Les Pervenches‘Macpel 22 ans’ 2020 (750ml)

Mike and Véronique of Les Pervenches have been growing grapes and making wines outside of Montreal – a most serious boundary region of viticulture – for over 20 years. They are the OGs of the Montreal wine scene; their wines are coveted and poured at the best restaurants of this amazing city: Joe Beef, Nora Gray, Le Vin Papillon, etc. Les Pervenches has, more or less singularly, led the group of young winemakers who are experimenting with both hybrid and vinifera vines, including Pinard et Filles and Domaine du Nival. Yet Les Pervenches is different; these wines are some of the most quietly, subtly complex wines I have ever had: intricate puzzles etched on the head of a pin. The wines seem to me able to have a dialogue with any of the great wines of the ‘old world,’ relating most obviously to the cooler climates of Europe. The best of them feel as if they were made in an ancient European winemaking tradition that doesn’t exist: Chablis dropped in the coolest vineyards of the Saar? From where or why or how this unique-ness comes about, I don’t know, but I do feel it, profoundly.

The “Macpel 22 ans” is a celebration, first and foremost, of 22 years of viticulture in an extreme environment. The wine is a blend of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Seyval with extended skin contact, thus the partridge-eye color, the copper salmon fireworks. As with the Mapel Seyval, the phenolic density, the pungent herbal quality of the wine takes a moment to blow off. This is always one of my favorite wines of Les Pervenches, and in general I am hardly a fan of “orange wines,” finding them most of the time too bulbous, clumsy and murky. Yet here, those adjectives are inappropriate; the wine is lithe-feeling and agile, ripe stone fruits and citrus oils lined by clean streaks of lime and lemon zest, a pithy, primal citrus that provides bounce and levitation. Flakes of sea salt and a wild, foresty florality – the wine is mysterious and labyrinthine, yet it is crystalline. I think we got two or three cases so… “le sigh.”