As a négociant, Mounir Saouma is unique, and so are both the rapidity and height of Lucien Le Moine’s rise.
(« Le Moine » stems from Saouma’s stay in the 1980s at a Trappist monastery, which ultimately conferred a winemaking vocation on this would-be journalist.) In business only since 2000, he and his wife, Rotem Brakin, working alone, purchase tiny batches of juice (in the case of whites) and youn wine (immediately following primary fermentation) from manifestly exceptional, strictly premier and grand cru sites, raising them in the grower’s cellar for the first three to four months in custom-constructed new barrels of oak from the Jupilles forests in western France.
(Saouma champions its use on account of its tightness of grain and relative flavor neutrality.) Saouma and Brakin put great stock in phenolic maturation and acid-retention in the fruit, employment of whole clusters, retention and absorption of lees in the young wines (especially in tannic vintages like 2005 or 2003), cold temperatures, low sulfur, late malolactic fermentation, one sole gravity racking, late bottling, and in general methods as close as possible to approximating the way they imagine vinification proceeded prior to World War II.
Their mere 2,000 total cases are often spread over 50 or more lots, as Saouma puts it, « focusing on their individuality. » The array of crus represented in this tiny cellar and the richness and the complexity of their vinous representations are stunning.
