The Sweet Life

Can this Monbazillac open your mind?

"I want to get out of the ghetto," says Bruno Bilancini.

Below him, the hillside of browning Muscadelle and Semillon grapes in southwest France's Monbazillac appellation doesn't look much like a "ghetto." In fact, the gentle slopes look more like a vinous paradise.

But I get the point.

Bilancini's Château Tirecul La Gravière makes delicious cult sweet white wines that have been compared with Sauternes' Château d'Yquem. But he's frustrated that fine sweet wines are still an afterthought in the wine world. The French, for example, drink sweet whites with foie gras around the holidays, then forget about them for a year. We Americans relegate them to the dessert course.

"I want to get them out of the ghetto of foie gras and dessert wine," says Bilancini, rattling off some surprisingly delicious-sounding pairings: white meats, spring rolls, strong cheeses and curries. Even entire cuisines like Szechuan, Indian and Moroccan.

In this gorgeous Dordogne region—where foie gras, duck magret and black truffles are the trinity of culinary icons—world wine lovers end up at Bilancini's door. Many consider him the maestro of Monbazillac—leader of a small group of standouts in a large (5,000-acre) appellation whose reputation has suffered from mediocrity.

The son of an Italian father and French mother, Bilancini studied enology in Bordeaux and, in the late 1980s, worked for the Monbazillac cooperative. He and his wife, Claudie, looked for their own vineyard to develop but could afford little.

In 1992, an opportunity to rent opened at Tirecul La Gravière, a neglected historic estate that in the 18th century had been classified by Dutch traders among the prized Monbazillac grands crus. By 1997, the Bilancinis could afford to buy the 22-acre estate with its 400-year-old cellars.

The real action is in the vineyards, where Bilancini now has about 16 acres under production, equally divided between Muscadelle and Semillon, with several more acres of newly planted Chenin Blanc, which he plans to experiment with as they come on line.

With easterly and northern exposures, Tirecul La Gravière's vineyards are well-positioned for development of the beneficial fungus that gives Monbazillac wines their distinctive character, as early morning fog is followed by warming midday sun.

If conditions are too damp, Botrytis cinerea—the same mold that puts a beard on fruit left out in your kitchen—will overrun grape bunches and ruin a crop with what's known as gray rot. But if controlled by drier intervals, botrytis becomes the vaunted "noble rot" that slowly dehydrates white grapes, concentrating flavors and sugar.

Making a fine wine from botrytized grapes is work for fanatics, but even so, few in Monbazillac employ methods as intensive as at Tirecul La Gravière. At harvesttime, the picking teams work nearly grape by grape, making up to 11 passes to get the crop selection right. For the best results, Bilancini, who works organically, wants only grapes about halfway to raisins. "The first selection we make is the selection of harvesters," Bilancini says. "Intelligent people who understand."

He presses the partially dried grapes into wood barriques to ferment on indigenous yeasts. Depending on the cuvee, wines stay in barrel from about eight months up to three years. Bilancini produces about 1,500 cases a year: one dry white and three sweet wines, the latter in 500ml bottles. In good years, his wines are topped by his Cuvee Madame. In all his wines, he aims to blend the structure and creaminess of Semillon with the aromatics and elegance of Muscadelle.

Though such sweet wines can age more than a century, Bilancini prefers them in their youth, when they are marked by the taste of sweet orange peels, and after 25 years, when they begin to reveal fig and nutty aromas.

Because the Muscadelle and Semillon are mixed together in the vineyards and harvesters pick from both types of vines at the same time, Bilancini can't say how much of each variety goes into each bottling. "I know what's in the vines," he says. "But I don't know what's in the barrels because in the [harvesting] baskets we have both."

In other words, who cares about grape percentages? They aren't what will get Monbazillac out of its wine ghetto.