2009 Domaine Huet Haut Lieu Vouvray Le Haut Lieu Moelleux
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Tasting notes
The 2009 Vouvray Le Haut-Lieu Moelleux offers rich and super ripe fruit on the nose, but is still precise and fresh and displays some earthy flavors. Round, intense and elegant on the palate, this is a sweet and salty, very elegant, pure and persistent Chenin of great delicacy. Silky textured and with a lovely refined acidity, this concentrated and densely woven bottling is still very young, full of energy and provided with discreet power. The finish is compact, salty, very long and gives a revival of all the ripe fruit flavors. Not a coolish but a ripe, very energetic and just beautiful wine. Drink now and over the next 50+ years.
Critic scores
The Wine Advocate
Stephan Reinhardt, Wine Advocate
More reviews and scores
Peach, musk melon, and almond extract aromas to the Huet 2009 Vouvray Moelleux Le Haut-Lieu lead into a caramel-tinged palate on which nut paste and peach preserves are pitted against a bright but as yet somewhat detached sense of fresh citricity. Despite the sense of citricity and an impressive degree of sheer density, the 50-some grams of residual sugar here come off as decidedly efficacious. This really needs time to knit, but certainly displays an impressive degree of energy and persistence, albeit of a pronouncedly sweet sort. A sense of increasing harmony and some sense of buoyancy emerged as this sat open for an hour in the glass. (Unfortunately, time did not permit me to follow it further.) If the past is any guide, it should hold up well for at least two decades. Noel Pinguet professes great confidence in his 2009s and pleasure in one of those rare vintages where it was possible to bottle everything from sec through Cuvee Constance. That said, he admitted that achieving a balanced dry wine was challenging, and total production of sec was down from the estate norm; that of demi-sec, surprisingly, even more so (represented by a single bottling); virtually half of the vintage production being moelleux. While acknowledging similarities to 1996, Pinguet finds 2008 most closely resembles 1988. His is one of the few 2008 collections from Vouvray or Montlouis that is clearly less consistent than the corresponding 2009s, which he also finds more interesting. Importer: The Rare Wine Co., Sonoma, CA; tel. (800) 999-4342
Peach, musk melon, and almond extract aromas to the Huet 2009 Vouvray Moelleux Le Haut-Lieu lead into a caramel-tinged palate on which nut paste and peach preserves are pitted against a bright but as yet somewhat detached sense of fresh citricity. Despite the sense of citricity and an impressive degree of sheer density, the 50-some grams of residual sugar here come off as decidedly efficacious. This really needs time to knit, but certainly displays an impressive degree of energy and persistence, albeit of a pronouncedly sweet sort. A sense of increasing harmony and some sense of buoyancy emerged as this sat open for an hour in the glass. (Unfortunately, time did not permit me to follow it further.) If the past is any guide, it should hold up well for at least two decades. David Schildknecht, eRobertParker.com