From: Maconnais, Burgundy, France
Varietal: Chardonnay
Taste: This pretty Macon-Charnay is an incredible value that effortlessly balances freshness, fruit, and minerality. It tastes and smells of crunchy apples, crisp pears, lemon curd, and zesty citrus with a zippy, saline finish—beautiful and easy-drinking (and yes, no oak).
Pairing: This stunning white wine is easily enjoyed as an aperitif or with appetizers. More specific pairings include dishes like summer salads, picnic fare, fish and chips, garlic shrimp, fried chicken bites like karaage chicken, vermicelli bowls, cod and herbed butter, pesto pasta, cod with brown butter and pine nuts, mild Panang or green curries, rice dishes and weeknight chicken, fish, or shrimp tacos.
This wine. 100% Chardonnay. From estate vines on clay-limestone soils averaging 20-25 years old. Whole clusters are harvested by hand, pressed directly and fermented with natural yeasts, as for all of Manciat's wines. Aged in stainless steel tanks. Bottled with a light, non-sterile filtration.
About. Thank you to importer Louis/Dressner for this profile of Manciat:
We know the Mâconnais well. Denyse Louis’ family comes from this area, has vineyards with the coop in Lugny, and we own a home there. We knew the coop and négociant wines that dominate the Mâconnais and the American marketplace, but it was a 1986 Mâcon from a small artisan estate that was the revelation and the start to our search for comparable wines from other regions. We take special pride in our selections from the Mâconnais, our local wines.
Some of the coops produce millions and millions of bottles. Jean Manciat’s vineyards can be toured on foot in a few minutes (5.5 hectares). When Manciat took over his family estate, he immediately left the coop in Charnay. He replanted extensively but kept as many of the old vines as possible. The yields average less than 50 hectoliters/hectare (the coops routinely harvest twice as much) and the picking is done by hand (a tradition totally lost around here except at the best Mâcon estates).
Manciat prunes his Chardonnay vines in the Côte d’Or fashion (taille Guyot), leaving a shorter cane that is less productive. The Mâconnais style of pruning is to bend a long cane into an arc, but Manciat finds the quality much higher with a shorter cane. Manciat is also experimenting with various agricultural techniques, such as sowing particular varieties of grass between rows, to eliminate the use of herbicides and alleviate soil erosion. He uses a type of old rootstock which he finds ideally suited to the chalky soil of the Mâconnais and replants with a mix of clones and grafts taken from old vines in the Pouilly-Fuissé area.
Manciat has a passion for wines fermented and aged in oak barrels, and uses a fair amount of new wood for his Vieilles Vignes cuvée and his miniscule production of Saint-Véran. But the Mâcon-Charnay Franclieu featured here is made in stainless-steel vats, to express the fruity, floral aromas and flinty minerality that characterize the best Chardonnay in the region.
