Mito Inoue
We have been communicating with
winemaker Mito Inoue for a number of years but she has never had
enough wine to allocate some to us. This year we finally got the
opportunity to visit her and see her tiny, tiny cellar and walk
in her vineyards, despite snow covering the vertiginous slopes
to which they precariously cling!
She works in the Auvergne in central
France in a village 30 minutes south of the main city of
Clermont-Ferrand.
We were introduced to her wines by
Pierre Jancou when he owned Vivant in Paris. However,
these are true “unicorn” wines – they are very hard to locate
and there are very few of them.
Mito has always been very gracious
and has answered our emails and has kept in contact despite the
last three vintages being incredibly low yielding.
When we visited her cellar she only
had one barrel of wine from the 2014 vintage – too little to
satisfy her existing customers let alone us.
This year the wine is a lovely blend
of Gamay and young-vine Pinot Blanc. After tasting the wines and
watching Mito label some of last year’s vintage to send to a
lucky customer she offered to take us to see her Pinot Blanc
vines which she has planted on a steep mountain-side about
twenty minutes away from the village where we were tasting the
wine.
Mito warned us that the walk would be
slippery and steep! The slopes were covered in snow and the
track wound up the mountain via dry-stone terraces that were
being restored by volunteers.
You can see the distant volcanic peak
and the pale blue sky on this snowy afternoon as we walked up
the snowy slopes to the terraces.
Our sedentary legs were not the ideal
vehicles for this climb, but we persisted and eventually arrived
at the top where the beautiful terraces were planted with two
and three year old Pinot Blanc vines, looking stark and cold in
the winter snow. It was a magical experience.
Here is a photo of the terraces and
the Pinot Blanc vines. The local name for these dry-stone
terraces is “pailhats”.
And in the photo below you an even
better idea of the pailhats:
This was a cold, but thoroughly
enjoyable afternoon!