A benchmark burgundy

The best wine we drank on holiday in Galloway was not bought there but brought there by a friend who was spending a day with us.   A  2009 Pouilly Fuisse recently added - briefly it seems -  to the Waitrose list, it was perhaps no great rarity among French whites. But certainly, at its best, Pouilly Fuisse is a benchmark burgundy, very different from the Loire’s rival Pouilly Fume, and  ours was a good one, the perfect accompaniment to our salmon supper.

Pouilly Fuisse, it’s true,  can be a fleshy wine but this one had all the structure it should have had. With its hint of steel, it was a model of its kind. 

The wine authority Hugh Johnson has written with pleasure of drinking a “nutty” 2000 Pouilly Fuisse on a square in France  “amid merry broad-beamed grey-heads” eating  a vinaigrette of twelve different fresh vegetables, but ours was fine with fish, courgettes, and roasted baby peppers prepared by my wife in our rented chalet. Our Pouilly Fuisse was younger than Hugh Johnson’s, not so nutty but with that  tension which I prefer in a white burgundy (above all in the best Chablis) and quite delicious.

Wines we bought locally which we enjoyed included a  lovely red Louis Jadot Fleurie from the village shop and, from the Castle Douglas Tesco, a frisky Macon-Villages, a bargain at less than £7. 

5 August 2014