A third of my vineyard is planted with Melon de Bourgogne.
You're probably asking what on earth is Melon de Bourgogne? You might even wonder why I am planting melons on a vineyard. Well read on.
Last year I wrote about Pinot Meunier. The underappreciated, forever the bridesmaid grape variety of Champagne, shuffling up the aisle in her little pale purple dress behind the elegant Chardonnay and her handsome suitor Pinot Noir. Almost equally overlooked in Britain, though some are starting to notice. I've planted a lot of it.
If Pinot Meunier is the marginalised little bridesmaid, then Melon de Bourgogne isn't even at the wedding. It's from a different region entirely, the Loire, but even to those who know and love Loire wines it's not well known as a varietal because you won't find it named on the front of any labels. It's certainly not a melon, and these days it has nothing to do with burgundy. It's the grape that makes Muscadet.
I've had enough conversations about this grape variety to know that simply saying "it's the grape that makes Muscadet" might not be enough. Muscadet is as confusingly named as the grapes that make it. It isn't Muscat, or remotely like Muscat. It's not in the slightest bit musky or perfumed. Nor is it typical of other Loire white wines. Not soft and tasting of ripe orchard fruit like Chenin Blanc, nor aromatic and grassy like Sauvignon.
Muscadets are bone dry, neutral, crunchy, ever so slightly creamy and a tiny bit saline. The closest you will get in wine to drinking a seashell. And thus tailor-made to be drunk with oysters, ideally by the seaside on a sunny Breton afternoon with seagulls circling and fishermen in striped blue and white tops unloading the morning's catch on the harbour wall.
Muscadet is in a manner of speaking the national wine of Brittany. Almost all Melon B in the world is grown in the Loire Atlantique department inland from Nantes. It arrived there in the 17th century, supposedly introduced by the Dutch as a neutral base wine for Brandy and then growing in popularity for table wines after severe frosts hit other varieties. Like some others it was banished from Burgundy in the 18th century in favour of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. And like most from over there it's another offspring of that promiscuous old rogue Gouais Blanc.
Muscadet is a large region. Over 9,000 Hectares planted across the three appellations of Muscadet Sevre et Maine (the largest by far), Muscadet Coteaux de la Loire (a little inland and higher), and Muscadet Cotes de Grandlieu (around a large lake). By comparison there are about half that number of hectares of vines in the whole of England and Wales, even after the planting boom of recent years.
A vineyard in Muscadet. Reassuringly similar topography and general vibes to Little Bursted, though the soil is very different.
Muscadet from Melon B is light in colour and relatively low in alcohol (typically 12%). It's a member of the sub-genre I'd call "coastal whites", alongside Vinho Verde and Xacoli, Picpoul and Assyrtiko. Most is vinified without the use of oak, often in glass lined tanks. The most notable feature of its winemaking is the widespread use of lees stirring, indeed Muscadet "sur lie" must spend a period of time on its lees in order to tick the appellation box. This gives what would otherwise be quite acidic, edgy wines a bit of a creamy mouthfeel. Just like oysters.
Whether the Muscadet style is typical for the variety or more to do with the winemaking is hard to judge. It's not a well travelled grape. Like its red counterpart Gamay (for Beaujolais), it's only ever really been associated with one specific French region and a particular style of winemaking.
Also like Beaujolais, in the 1980s it experienced one of those boom and bust cycles that happen from time to time in this industry. A wine style becomes popular, usually because it's easy drinking and approachable. Beaujolais, Cava, Aussie Chardonnay, Hock, in due course probably Provencale Rose...so popular that it becomes a bit naff and falls out of fashion in its export markets. Volumes slump, winemakers struggle, many go out of business and the wine disappears from the shelves. The remaining vignerons spend a decade or two working out what went wrong, reduce yields and focus on quality, and in time the stuff becomes a bit of a bargain.
And again like Beaujolais, when you get a region with a history of oversupply and a collapse in the value of vineyard land, you also get experimentation. Muscadet and the wider Loire region is one of the cradles of the natural wine movement. So you can now find Muscadet with extended skin contact, Muscadet (or varietal Melon B) made without sulphur, or with much longer lees ageing than the appellation allows. Probably somewhere there's a Melon B made in Qvevri. I know there are Pet Nats because I've tried one.
I'm the first vineyard to plant Melon B in Britain. Perhaps here we should call it Mel B, for reasons of patriotic nostalgia.
Why the first? I think - I hope - it's simply a result of the grape's relative obscurity rather than it being impossible to grow in our climate. I wanted a third grape alongside the two Champagne varieties, to mix things up a bit. One that could make still wines if it achieved the right level of ripeness, but that could work well in sparkling if not. Mel B has all the attributes of a great sparkling base wine: it's neutral, with good acid, "minerality" (after all it does taste like seashells), and evidently good at taking lees contact.
When I was choosing a grape it was between Mel B, Chasselas and Aligote (Ali-G?). I knew Chasselas would work here as there are already good examples made by Bluebell vineyard and others, but when I looked at comparable climates the statistics for Nantes were more similar to East Kent than were those of the Chasselas heartland along the North slopes of Lake Geneva, or Aligote’s home on the Cote Chalonnaise.
The two climatic worries with this variety were sunshine and frost. It's very sunny in Loire Atlantique and notably dull in Britain, as we all know. Mel B budbursts early and Muscadet has suffered repeatedly from late frosts in recent years, though the variety does also push out a lot of secondary inflorescences. As I wrote in my last post in May, the Melon was hit roughly as badly as the other two varieties this year. Certainly no worse. There are plenty of bunches hanging on the vines at the moment.
The soils of Muscadet are completely different from those in the Kent Downs. Much of the area is gravel or sand over igneous rocks. We are flinty clay and silt over chalk. But this isn't a big issue. I'm not trying to imitate a specific fine wine style as closely as possible, I'm looking to make good wine from an interesting variety that I don't believe has yet shown all of which it's capable.
I was hoping to take a large enough sample of the Mel B last year to make a home brew batch of wine and see how it came out. The vines were on the whole way more well developed than the Meunier or much of the Pinot Noir, probably thanks to their vigorous SO4 rootstocks. Except in the top right corner where the soil - now I find out, and the topic for another blog - is much more alkaline and limy than elsewhere. Not great for SO4.
The grapes ripened at roughly the same pace and to the same sugar levels as the Pinot. It was looking promising. But no such luck: the pheasants took every last one of them. I suppose I should take that as a win: they were clearly sweet and tasty enough for the birds.
So this year will hopefully be the chance to test properly. I should get a decent though as yet non-commercial quantity of grapes even after carrying out a large green harvest this summer. They're not yet at veraison but are showing signs of getting there. That suggests harvest sometime in mid to late October.
I'm crossing my fingers. If it goes well, then we're on the way to being the first English producer of Mel B with the enticing market of Whistable and its millions of Oysters nearby. Splashes in the trade press. Native Oyster pairing tastings. Celebrity endorsement from Mel B herself? If it doesn't, then well at least I tried.
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