Sebastien Riffault (Sancerre)

Sury-en-Vaux (not Riffault's vineyard)

Sury-en-Vaux (Sancerre, Loire).
If you visit the Paris wine bars, you may find Sebastien Riffault's Sancerres on the blackboard-list of a few of them. The first time that I tasted his generous Sancerre whites was precisely in a wine bar and he was there in person. His grapes are organicly grown and his wines are vinified with a slow-vinification approach. His unfiltered Sauvignons have a beautiful turbid-gold color with an onctuous mouth feel. I told him at the time that I would drop one day in Sancerre for a visit
Aged 25, he is working on a 2-hectare vineyard near Sury-en-Vaux in the Sancerre Appellation area. The hills near Sury en Vaux overview both Sancerre (the town) and the Loire. Sebastien Riffault vinifies his wines at his father's winery (Etienne Riffault), a recently-built facility just outside the village, and the 2-hectare vineyard plots were intially part of the 10 hectares of the family estate.
If I trust my sense of smell as I ride my bike on the winding roads near the village, some vignerons of the area aren't growing organic, to say the least, but that's another story. The weather today is like it has been most of april in France this year : bright, warm, sunny and dry. The vines are everywhere in advance and it raises some worries about the unknown impact on this millesime of an ongoing exceptional warm and dry spring. The good side for organic growers like Sebastien Riffault is that the transition between winter and spring has been extraordinary healthy for the vineyard and lifted the risk of disease.

Skeveldra plot (Sancerre is on the hill's peak on the right) Sebastien drives me to his Skeveldra vineyard, a (mostly) 40-year old Sauvignon plot on a slope facing Sancerre on the right and the winding Loire river on the left in the far. His wife being lithuanian (her first name is Juraté), he gave lithuanian names to his plots and cuvées. This particular plot has a soil with lots of flint or silex fragments, that's why the name Skeveldra which means (stone) fragment in lithuanian. Sebastien began his independant push as a grower and winemaker in 2002. He uses no fertilizers and the soil having received no external feed, the vines didn't sprout extra buds in this warm spring. And because the ground is so dry this year, he chose not to earth-down (decavaillonage) the vineyard this year because when he wanted to, he noticed that the undersoil was already very dry and he did not want to amplify the drought with plowing. Anyway he doesn't overuse plowing because he considers that the systematic upheaval of the topsoil is to some extent harmful for the vineyard and its harmonious life. So he does earth-up and de-earth regularly, but every three years or so.
In addition to the organic farming, he uses elements of the the biodynamic principles without being certified. He stresses out that he never uses his viticulture farming as a flag to trumpet his wines and market them in a fashionable way. Right now, he is on his way to get the certification for the organic viticulture. His father's vineyard, from which his own vineyard was carved, has also gradually been turned onto the organic path. Left :Skeveldra's silex.....................Right : Akméniné's limestone plates Skeveldra has a 0,7-hectare surface, with a south/south-east exposition on a 20-25% slope. As we look at the future flowers and grapes, he says that because of the unusually warm early spring this year, there's a 10-15 days advance on the normal schedule. He says that even though he scraps the grass when it's too thick, he still leaves different wild weeds between the rows for the natural biodiversity. All these weeds and their tiny flowers help attract useful insects that will destroy potential acarian pests. This helps build the right food chain for the vineyard and that's why he tries not to plow too often. He also never sows ray-grass seeds because he prefers the grass and weeds that grow naturally. Sowing ray-grass is like, he says, adding another monoculture to the vineyard, which is not what he looks for.
His other climat, Akmeniné, is a 30-year-old Sauvignon vineyard on limestone soil, with many "caillottes", which is the local name for limestone plates [see picture above]. Akmeniné , which means "made of stones" in lithuanian, is on a gentle slope and has a 1,3-hectare surface. While the silex gives wines with minerality, but also needing more time to reach their full expression, the limestone gives wines with richness, substance and fruits, and this, on a shorter time range.
Before going to the winery to taste the wines, he shows me his Pinot Noir plot, on a slope to a small side valley. Here too, the ground is dry like in summer [picture on left].
__1 Akmeniné 2006. From a cask. Most of this wine is still in casks but he bottled some already (Market price for this wine : 15 Euro). The Sauvignon grapes were hand-picked in crates and pneumatic-pressed. The wine stays 6 to 9 months in old casks. The one in which he plunged his winethief dates from 1996. No SO2 added except 10mg at bottling. Very fresh on the nose. White flowers. In the mouth : richness with some fizziness on the tongue. He says there is some fermentation gas left. This wine's particularity compared with "normal" Sancerre wines is that it went through its malolactic fermentation. He says that it is erroneously considered that Sancerre Sauvignons are better without the malolactic fermentation, but the fact is that this "tradition" was a direct result of the massive addings of SO2 to prevent this malolactic fermentation to take place. The common credo is that the Sauvignon looses aromas when it goes through this second fermentation. Here, you can feel ripe aromas, and it has to do with the fact that he harvests at full maturity. Here, yields are at about 30 hectoliter/hectare. He doesn't target particular yields each year and he tunes to the vineyard's pace and rythm. Some years, it gets up to 40 ho/ha, but as long as the vines are not pushed and the soils are poor and stony, there's moderation in the yields.
__2 Akmeniné 2006. This Sancerre Sauvignon comes from an isolated part of Akmeniné with very-very low yields (10 ho/ha), due to hailstorms 10 days after bud-burst, plus a few heat days later where the flowers dried. Great aromas of mango, corinth raisins, honey. Very onctuous. Never had any SO2 yet. He says that since last year, he bottles all the wine by gravity : he shows me the 5 cm (2-inch) hose which he uses to transfer the wine to a resin vat, sinking the hose at a calculated depth not to take too much of the lees. Then, after some rest, he uses a pallet elevator to position the vat over the bottling line, so that he never uses a pump during the process, and thus avoiding the sometimes negative impact of mechanical vibration on the wine. He also uses a bottling line that can be set at a slower pace (900 bottles/hour compared with a maximum of 2000/hour), which is also better for the wine.
__3 Skeveldra 2006. Sancerre Sauvignon. From a cask. Minerality and ripeness in the mouth. The buttery side is not due the wood, but to the silex. Acidity, with hints of lemon. This wine needs time to reach its best expresssion and one year elevage is ideally a minimum. The Skeveldra 2005 is at 18 Euro.
__4 Pinot Noir Raudonas 2006 (means red in lithuanian). This wine will have a one-year-long elevage. Very nice, spicy nose. Ripeness, acidity, very nice wine already. Yields here are 30 ho/ha. On the whole, his yields are one-third of the average in Sancerre, because of the poor soils in his plots, the old vines and his non-use of fertilizers. The Pinot Noir 2005 is on the market at 15 Euro.
Sebastien Riffault found his first customers through several restaurants, cavistes and wine bars in Paris, with the decisive turn of events when two Paris wine shops, La Cave de L'insolite and Le Chapeau Melon, bought his wines.
Sebastien Riffault now sells in several countries. In the UK, for example through Caves de Pyrene in Guildfords, and [edit 2012] in the US with Return to Terroir.

Sebastien RiffaultSury-en-Vaux 18300Phone +336 09 63 48 35seb [dot] riffault [at] gmail [dot] comSkeveldra WebsiteSury-en-Vaux main street

Comments

[East Village Wine Geek]

Wow. Thank you so much for this post. I am officially looking for one of these Sauvignon Sancerres in New York City. I am opening a wine shop in Manhattan and from what I just read I feel a real need to have this producer in my store. Thanks again and can't wait for the next post.

EvWg

[hikalu]

brilliant color! it looks delicious. I wanna taste it!

[vivian]

Excellent article!
Does anybody know if these wines are available in any shops in London, UK?

[andrew]

Looks like these blokes have some in the UK.
http://www.zelas.co.uk/sancerre-domaine-sebastien-riffault-akmenine-loire-2007.html

[putnam weekley]

Thanks. I remembered your post when I was in NYC and saw a bottle of 2004 Skeveldra.

It was post malo in bottle, nutty, wacky, and once I came to terms with it, it was really, really delicious. I wish I had more. Thanks for the report, again.

[Luke]

also caves de pyrene in guildford stock his wines... www.lescaves.co.uk

[Danny]

Have just had a bottle of this from the Sampler in Islington, London. Fantastic, perhaps the best bottle of Sancerre I have ever tasted. The after taste is very Sancerre with a nice acidity, but the initial rounded mouth feel and aroma remind you of something else entirely, floral and tropical like a Gewurtz, so not like other Sancerres, and please don't drink it too cold.

[Raphael]

San Francisco-based wine importer Return to Terroir is importing Riffault Sancerres to SF starting this summer...