2022 Matthias & Emile Roblin Reserve de Maimbray Cuvee Terres Blanches Sancerre 750 ml

The very best names in Sancerre do ALL the little things right, from employing top-notch, labor-intensive farming to aging the wine for a little longer before release, often in older barrels.

Each one of those details is expensive, which is why names like Cotat and Vacheron easily command $60+ per bottle. So when our friend Juliet—a Paris native and impeccably connected wine pro—told us that Matthias and Emile Roblin would soon be joining that group, we were all ears. 

From the first sip, the Roblins’ 2022 instantly vaulted into the top echelon of Sancerre we’ve tasted in the last year—unbelievably classy for the price.

Decanter magazine named Matthias Roblin as one of the new Sancerre producers to watch, in 2006, and the estate has enjoyed a meteoric rise since then. Matthias’s brother Emile joined him the same year as his Decanter profile, and they’ve been reinvesting a significant portion of their modest profits back into the winery every year since.

In the cellar, Matthias and Emile have progressively moved to more and more fermentation and aging in large wood casks. These vessels are expensive to buy and maintain, but they create texture and complexity that provides nuance and intrigue in the finished wine. Additionally, the winery has been updated so that only gravity is used to move the wine between vessels, a much gentler process that preserves an extra layer of aromatics.

The combination of everything that they’ve done has elevated their wines to the point that they can challenge the absolute best of Sancerre—wines like Cotat, Crochet, and Vacheron. Fortunately, their relative-unknown status makes them exceptional values, for now.