TN: 2017 Domaine du Pelican Savagnin Arbois "Ouille" (France, Jura, Arbois)

Can’t remember the last time I had a wine that was just so delicious and a flat out joy to drink.

  • 2017 Domaine du Pelican Savagnin Arbois “Ouille” - France, Jura, Arbois (8/31/2020)
    Bottom line: this stuff is delicious. It’s not oxidative, but has a slightly round oxidative note. There is nuttiness, and layers of white fruit. It has a savory/saline note and hints of butterscotch and bitters on the finish that makes it so crushable. It just tastes good, clean and precise and hard to not pound the whole bottle in an a half hour. Uncanny. Silky and sophisticated, but crushable, too. Well done.
    Posted from CellarTracker

Thanks for the note, sounds really tasty. I am not a huge Savagnin guy but your note really makes me want to try this one. Seems to be well priced, too.

If you believe it, it gets even better with a few years. I discovered this wine with the 2012 vintage and it’s been a yearly case purchase ever since. The '12 is drinking exceptionally well right now. One of those wines, few and far between, that could make this set-in-her-ways wino sit up, take notice, and add it to the rotation.

Good to know. I only have a few 17s. Went through a little Puffeney phase when a friend was bringing them in to his local shop a few years back, but I don’t buy Jura with any regularity these days. This made me, as you say, sit up and take notice. Will leave the rest a lone for a bit and probably try to back fill some.

I tried the '16 earlier this year. It was the first time I had tried this wine and was quite impressed. I got a couple more off WineBid at a good price. I will look out for the '17.

Has the winemaking changed much since the first couple of vintages? I found them to be almost ‘sterile’ in comparison to a lot of the other jura wines I was drinking 5 years ago (puffeney, tournelle, gahier, bourdy).

While I remember them being tasty, they were more expensive than their counterparts at the time. However it looks like the other producers prices have caught up to them these days.

I’ll have to try them again.

Richard: I had the exact reaction you did.

As an Angerville fan I was totally pumped and ready to dig those first releases. But like you I left asking “Is that all there is?”

So glad to read this note. Dennis has similar palate to mine, so if he says go then I will. He’s not one for hyperbole. You can see the joy in his note!

Will have to revisit

I’m not a real fan of the Pelican wines (tried when they first came out, but, as somebody said, a little neutral), but I buy a little Jura every year because they Are so drinkable.
And Dennis, it sounds like you had a good pairing, which can really show these wines off well. What did you have it with? Savignin is great with cream-based dishes as the acidity cuts through like a knife.

Thanks, Matthew [cheers.gif]
Interesting, this was my first every trying the Pelican wines, though I drank my share of puffeney back a few years ago, so I think I have a sense of the wines of the region. This '17 is anything but sterile, or lacking. I will say, I do like a slight oxidative note and some creamy/nuttiness, which this shows, but not to the same degree as the Puffney wines or old LdH.

Honestly, I enjoyed it with and without food. I made homemade Kibbeh and spinach pies, wasn’t really a planned pairing, more the fact that it is 90 and humid every day lately and I’m drinking mostly white wines.

my experience with these wines is they are indeed too sterile and boring for the jura. maybe they have improved in recent vintages, but at the price point i am not inclined to taste them again.

It should be noted that at least with respect to the “Ouille” bottling it is made in a non-oxidative style. It’s fermented and aged in large foudres. I can’t speak to the other bottlings of the domaine.

Wanted to add a footnote to this that I haven’t seen mentioned before - I just found out they made a skin contact savagnin in 2018, “maceration pelliculaire”, and just ordered a bottle to check out. (I also didn’t know that the symbol for Arbois is a “heraldic pelican which is called a Pelican in her piety who is feeding her young from her beak”.)

I really like their normal savagnin, the cut and linear fruit satisfies me like good premier cru white Burgundy, with some extra funk and spice.

Haven’t had any Pelican wines before, but this is what I’ve heard from so many sources that I’ve just left the producer alone. Since I prefer the funkier voile wines of Jura and the bolder, more sauvage style of ouillé mastered by Ganevat, these Pelican wines have never sounded interesting enough for me to pull the trigger.

I liked Domaine du Pelican’s chardonnay with the very first vintage (2013?, 2012?), but not as impressed with their Savagnin, when I tasted at a store with Guillaume d’Angerville doing the roadshow here in NYC. I recall that it’s the closest (not by proximity) a Jura chardonnay can get to a Burgundy. Agree on all counts that the Pelican wines, even the reds that I tasted, were more Burgundian then than any I’ve tasted from the Jura region which has its definite rusticity and style. I haven’t tasted any vintage after the first one.

Btw, if Ganevat mastered ouillé, I’ll go out on a limb and say that P Overnoy and E Houillon grandmastered the style.

This is a good summary of my experiences with Pelican. I agree with the critiques above that the wine I posted about doesn’t read Jura. Valid. Though it was still right tasty.
Thanks for all the dialogue here.

overnoy is the most overhyped wine there is, not to mention way too much inconsistency. ganevat wins every time for me, so long as you don’t include all the wonky negoce wines.

See, this is the thing for me. The wines do not scream “Jura” to me like Ganevat’s or Puffeney’s do, but they don’t have to, and are delicious in their own right. As in Burgundy, I think a broad range of styles can be made from a region without one necessarily being “correct”.

I think that is what struck me about the '16 version of this wine. Excepting the fact that I’ve never had a Savagnin from anywhere else, this was quite good without the typicity of the Jura in terms of voile, etc. I do love all the Sherry sorts of notes that can come with good Jura blanc but this Pelican is quite good without them in it’s own right.

I agree with Dennis and Jason. I don’t need them to be like Ganevat of Puffeney or Macle, which I also like a lot, and I don’t fault them for being made in a different style. To critique a wine for not being something it’s not even trying to be seems off base, especially if you haven’t even tried the wine. Of course, if you don’t like that style, you shouldn’t drink it. But I don’t see how the wine has somehow failed in this scenario.

Now, if you taste it and don’t like it, find it dull or too linear or boring, that’s another thing and those are legitimate criticisms. I don’t happen to agree with them - I’ve never found anything remotely boring about these wines, having drunk numerous bottles over several vintages, except to the extent that I don’t think they don’t show all they have to offer when they are young (thus my original comment about aging well.)

This is all personal taste, of course, whether a wine bores you or doesn’t. I myself have never found a bottle of muscadet even remotely interesting, from any producer or at any age, but I know a lot of people are excited by them. I’m just trying here to separate “I think the wine isn’t interesting” from “I think the wine isn’t interesting because it’s made in a style that isn’t my favorite.”

With 100+ different labels, I find the very few Ganevat I tasted to be either too ‘try hard’ to be eccentric.

With the pricing and scarcity, I can’t blame if others find Overnoy-Houillon hyped. What have you had that made them overhyped?