I tasted the Baumard 2009 Quarts de Chaume in its final blend and on the eve of filtration and bottling. Yeasty and fermentative overtones as well as a radish-like expression of botrytis in the nose were backed up by scents of quince preserves and herbal distillates which then coalesce on a viscous, honeyed, creamy palate and together with alkaline and wet stone notes make for a metaphorically cool and laid-back impression rather than a torrifactive one. This lacks the senses of citricity and salinity that helped enliven the 2008 rendition, with its similarly almost smothering sweetness, but there is a marvelous ethereal dimension to the concentration exhibited here as well as a sense of grounding in schist-licking minerality that are in themselves remarkable. In the end, it may simply take years for the sense of sweetness here to back off to the point where the wine begins to demonstrate its full potential complexity and a balance that – for me at least – would encourage repeated sipping. It doesn’t have to be this way with a wine from material this off-the-charts in must weight. But perhaps the acidity and extract possible on schist in this vintage cannot be compared with the balance that was achieved by a few stratospherically ripe Vouvrays and Montlouis of the 2009 vintage. I would in any event not be the least worried that this wine might begin showing signs of decline over the next 20 years. I finally had the pleasure to taste personally with Florent Baumard (for more about whose domaine and methods, consult my report in issue 172) and found him a disarmingly astute critic of his own wines whose confidence I share that the best is yet to come from this vast and already justly renowned estate. I find a freedom from bitter or coarse elements and a clarity of flavors in the more recent wines that is welcome and which, when pressed, Florent Baumard suggests might in part be attributable to increasingly selective and watchful (though not necessarily gentler) pressing. The envelope-pushing here is evident in the quality of Baumard’s relatively high-volume sparking wines, rendered from blends unfamiliar outside of the Loire. The wines I tasted five years ago were good, but only modestly-recommendable (and I elected not to publish notes on them in issue 172). The lot numbers of Baumard non-vintage sparkling wines appear on the front label in very tiny, faint letters under the words “sparkling wine,” but cannot be read without good eyesight, and not if the bottle is wet! The Baumards’ “regular” bottling of Savennieres is from their Clos St. Yves vineyard between the Clos du Papillon and Roche aux Moines, and a fact of which I was not aware when I published my notes in issue 172 is that two different labels are used interchangeably, one of which indicates the vineyard name.Importer: Ex Cellars wine Agencies, Cambridge, MA; tel. (617) 876-5105
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