A wine for every fish in the sea

The perfect little fillets of sole slide into the hot butter, and as they start to sizzle I pull a bottle of Sancerre from the fridge and pop the cork. Everybody ditches their Champagne flutes as I turn the fillets and pour Sancerre all around, then the fish slides onto plates and we sit down to feast. Wonderfully simple, and simply wonderful.

To me, it doesn’t get much better than perfectly fresh fish served with fragrant, crisp Sauvignon Blancs from the upper Loire Valley of France. I discovered the match on an early visit to Paris, when I happened to order a carafe of white wine in a bistro that got its house wine directly from Sancerre.

That carafe was filled with revelations. I fell in love with those pure scents and flavors -- a meadow in the rain, the minerally savor of wet stone, a thread of peachy or melony fruit lingering through the finish -- and, unique to wines from the Loire among all the world’s Sauvignon Blancs, a palate-caressing tenderness at the heart of the wine.

Over the years, I would repeatedly find that crisp Sauvignon Blancs, especially Sancerre and its close cousin Pouilly-Fume (from Pouilly-Sur-Loire, just across the river) were ideal with just about any seafood.

Now I buy cases of Sancerre and some Pouilly-Fume every year to drink throughout the annual cycle of delectable proteins from the sea: oysters and Dungeness crab and cilantro-steamed clams, grilled sand dabs and rockfish, fresh Alaskan halibut and sauteed rex and petrale sole, scallops and spot prawns. It’s perfect too, with the first local asparagus each spring, then with grilled vegetables from the farmers market all summer long.

And these wines are great for cocktails because they’re dry and snappy and won’t kill the palate like a bombastic Chardonnay.

I find myself buying several producers’ wines year after year. Some, like Jean Reverdy and Pascal Cotat, I’ve visited over the years. Others, such as Regis Minet, were so impressive as random buys -- I’ll try any Sancerre or Pouilly-Fume at least once -- that I try to buy a case or two of each vintage (for example, I get Minet’s wines directly from importer Kermit Lynch in Berkeley). Luckily, this is not a particularly expensive passion; a case of outstanding Sancerre can cost less than a single bottle of California cult wine.

I especially enjoy exploring the specific character of each vintage in comparison with previous years. In fact, one of the big draws for me in wines from long-established European appellations is that they showcase vintage variation, rather than trying to smooth it over as most New World producers do. For example, the steel-engraved elegance of Sancerre from a balanced, moderate growing season like ’02 is a different expression than the peachy opulence of wines from an extremely warm year like ’03 -- and yet the rigorous viticultural and winemaking traditions of each vigneron assure that the spirit of the place shines through. Tasting several vintages of, say, Cotat’s Les Monts Damnes is like looking at a familiar landscape in different types of light.

Because, of course, that first carafe in Paris sent me to Sancerre itself where, like putting a face on a phone acquaintance, I put a landscape on the pleasure of the wine. Sancerre is only about a hundred miles southeast of Paris, but it’s another world. The fabled river, which flows almost due north at that point, looks like a plane of sand bars and ribbony puddles. The terrain looks as if it had been shattered and glued back together, deeply faulted limestone sediments forming mismatched hills and swales with grim little villages tucked in here and there. In summer the hills are covered with a kind of tattered green chenille blanket, each vine looking very serious about pulling water from the chalky ground.

The grimmest village is on the highest hill: Sancerre, known long ago by the conquering Romans as the Fort of the Holy Satyrs. That fortified Celtic settlement is long gone. Some of the Roman structures remain, but Sancerre today looks like a medieval town with a few modern touches (like too many cars for its tiny streets). From a portion of its ramparts there’s a good view of another old town across the Loire to the southeast: Pouilly-Sur-Loire.

The vineyards around Pouilly have flintier soils than those on the Sancerre side; they yield Sauvignon with a characteristic gun smoke scent -- hence the name Pouilly-Fume (Sauvignon Blanc is called Blanc Fume on that side of the river). I probably drink two or three bottles of Sancerre for every one of Pouilly-Fume because of that edgier, more assertive character, but I often drink Pouilly with mesquite-grilled fish, freshwater fish such as trout and sturgeon, and with such fattier ocean fish as halibut and shark.

A big part of the reason Sancerre is so consistently and unmistakably Sancerre-like is that the Sauvignon Blanc vines have been tuned to the terrain for at least a thousand years, and the wines express the essence of the limestone soils, moderate climate and varied exposures of hills formed during the Cretaceous era. At that time, the Paris Basin was a warm inland sea teeming with tiny mollusks. Their shells eventually formed the white calcareous rock that makes those hills glow eerily by moonlight and provides a perfectly hydrated medium for vine roots. In places, especially east of the river around Pouilly-Sur-Loire, there are concentrations of reddish silica called flint, which can impart that subtle gunpowder-like smokiness to wines.

The vineyards in the hills around Sancerre are thought to be where the Sauvignon Blanc vine originated, possibly selected from wild vines and propagated by the wine-minded monks in the Saint-Satur abbey during the Middle Ages. Some scholars believe it was first cultivated in the Graves district near Bordeaux, but Sauvignon has never achieved sovereignty there, and the upper Loire remains the undisputed spiritual home and world capital of Sauvignon Blanc wines.

That’s saying a lot, because Sauvignon is among the most ubiquitous grape varieties, and it yields a number of different styles of wine. But although I like many Sauvignon Blancs from Napa Valley, South Africa’s Capetown area, Marlborough in New Zealand and Bordeaux (where Sauvignon is usually blended with Semillon), none of them consistently approach the Loire’s magic combination of vibrant intensity, purity of fruit, luscious acidity, ripe flavor at moderate alcohol, and that signal tenderness on the palate. Perhaps the greatest revelation of that long-ago carafe of Sancerre was the way it informed my lifelong love of wine. It steered me toward the endless pleasure of wines that consistently express true regional character, something that’s just beginning to evolve in California, even as it’s becoming less common in Europe. Drinking superb local wines is one of the greatest rewards of travel, and it’s something we can take home.

Whenever I open a bottle of Sancerre, I have that indescribable sense of place. And often with the first sip, I marvel that my favorite fish wine comes from vines that have their roots deep in the fossilized remains of seafood that was fresh 60 million years ago, but never got to swim in a butter-lemon-caper sauce.

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Some Sancerres to sip

These outstanding Sancerres show why the upper Loire is the world capital of terroir-expressive Sauvignon Blanc. Most are from the very warm 2003 vintage, which yielded relatively ripe, full-bodied wines that still have that amazing acidity.

2003 Pascal Cotat “Les Monts Damnes” Sancerre. Old-style Sancerre in its youth, a big Sauvignon that will age well, yet was perfect with grilled halibut last week. $30 at Manhattan Liquor in Manhattan Beach.

2002 Daniel Haas Selection Vieilles Vignes Sancerre. Brilliant, seductive perfume (white blossom, peach, tangerine), full-bodied yet pure and buoyant, with a fine thread of minerality. $15 at Beverage Warehouse in Marina del Rey.

2003 Alphonse Mellot “La Moussiere” Sancerre. Chardonnay weight with Sauvignon clarity and definition, and that Sancerre heart of gold -- or, rather, limestone. $26 at Wine House in West L.A.

2003 Paul et Jean-Marc Pastou “La Cote de Sury” Sancerre. Firm, fleshy fruit with succulent minerally undertones; a bold statement and yet there’s the signal tenderness, like a sunny glade in a forest. $17 at Beverages & More in Pasadena.

2003 Domaine Vacheron Sancerre. Glorious Sancerre with a piercing fragrance of flowers and stone, at once substantial and ethereal, with a touch of pure white peach at the heart. $24 at Wine House.

-- Rod Smith