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Our annual pilgrimage to Nantes for Marc Ollivier's Muscadet-athon was particularly fabulous this year as the 2009 wines, tasted from the vats, showed great promise, and the parade of older vintages, going back to 1977, showed the amazing aging potential of these oustanding wines. One cuvée of 2009 Muscadet Sevre et Maine has already been bottled and shipped - it's at the store now and shows the round, lovely fruit typical of the vintage along with the citrus, herbal and mineral notes always present in this wine. 2009 is similar to 2005, says Marc, but with a bit more acidity to balance the ripe fruit. Later bottlings of Pepiere, by the way, will carry the "in conversion to organic agriculture" label, and Marc's entire estate will be organically tended within two years. New for 2009 is a parcel of old vines near the Clos des Briords which will be bottled as Granite de Chateau Thebaud after two years on the lees. Here the granite is veined with quartz and is slightly more porous than at Clisson. He feels it may give a better balanced wine, but it's hard to imagine a better Muscadet than the Granite de Clisson. Once again in 2009,  Marc's Clisson is a big wine (at 13.3% alcohol) with creamy lemon, stone, herbal and white fruit notes on the palate - a worthy successor to the magnificent 2007. Marc's parcel of Gras Moutons also did well in 2009, with the gneiss subsoil giving a lighter, extremely elegant and aromatic wine. "I prefer the granitic soils" says Marc, "they give a more original wine, but one must like acidity..." Marc has been fortunate to obtain a variety of parcels on different soils and he's making great wine with all of them. He's a winemaker of great intelligence and integrity - if you haven't tried his wines this would be a good time to start....

Another superb wine at Marc's party was a 2005 from the Pepiere vineyards on granite de Clisson, which spent 36 months on the lees and retained a little residual sugar (2.5 gr/liter). We don't know what he'll call it but it has super complex aromas of mint, spice, lemon and stone and fabulous material. Soon to appear at a supermarket near you... Next in line, after the pheasant, woodcock and wild boar paté (Marc's own production) was the 1999 Clos des Briords. This wine has always seemd a bit awkward to me, but it's singing now - maybe Louis/Dressner Selections could coax a few cases out of Marc.... and then there was the 1989 Domaine de L'Ebaupin - a deliberate mis-labeling of the Clos des Briords for us at Garnet Wines, which, though still young, is now showing superbly with intense flavors of dried herbs, lemon and minerals - bring on the Sandre au Beurre Blanc! The point being that any wine-geek with storage space should fill it up with Muscadet!