Clint Hall wrote:I'd always considered Huets secs (my favorite dry Vouvrays) to be remarkably dry, especially as some of my friends used to say they found them dry to the point of being objectionable. But I haven't heard such complaints in recent years.
Last autumn I had the good fortune of being able to discuss the issue of RS in Vouvray sec with both Noël Pinguet (Huet) and Philippe Foreau (Clos Naudin). This was before the resignation of Pinguet became public knowledge.
Pinguet told me that in the recent vintages, it was becoming increasingly difficult to make really dry Vouvray and that routinely nowadays his sec shows around 10g/l of RS and sometimes as much as 12. However such is the level and quality of the acidity that the wines are subjectively dry and can be used as such gastronomically; I fully agree with this impression.
Philippe Foreau and Pinguet are good friends and often taste each other's wine together but Foreau does manage to produce wines with significantly less RS. He admits that Pinguet complains that the Clos Naudin wines are too dry so I think that this difference is partly a matter of taste between the two men. Foreau's wines tend to show even sharper focus and more tension than Huet's. I find that Huet's sec is definitely more approachable in its youth and it shuts down in the medium term less tightly than Foreau's. Both age superbly.
One of the reasons for Pinguet's departure was reported to be his reluctance to increase the proportion of sec in the Huet portfolio due to the natural balance of production tending towards a greater proportion of sweeter wine. Now that the Hwangs have got rid of Pinguet's "obstructiveness", it will be interesting to see whether we get a larger proportion of even sweeter sec or whether they revert to producing drier sec along the lines of Foreau and Blot.
