About the Wine
A very special, one-off cuvée coming to you from our good friends Joel (of Wrights Wines), Sean and Andy. A wine that trio made using stellar grapes from the Anjou vines at Vins Hodgson, where the group worked on the 2022 harvest. A little more direct than Mai & Kenji's wines, it's typically vibrant and exciting, reflecting the work that they do in the vineyard. Fun to drink now, this will only get better with time. One to lay down if you have the patience.
100% Chenin Blanc from two vineyards that usually go into the Hodgson’s Faia cuvée, aged in a barrel gifted to Mai & Kenji by none other than luminary of the region, Richard Leroy. The barrel was filled and left on the lees for 9 months before bottling by hand. The wine is then left to rest in bottle for 14 months before release. It’s a rare, single barrel Chenin of which less than 300 bottles exist, bottled by hand with no additions. This is certainly one for the Chenin Blanc lovers.
A word from Joel on the experience of working the 2022 harvest at Vins Hodgson…
‘In the harvest of 2022 myself and two friends were fortunate to go out to Anjou and spend two weeks harvesting with Mai & Kenji Hodgson. We picked a lot of quality Chenin Blanc, cleaned a lot of equipment and met a lot of great people. Though it was hard work it never felt like it, being outside in beautiful vines, generally great weather, in one of the most beautiful villages in France and getting to drink old vintages of Aussigouins & Faia, some of the best wines I've ever drank over a humble harvest lunch...
While we there we were given the incredible opportunity by Mai & Kenji to barrel a wine from some of the grapes we'd picked from two of the vineyards that make up some of what goes into their Faia cuvee. We filled an old barrel previously gifted to them by Richard Leroy on the morning of the day we had to head back to the UK, said a prayer and waited.
After getting the OK from Kenji that the wine was dry and ready to bottle, we headed back the next May to bottle it by hand, with no additions of course, with a label created from a picture taken on the trip of a chair behind their cellar that offered rest after a long day picking fruit.
After a long rest post bottling we have decided that now is the time to release this wine, one of less than 300. We think it's tasting good already, but will be cellaring a good few bottles for a number of years, partly to remember those sunny harvest days and partly because we tasted some incredible old vintages of Hodgson Chenin on that trip which if this wine gets even halfway too, will be very much worth the wait.’
