Vin de Lies Blanc 2018

Vin de Lies Blanc 2018,

Jean-Yves Peron

Near Lake Annecy, Jean-Yves Péron skillfully combines committed viticulture and merchant winemaking, both with a focus on nature. His Mondeuse reds are magnificent, as are his whites made from old local grape varieties—Jacquère, Altesse, Bergeron, and Persan. He lives in Chevaline, but his current vineyard, three hectares of which have been 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 business, which he began in 2011, allows him to buy the harvest from organic winemakers close to 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 that allows fresh fruit aromas to be extracted. 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 neither fined nor filtered. Savoyard wine has long suffered from a somewhat flimsy image, not taken seriously enough. Yet, what treasures its soils with their varied pedology and its many ancient grape varieties produce! Jean-Yves Péron embodies the rebirth of this beautiful vineyard.
Vin de lie is a winemaking practice little known outside the profession: it consists, after racking the barrels or aging vats, of gathering all the lees in a single vat. These lees are suspended in a small quantity of wine and it is this wine that is decanted once or twice to be recovered. It is not normally sold but reserved for the cellar team. This is the true "house cuvée", generally very appreciated. Nourished by the lees, the red obtained in this way is smoother, softer, and the white is less tense, rounder. Jean-Yves Péron decided to release a vintage of this type by combining all the lees from his 2018 whites and some from 2019. The wines, made from grapes from Savoie and Piedmont, include a majority of Jacquère grapes with a little Muscat, Altesse, Roussanne, etc. “It’s a little less precise, in aromatic terms, than what I usually do, but it’s very pleasing; it’s a wine for pleasure that will be particularly delicious in six months. It can be drunk anytime, from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.!” As we write these lines (end of July), we predict this moment of grace for next winter.