Domaine de la Pepiere Muscadet Sevre et Maine Sur Lie 'Clisson'

One of the finest Muscadets you'll ever pour in your glass, Pepiere's Clisson bottling comes from a small site near winery founder Marc Ollivier's home. Its distinguishing feature is the soil type, called granite de Clisson, which is a particularly poor, hard, compact granite with little clay and a lot of quartz and mica over hard granite mother rock.

The Pepiere vines range from 50-110 years old and are organically farmed and harvested and worked by hand. As with the rest of the Pepière wines, the fruit is direct-pressed in whole clusters and the juice settled naturally for 12 hours. It is then fermented in stainless steel tanks with natural yeasts; the wine is aged on its lees for 2 years in large underground vats until being bottled without fining or filtering. Marc bottled this wine years before the cru was made official under the label "Granite de Clisson". After the declaration of the cru, he had to drop the "granite" part and as well as the "sur lie" (the latter being true for all cru-designated wines even though they are lees-aged).

The finished wine is powerful yet elegant, and it has a reputation for aging and improving in the cellar for a decade or more.