i Vicini Cortese Blanc 2019

i Vicini Cortese Blanc 2019,

Jean-Yves Peron

For a long time, Savoyard wine suffered from a somewhat flimsy image, not taken seriously enough. Yet, what treasures its varied soils and numerous ancient grape varieties produce! Jean-Yves Péron embodies the renaissance of this beautiful vineyard. Living in Chevaline, near Lake Annecy, he skillfully combines committed viticulture and merchant winemaking, both with a focus on nature. His Mondeuse reds are magnificent, as are his whites made from ancient local grape varieties—Jacquère, Altesse, Bergeron, and Persan—no less so. He lives in Chevaline, but his current vineyard, three hectares biodynamic since the beginning, is divided between Conflans, near Albertville, and Fréterive, a little further downstream in the Isère valley.
Initially destined for a career in biochemistry, Jean-Yves quickly fell in love with the vine and trained as an oenologist in Bordeaux. He learned his trade as a winemaker with Thierry Allemand in Cornas, then with Bruno Schueller in Alsace, before spending some time in New Zealand and the United States. His trading activity, which began in 2011, allows him to buy the harvest from organic winegrowers near his home, but also in Northern Italy: for him, it is a new dimension given to his work as a winemaker, allowing him to multiply the terroirs and to deepen his experiences in winemaking and aging. Jean-Yves Péron's winemaking follows the principles of minimal intervention. On narrow and steep surfaces, his mountain vines receive no synthetic products, Jean-Yves preferring horsetail and nettle manure. The surrounding vegetation is very rich: it protects the vines and helps to strengthen them. The soils are grassed, mown and reworked with a pickaxe and winch. The harvest is entirely manual. Once vatted in whole bunches, the grapes, both red and white, undergo a semi-carbonic maceration which allows the extraction of fresh fruit aromas. This maceration time varies between five days and nine weeks depending on the vintage. The day before or two days before pressing, Jean-Yves performs foot-treading directly in the vat. After this fermentation, the musts are sent to barrels for aging on lees for twelve months in five hundred liter barrels of two or three wines (to limit the oaky sensation), followed by blending and resting in vats. No sulfites are added, or as little as possible, and the wines are not fined or filtered.
In 2017, Jean-Yves Péron decided to expand his range by collecting organic grapes in the heart of the Italian Piedmont. The result has been several vintages, including this 100% Cortese white, an ancient grape variety often associated with Trebbiano or Garganega. Cortese produces a quality wine, fresh and tangy, with a straw yellow color with greenish highlights. This vintage was harvested for the first time in 2019, in Asti, in a cool microclimate that allows for fairly late ripening and, particularly this year, harvests in early October. It is a light and fresh wine, very digestible, with an alcohol content between 10 and 11 degrees, making it very easy to drink. It has a minerality due to the terroir and notes of citrus, especially lemon zest.