne is an exceptionally steep 1.5-hectare vineyard in the far north of Bué, with well-draining soils of distinctive blue clay riddled with pebbles, and with the limestone bedrock lurking very close to the surface. To best express this unique site’s character, Crochet employed a more oxygen-friendly aging process than with their super-sleek stainless-steel-raised classic trio, and the 2023 harvest’s 23 hectoliters of wine spent a lengthy 18 months in a combination of two-thirds terracotta amphora and one-third steel. The Sancerre from this site, however, does not feel pointedly experimental; cut clearly from the same cloth as their classic trio, it offers a broader yet no less powerful sense of minerality, a more brazen salinity, and a texture at once enveloping and clinging. As with all their wines, this cuvée was farmed organically (the domaine has been practicing fully organic viticulture since 1989) and harvested manually—still an exceptionally rare practice in the Sancerre appellation.
It is exciting to see such a well-established estate expand their lineup in such a thoughtful and well-executed manner, and we are certain that the scant handful of cases to grace our shores will delight long-time fans of the domaine—and perhaps create new converts as well.
Grower Spotlights
Since coming home to work at his family’s domaine full-time in 2018, Paul Fumoso—with mom Stéphanie by his side—has steered Gour de Chaulé to new heights, and the wines of this stalwart Gigondas estate are more popular stateside than ever.
Grower Spotlights
Rather than crafting their lineup to accommodate perceived market demand, Philippe and Vincent allow the character of the growing season to dictate which wines they produce from a given harvest.
Grower Spotlights
In Jacques’ modest cellar beneath his house in Montigny-les-Arsures, Emeric learned the virtues of restraint and the value in trusting one’s fruit; he learned to act as shepherd rather than “winemaker,” and his wines at Les Matheny embody that philosophy arguably more emphatically than even Puffeney’s did.
