17/04/2026
Yesterday at lunch , (the new venture from the team behind ), in Covent Garden: Clos de la Néore 2016 and Utopie Créative 2023. Both Loire Sauvignon Blanc, both brilliant, but they represent completely different philosophies of winemaking.
Edmond and Anne Vatan’s Clos la Néore speaks the language of centuries. Thirteen generations of family stewardship, a single hectare monopoly in Chavignol’s Les Monts Damnés, ancient 100-year-old foudres, and fermentation guided by nose rather than thermometer. This is Loire Sauvignon that has more in common with Raveneau Chablis than most of its regional peers.
Nicolas Barbou’s Utopie Créative speaks a different truth entirely. While researching the producer, I came across an interview where Barbou said his project is to make “emotional wine” and he describes his mentality as “dreamer, sensible passionate and creative.” Here’s a winemaker who learned from Bizot and Boisson-Vadot, then returned home to work fifty-year-old vines with Burgundy barrels and twenty months of aging.
What struck me wasn’t the contrast in the glass (though that was remarkable) but what these two wines say about winemaking right now. The Vatans honour a tradition so pure they’ve never made anything else for 200+ years. Barbou respects tradition deeply enough to reimagine it completely. It’s the paradox of the best innovators: you have to master the rules before you can meaningfully break them.
Neither approach is right or wrong. Both are necessary. Both are brilliant.
The reds that followed told a similar story of time and place. Montille’s 2018 Nuits-Saint-Georges aux Saints Juliens showed Burgundy in its most elegant form: precise, mineral, alive with that particular NSG tension. Then the Chateau Montrose 2004, twenty-two years on and drinking beautifully, reminding us why Bordeaux’s greatest vintages reward patience. Different regions, different decades, but both wines that could only exist where they were made.
Sometimes the most interesting tastings aren’t about finding the “better” wine. They’re about understanding why we need both the guardians of tradition and the risk-takers pushing boundaries for art.
