My consumption of Loire Chenin Blanc has generally been enthusiastic but geographically limited: it was the 1996 Baumard Savennières that really turned me on to the region, and since then I've focused mostly on that AOC as well as Vouvray, so Saumur is new territory for me, and I think this is the first wine I've tried from the Brézé hill: a Château de Brézé 2013 Saumur Blanc, "Clos du Midi."
And I really didn't love it.
The bottle was in fine shape, as far as I could tell: light color, fresh, no flavors that would suggest poor handling or microbiological weirdness. The wine seemed well-made: penetrating and puckering acidity in nice tension with richer quince fruit, a little wax, a very little wool, very long.
But there was something in this wine I don't think I've ever noticed in a Chenin before, and here it was impossible not to notice: a richly floral note, not exactly "lilies" but like lilies in the way their aroma can feel almost overpoweringly sickly-sweet (no, I'm not a fan of lilies, nor of certain kinds of florality in dry white wines: I almost never choose to drink Pinot Blanc for this reason, and I'm not generally a big fan of dry wines from grapes in the Muscat family; the kinds of florality expressed in Nebbiolo, Pinot Noir, and Syrah, by contrast, are very appealing.) One TN I saw for this wine said "herbal tea," which might be referring to the same note, depending on what the author was imagining. It dropped into the background with time, but never really went away. I even half-seriously smelled the outside of the bottle to see whether perhaps it had been handled by someone before me wearing too much perfume. And while it wasn't unpleasant enough to keep me from finishing my half of the bottle, given how good the wine was otherwise, it would sure keep me from buying it, or anything that threatened to taste like it, again.
So my question is: is this a Saumur thing? Is it a feature of the Brézé terroir? Or is it safe to climb the hill again?
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