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Château Rives Blanques
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Blanquette de Limoux
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| Limoux Contrôlée
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Château Rives-Blanques is one of the few independent vineyards in the South of France specializing in quality white wines. Situated on a plateau 1150 feet above the Aude Valley in the Pyrenees foothills (just south of Carcassonne), this property benefits from the cooler breezes from the mountains and produces wines showing abundant fruit, smooth and round, almost New World but truly French in the balanced acidity and complexity from ageing in mature French oak barrels. Consulting oenologist, Georges Pauli of Gruaud Larose, St. Julien, and a Catalan by heritage, is taken with the property being in what was once Catalonia.
The world's first and original brut sparkling wine was discovered by happy accident - or by divine intervention - at a Benedictine monastery in Limoux in 1531, over a century before Dom Pérignon reputedly took the recipe up to Champagne. By the 19th century, Blanquette was enjoying worldwide popularity, from the White House in Washington to the palace of the Czars in St Petersburg. One of its biggest fans was Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, author of its Declaration of Independence, and certainly his country's greatest and most famous wine connoisseur. At the time of his death, about 10% of the legendary wine cellar at Monticello was filled with Blanquette de Limoux, the only sparkling wine kept there. The world's oldest sparkler is still made to this very day only in Limoux, under the strictest AOC rules. Blanquette de Limoux is the oldest appellation in Languedoc-Roussillon, and one of the first in France. It has the lowest permitted maximum yield of any sparkling wine in the country, and is made exclusively from hand harvested grapes.
This sparkling wine is made from 90% Mauzac and 10% Chardonnay/Chenin Blanc at a yield of 45 hl/ha. The three grape varieties are fermented separately in stainless steel vats with the secondary fermentation in the bottle (méthode champenoise) and allowed to rest for 24-36 months on the lees. The dosage is 6 gm.
“The calligraphy on the label is borrowed directly from an early 16th century manuscript housed in the archives of Carcassonne, stating that Blanquette was twice the price of a still wine at that time. This is the oldest written reference to any sparkling wine in the world.” – Jan and Caryl Perman, proprietors.
Website: http://www.rives-blanques.com
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Selected
and Imported by:
Chicago,
Illinois |
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