In 1982, Didier Dagueneau returned to Saint-Andelain and refused to join the family domaine, setting out instead to make, as he put it, “the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world.” A former professional racer of both dog-sleds and motorcycle sidecars, he became the most divisive and most decorated figure in the Pouilly-Fumé appellation before his untimely 2008 death in an ultralight plane crash. His son Louis-Benjamin, then 26, took the reins alongside his sister Charlotte, and the wines have only sharpened. The domaine farms roughly 12 hectares in Pouilly across silex and clay, a parcel of Monts Damnés in Sancerre, and three hectares in Jurançon at the foot of the Pyrénées. Yields are kept at 75% of neighboring estates and vinified parcel-by-parcel; fermentations rely on indigenous yeasts; aging happens in cigar-shaped barrels and demi-muids designed for lees contact without aromatic distortion. Since 2017, in protest of an appellation rejection, the wines have been bottled as Vin de France.
The 2021 vintage was brutal. Frost devastated the crop, mildew followed, and the harvest came in roughly 60% short. Rather than bottle a diminished version of each single-parcel cuvée, Louis-Benjamin made a decision he has not made before or since: blend everything together — Pur Sang, Silex, Buisson Renard, and the rest — into a single wine and name it for the year that forced it. There is no Silex, no Pur Sang, no Buisson Renard from this vintage. There is only XXI.
The wine reads as the cool, acid-driven side of the Loire returned to form: gooseberry, lemon grass, green apple, elderflower, fresh hay, and a tangy citrus pith run through a silky, mouthwatering palate held by chiseled acidity. A clean nettle lift on the finish, with extended lees aging filling out the mid-palate. A wine as singular as the year that produced it, built to evolve serenely for twenty years or more from vintage.
