Emmanuelle Mellot Menetou Salon Mon Loup

Emmanuelle Mellot
Loire Valley, France

The Mellot family name is one of the French wine community’s most long-lived and celebrated. Their history goes back more than five hundred years (to 1513) in the Central Loire Valley where they make their home in Sancerre and bottle wines under the name Domaine Alphonse Mellot.

The new project of Emmanuelle Mellot, the daughter of the famous Alphonse, has branched out of the family business and back into the negociant wine world, a familiar métier of her father’s in the 1970s before he began to focus solely on growing his own grapes for his estate-bottled wines. Negociant wine projects are usually less interesting (at least to us), not only because they are often uninspired wines made for cash flow and profitability, but because they usually lack what we find makes for the most compelling sort of wine: those that are made from bud break to bottle by the same hand and mind, year after year applying their experience with a specific plot to further master their craft; in other words, made by a vigneron. But, Emmanuelle’s project is more clever than most as are her noble intentions.

Emmanuelle set out to find winery partners who largely work with organic and/or biodynamic methods (as her family’s estate does) from different high-quality satellite appellations near Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. The principal objective (aside from making fabulous wines) is to bring more notoriety to these lesser-known appellations and to unify them in approach in order to better expose the voice of each region and help to familiarize their names to a more broad audience. While the quantities are minuscule, the influence she has in the marketplace with her family name will positively ripple through the small, less well-known wine communities like Quincy, Reuilly, and Menetou-Salon. She works closely with her partners on the cellar details to craft wines compatible with her preferred taste (elegant, pure, high tension; all perfectly in line with ours) and once her intention was understood and the wines were tasted (and the sources confidentially revealed to us) we were all in.