Every December we head to the South of France on a buying trip focused on the that year’s harvest. Along with time spent in the South, mainly in the Languedoc, one of the most important and exciting visits is to Plaimont in Gascony. It is from here that we source one of our most important and bestselling wines – Le Charme Sauvignon. Due to our very close and long term relationship (we were one of Plaimont’s first UK customers) we are able to blend own wines with their winemaking team.
The great thing about working with Plaimont is that we get to spend time with the brilliant and very talented head winemaker, Christine Cabri. First, she gives us an overview of the vintage – in this case describing 2024 as very good qualitatively, but with very low yields, especially for Colombard. Thankfully, Sauvignon fared a lot better in quantity terms.
Harvest began in the last week of August with the Sauvignon picked at the end of September. Regarded as a relatively cool vintage, this has naturally delivered wines at around 11%, which is good news with our duty rates!
Although 100% Sauvignon from Gascony, Le Charme is a blend from several of the different areas within Gascony, with some different vineyards from each sub-region forming the final blend. Whilst we endeavor to have a consistent style to the wine, the blend is never the same due to vintage variation. First, we tasted the 2023 vintage as our benchmark, fresh and lively with great acidity – absolutely delicious! This wine will drink well for another 12 months, although our stock certainly won’t last that long!
We then proceeded to taste 8 different parcels – two each from Aignan, Saint Mont, Condom and Mezin. We agreed unanimously on 2 – the Aignan 707, which had an aromatic character with a lovely fresh zing and the Condom 1508, which immediately typified the Le Charme style and would clearly add weight and fruit. We were split on the two wines from Saint Mont, the 367 & 646, which both had good acidity with lovely mineral notes.
For the first blend we tried equal thirds of Aignan and Condom, and a sixth each of the 2 wines from Saint Mont. Having picked the 4 best wines and put them together, we assumed that the end product would be better than each of the individual elements but no, incredibly the wine had become a little muted and dumb.
We went on to try 3 other options, each one a little better than the previous one, before finally settling on 40% Aignan 707, 32% Condom 1508 and 28% Saint Mont 367, producing a lovely wine with aromatic nose and good weight on the palate.
The final wine has 4g of residual sugar and is lutte raisonnée – quite unusual at this price level. Every restaurant and pub wine list has a Sauvignon at this sort of price, with Chile being the default choice. Take my word for it, have a try of Le Charme and you’ll be switching from Chile straight away!
The Charme blending was complete and we continued to taste some fantastic wines including a stunning old vine Colombard and a partially carbonic macerated Madiran which were amazing – more on these another day! I’ll leave the last word to Oz Clarke who also likes Le Charme Sauvignon:
"This must be one of the best value Sauvignons in Britain because it’s bursting with self-confident leafy lime-y, green apple-y freshness." Oz Clarke.
David Archibald
Sales Director
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