#6, Top 10 of 2017. This tilts toward the flattering side of off-dry, showing a plump feel to the core of creamed pear, white peach and yellow apple fruit. Lovely verbena, honeysuckle and mineral accents keep this balanced and driven, with a long finish that lets the fruit echo. Drink now through 2032.

93+ he 2016 Le Mont Demi-Sec from Domaine Huët is an excellent wine in the making, but this is more adolescent in personality than the Le Haut Lieu version and will demand some cellaring time before it starts to hit on all cylinders. The nose reluctantly offers up scents of pear, pineapple, wet stone minerality, orange blossoms, just a hint of lanolin, incipient honeycomb and an exotic topnote of lavender. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and reserved in profile, with outstanding mid-palate intensity, bright acids, fine focus and grip and a very, very long, soil-driven and primary finish. While this wine is not showing a whole lot of secondary components today, one can sense them waiting in the wings and all this beautiful wine will need is time in the cellar to blossom magically into a great bottle of demi-sec. Again, the elegance to come here is manifest and very, very promising!

Pebbly silex and green clay is probably the most exciting soil for the off-dry style of Huet's Le Mont Chenin Blanc. The 2016 Vouvray Le Mont Demi-Sec is a very good example. It opens with a clear, precise and smoky nose of crushed stones whereas the tropical fruit aromas remain discreet in the background. On the palate, this is an enormously pure, salty-piquant and delicate Vouvray of remarkable class and finesse. The wine has intensity, tension, lingering mineral expression and a stimulatingly pure, finessed and salty finish. Great length. This is not a big wine but a gorgeous one with a long life ahead. Tasted February 2018. - Stephan Reinhardt