How to Drink Coulée de Serrant Part 1

Biodynamics, Chenin Blanc, real wine.

You have to try hard to be wrong in your approach to drinking a bottle of wine, but lots of winemakers build special features into their wines that are unlocked by a patient and attentive drinker. Nicolas Joly’s Chenin Blanc from the famous Coulée de Serrant vineyard is one good example. It is also one of the most impressive results of biodynamic winemaking available, which is a weird and mysterious thing. Joly gives all the credit for his lauded wine to this harebrained methodology. You can spend a lot of time reading about Joly or watching short videos about the estate (here, here, here). Each serve as a primer for his complex, fascinating, and delicious wines, but drinking is best.

Here we focus on drinking and enjoying to the fullest the special cuvée, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant (That’s the name of the wine and the name of the vineyard). It’s a wine that’s spontaneously good, but there is a lot of hidden character that comes from drinking this wine at the right time, looking for certain qualities, and over a longer period of time.

Day One

First, you’ll need to procure this bottle. This is, more or less, difficult. Wine dorks sometimes refer to rare bottles like this one as ‘unicorn wines’. Nobody likes this convention.

You’ll have luck in small, boutique shops specializing in vintage/fine wine — or even better — natural wine.

You may have to ask for the bottle at the counter, as very often shops like this will stow away rare or sought after bottles for hand-selling, special customers, or personal consumption. They will check the cellar, storage, or “the racks” for you. These are funny places peppered with contraband, old street meat in Styrofoam containers, and extremely rare/expensive bottles of wine.

When they can’t find your coulée des Serrant (because they drank it) you might consult www.wine-searcher.com for locations nearest you. But call the place first to avoid a similar rigmarole.

Don’t get crazy about the temperature of the wine. This bottle should be chilled, but not cold. Essentially, chilling a wine does more to hide features than elicit them, so anywhere between 15–25 minutes in the refrigerator should be fine. Otherwise leave it in for as long as you like (not weeks or months) and take it out 10–15 minutes before drinking.

Reduction

After you pull the cork, the first thing you’ll notice is the sulfuric odor of a struck match. Burnt tires, rubber bands, manure, and similarly unsavory tasting notes are emblematic of something called reduction. Semantically speaking, the term ‘reduction’ comes from the wine being made in a reductive (as opposed to oxidative) style. Beyond that, reduction and oxidation are terms proper to chemical respiration that outstretch the purposes of this article, and are only slightly informative in regards to the smell of your wine. Put simply, wines that are made in a reductive style see less oxygen during fermentation and storage while wines made in an oxidative style see more.

Why do wines made in a reductive style smell bad? In the absence of oxygen, wines develop some volatile compounds that react when met with oxygen. The good news is that these volatile compounds “blow off’ relatively quickly. Sometimes it can be a matter of 5 or 10 minutes, sometimes it can take hours. Luckily for you, this reduction will all but certainly have vanished by your second round of tasting — very likely before.

Day Two

Most people have no trepidation saving a wine for the second day, but natural wines can sometimes be tricky. Some are very fragile and fall apart. Others may have slight infections that are benign, but show some unpleasant qualities after 12 or 24 hours. Coulée des Serrant, on the other hand, is designed to last a week or more. So claims the exceptional winemaker Nicolas Joly, in a sentiment that’s inspired this article and many endeavors like it. Wine is a paradigmatic instance of the ineffable; that this bottle can miraculously outlast wines that are chemically fortified to do so is a result of (i) incredible meticulousness, (ii) the mysterious biodynamic process, and (iii) a little faith in a broader palate of flavors.

Noble Rot

You’ll get evidence for all of this, but what is most obvious on day two is the level of rigor and precision needed to produce this cuvee. What you’ll notice more than anything here are flavors and notes grounded in something called Botrytis Cinerea. That bright, rich, complex, concentrated, aromatic fruit you taste is the result of a specific kind of rot. Like Parisian venereal disease in the 16th century, this is a fungus you want.

Affectionately nicknamed, noble rot, botrytis isn’t something proper to funky, natural wine. Botrytized grapes have been used in French Sauternes, Hungarian Tokay, and German Riesling for centuries. Coulée des Serrant is located in the Savinerre region of the Loire — just another emblematic place for the practice of cultivating and vinifying these weird, infected grapes.

Noble rot does two things. First, it concentrates the sugars in the grape. Second, it changes the metabolism of the grape to make room for compounds more proper to red grapes, absent in white grapes. Most immediately, this gives the wine a darker color, but the palate and nose are greatly affected as well. Tremendously complex, green fruit, raisins, sweetness on the nose, rich baking spice, and white flower are typical of botrytized Chenin Blanc.

It will be interesting to taste some other examples next to your Coulée des Serrant to see just how well the two work together. Chenin’s naturally honeyed character is accentuated by botrytis’s consumption of the fruit’s water, concentrating sugar. In this vein, botrytis also speeds up the ripening of the fruit.

It is very difficult to make wine using botrytis because you are allowing for conditions under which other, putrid, compounds will develop. Hand-harvesting and careful selection are extremely important to getting just the right grapes. This is one undeniable reason for the wines longevity after opening.

Is there a right way to drink a bottle of wine? “In treating such questions as open ones, you have already achieved a paradox,” says George Bernard Shaw, but if any wine is proper to paradox, its this one after 3+ days. In this article we got a first impression of this famous cuvée, but next we will see how it transforms to reveal a singular expression of fruit, technical prowess of the biodynamic method, and most of all, the expression of a place.