Domaine Mosse - Mousemettes, Pet Nat, Loire, France (2021)

TASTING NOTES

Dry, bright and bubbly, with a lovely pink hue and vibrant strawberry, peach and tart cherry fruit. With sediment in the bottle, this provides a beautiful grainy texture to juxtapose the bright acidity and tart fruit. 

Slow press without fermentation. The juice was fermented in barrels and bottled when it reached 18 grams of residual sugar. It then kept fermenting in the bottle until most of the sugar was gone and was bottled with minimal sulfur.

Agnès and René Mosse, along with their sons Joseph and Sylvestre, live and work in the village of St-Lambert-du-Lattay, a village in the Coteaux-du-Layon area of Anjou. They adopted organic viticulture techniques from the start, plowing between and under the rows, and use biodynamic preparations to treat the vines and soil. In their area of "Anjou Noir" (Black Anjou, so called because of the dark color of the soils of slate and volcanic rocks), the soils are shallow, with subsoils of schist and sandstone, and varying amounts of clay on the surface.

With all the efforts put into vineyard work, it is equally important to them to vinify in a natural fashion, and they are particularly attentive to minimizing manipulations and the use of sulfur. All the wines are barrel-fermented and aged. The whites usually go through their malolactic fermentation. The barrels are renewed as needed, but are always older as to not impart oak flavours.