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With at least one Wine Rambler new year's resolution still unfulfilled, a sense of duty and self-discipline finally compelled me to open a Loire white. I also wanted to try one of the esoteric, hyper-regional french wines that the really knowledgeable cats like Cory Cartwright from Saignée are always on about. I had hoped for something original to broaden my wine horizon, but this Chenin Blanc from a legendary Vouvray producer turned out to be rather more - a real shock to the Riesling-saturated system.

Deep straw colour. Dried apricots and figs in the nose, a whiff of petrol too, not unlike a mature dry Riesling in some ways, but then again completely different (does that help?). Very tight and with gripping acidity at first, with a hard-core stoniness I have never before tasted (like drinking pebbles from a riverbed, as Mrs. Wine Rambler put it), the wine completely changed and opened up with some exposure to air. This metamorphosis alone was a thing of wonder, let alone the rich, oily notes of dried fruit that now started to come out. Easily one of the deepest, most charismatic wines I have had.

With it, we had goat cheese baked in pastry dough on a bed of red onions - a success, and a good companion to the Vouvray. Which, can I just mention this again, was jaw-droppingly good.