Muscadet

Muscadet is the wine; Melon de Bourgogne is the grape. As the name suggests it originated in Burgundy, where it was banned in the seventeenth century for being insufficiently distinguished, and it found a permanent home at the other end of the Loire, in the flat country around Nantes where the river meets the Atlantic.

It survived there for a practical reason: it is unusually frost-resistant. After the catastrophic winter of 1709 killed most of the region's vines, Melon was replanted because it could take the cold, and it has been the grape of the Pays Nantais ever since.

The wine is bone dry, light-bodied, high in acid and almost aggressively neutral — green apple, lemon, a saline note, and very little else in the way of fruit. What makes it worth drinking is a technique rather than a flavour. Sur lie means the wine stays on its spent yeast sediment through the winter without racking, and is bottled directly off it in the spring. The lees add a creamy texture, a faint bready savour and sometimes a trace of carbon dioxide that gives the wine a slight prickle.

The best zone is Sèvre et Maine, and a new tier of cru communal wines — Gorges, Clisson, Le Pallet and others — requires extended lees ageing of up to two years or more. These are a revelation to anyone who thinks of Muscadet as cheap seafood wine: dense, mineral, and capable of ageing for a decade.

With oysters it remains close to unbeatable, and the pairing is not an accident of geography alone.

The sur lie designation is a legal one and worth looking for: it requires the wine to spend the winter on its lees without racking and to be bottled directly off them, between March and November following the harvest. That is what produces the creamy texture and faint spritz that distinguish real Muscadet from simple neutral white.

The cru communal system, introduced from 2011, is the more significant development. Wines from Gorges, Clisson, Le Pallet, Goulaine and several other villages must spend between seventeen and twenty-four months or more on lees, and they produce dense, mineral, ageworthy whites that bear little resemblance to the category's reputation and cost a fraction of comparable Burgundy.

The region has been hit repeatedly by frost and by falling demand, and the vineyard area has shrunk by more than half since the 1990s. What survives is increasingly concentrated in the hands of growers making the serious version.