2024 Domaine Pascal Janvier, Jasnières AOC Blanc, Loire Valley, France.
The bright, zesty and steely 2024 Jasnières by Janvier is pure Chenin with limestone influence showing off lemony citrus, white peach and tart green apple fruits, along with mineral flinty notes, wild herb, bitter almond and oyster shell. This medium bodied and racy Chenin Blanc has just a touch of leesy roundness, but is most attractive for its crisp dry detailing and youthful freshness. The winery notes that the 100% Chenin Blanc grapes undergo a two-hour pressing following harvest, after which the juice is then put in cuve for twelve to twenty-four hours to settle out the phenolics, then racked to tank, where alcoholic fermentation starts. The temperatures during fermentation are monitored and must not pass 20 – 25 degrees Celsius, to keep things precise and pure, with sugar levels monitored daily. The fermentation stops here when equilibrium is found between acidity and sugar, which depending on the year you’d find some residual sugar left, though this vintage seems bone dry. Another racking takes place after fermentation, with the winery adding that he wine ages on fine lees in stainless steel cuve for a few more months before bottling. I’ve been a fan of Pascal Javier’s wines for a long time and it was a thrill to catch up with his latest release, which is a brilliant effort and highlights the quality of this very lesser known area of the Loire Valley.
Importer Kermit Lynch tells the story that Pascal Janvier, who founded his winery in 1991, had never planned on becoming a vigneron, even though his parents had vineyard land of their own, but he adds that they did not make their own wine. Instead, he went to school to learn butchery and planned his future around that, however, Pascal made a sudden about-face at the age of thirty and decided to study winegrowing in Amboise and took to winemaking like a fish to water. Now Janvier makes about 2,000 cases annually, with his top Chenin Blanc wines labeled Jasnières, along with some, very quaffable, Pineau d’Aunis Coteaux du Loir Rouge and Coteaux du Loir Chenin Blanc. The terroir here, which is one of the more Northern zones in the Loire and a bit closer to the Atlantic, sees cooler growing seasons and has lots of chalky limestone with some clay that gives the wines their character. Kermit Lynch explains that the remote Jasnières region, is in the department of the Sarthe in the Val du Loir, noting that the Loir is a tributary of the Loire River, and its viticultural area is the most northerly, as I mentioned, (and coldest) of the greater Loire Valley. This was once a proud wine appellation, but is almost now extinct, with still less than one hundred and two hundred hectares still respectively under vine, making Jasnières quite rare in modern times, but well worth searching out, as this wine proves.
($32 Est.) 92 Points, grapelive