2017 Domaine Leflaive Meursault

Recently, we had our friends over for dinner. My husband retrieved this 2018 Chenin Blanc Petillant Naturel or Pét-nat from our stash to serve with the first course which was fresh shucked oysters. My husband has perfected the art of shucking!
We made this wine in 2018 and call it Pa'akaihu which is Hawaiian for effervescent. Pét-nat wine is also known as Méthode Ancestrale. We made this wine by transferring partially fermented Chenin Blanc into heavier champagne style bottles and crown capped it to finish fermenting and trapping the carbon dioxide fermentation by-product in the bottle. Since the wine is now 6 years old, it has been sitting on the yeast lees for a while. This leads to a yeasty, brioche flavor, in fact, when we drank this sparkling, after we first made it, it had all the hallmarks of a beer! It has evolved since then and was a nice foil for the oysters.

For dinner, my husband made salmon which he coated with a pepper rub and baked it in the oven for 20 minutes. For the side dishes we had wild rice and sugar snap peas. The dinner was made more enjoyable by the generous contribution of a 2017 Domaine Leflaive Meursault, a Premier Cru Chardonnay from Burgundy, that our friends brought to share. Our friend is partial to Domaine Leflaive and we were the lucky beneficiaries. The wine has 7 years of age on it now and was a full bodied wine with a nice influence of oak which came off to me as a bit caramel like.
The wine opened up as dinner progressed and it was the perfect compliment to the salmon.