Authentically visionary wines usefully go on baffling our terroir-centrism. By visionary I do not intend wines made with style in service of site expression but rather those with so strong and particularized a stylistic stance as to fully subsume both varietal and site.
Stéphane's wines decline to shuttle us to Anjou or Layon, nor do they appear concerned with Chenin varietality. At their best they are aesthetic ends-in-themselves, with sweet citrus reductive signatures illuminating their visionary creator just as they decline to reveal more localized features.
This is all intended positively. Site-above-all has become a critical commonplace yet Stéphane’s artistic intentionality paints a more interesting picture than little parcels of Anjou might hope to equal, fascinating though they may otherwise be.
Cheers,
Jason
