Other highlights at the tasting included the wines made from Belluard’s vines – in a beguilingly bright but resonant style not dissimilar to “the master of ginget” – by a young winemaker, Vincent Ruiz, at Domaine du Gringet; and Domaine Dupraz’s effortlessly pear-scented, Alpine stream-racy En Route Pour L’Apero dry white, made from another local hero Savoie variety, jacquère.
It’s a tale that begins in the hillside vines of Domaine Belluard in the village of Ayse in the Haute-Savoie region of the French Alps, where Domaine Belema’s Yann Pernuit, originally from Normandy, learned his trade as a vigneron alongside his friend and mentor, Dominique Belluard.
Domaine Belema Imago, IGP Vin des Allobroges, Savoie, France 2023 (from £34.75, terrawines.co.uk (lescaves.co.uk) The story behind the delicately delightful Alpine dry white wine that is Domaine Belema Imago is unusually moving.
Imago is Pernuit’s tribute to the memory of the much-missed Belluard, a pristine representation of the gringet variety that meant so much to Belluard and which Pernuit is committed to preserving, and a wine in which a swell of fresh apple combines with graceful surging mineral acidity.
Domaine Dupraz En Route Pour L’Apero, Apremeont, Savoie, France 2023 (from £19.50, gnarlyvines.co.uk; lescaves.co.uk; highburylibrary.co.uk) Pernuit was very far from being the only winemaker moved by the death of Belluard.
