At the corner of Crosby and Spring streets in New York City stands Balthazar, red awnings fluttering, sidewalk tables full and a steady parade of Sancerre rolling through its service doors. Here, says wine director Rebecca Banks, Sancerre is ordered by the pallet—that’s 56 cases at a time—and its demand is immune to season. It’s consistently the No. 1 glass pour at $26, outpacing the second most popular white wine by the glass, Chablis, by 1,500 glasses last year.
This affection for Sancerre is, of course, not entirely new; it’s been a staple Parisian bistro glass pour for ages. The 1970s ushered an affinity for all things French (and a boom in Gallic chefs opening restaurants) in the United States—and with it came Sancerre. In 1982, Patricia Wells, then the restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, wrote: “The dry, flinty white Sancerre is a wine with backbone, one that is simply for drinking and enjoying rather than pontificating about.”
Then, as now, Sancerre is not just a wine, but a brand, and for the myriad folks who walk into a restaurant and order a glass of Sancerre™, the inference is clear. Banks, who worked in fashion before transitioning into wine in 2004, recalls “coming into Balthazar with a previous boss in ’98 or ’99 and she said, ‘We’re going to sit down and order a glass of Sancerre and moules frites.’ And I understood that this is what you do as an adult in the working world.” Sancerre carries the appeal of being both sophisticated and casual; it’s French, but still easy enough for English speakers to pronounce.
It is also, for an increasing number of restaurant wine buyers, persona non grata. Many now refuse to carry it, citing everything from its rising prices to imbalanced price-to-quality ratio to being philosophically at odds with natural wine. (To be clear, we’re talking about the larger-production, “moderately”priced wines here—not the often-outstanding midrange Sancerres from producers like Gérard Boulay or top-tier ones from names like Edmond Vatan and François Cotat.) “I can’t even recall an actual Sancerre AOC wine that I could pour by the glass; they’re too expensive,” says Mackenzie Hoffman, wine director at Stir Crazy in Los Angeles.
“These price increases, a result of intermittent scarcity, demand and standard-issue inflation, have led many sommeliers to reconsider the ‘whatever the customer wants’ adage in favor of offering a wine they feel is a better value.”
The joke about Sancerre is that the majority of its faithful worshippers don’t even know that it’s made from sauvignon blanc. So, just in case, a quick primer: Sancerre is a region in the middle of France’s Loire Valley, planted with about 6,000 acres of sauvignon blanc vines (as well as pinot noir, which is garnering its own following—a story for another time). It’s not always easy to grow grapes there; the weather is volatile, which means that some years, such as 2021, producers can lose the lion’s share, some 70 percent of their crop—not great for a wine that has become a restaurant imperative. “2022 was a more normal production year, and on the heels of 2021, people just went bonkers,” says Whitney Schubert, French portfolio manager for importer Polaner Selections. “They had not been satiated in the previous vintage and the wine that came in just evaporated.” Demand is not slowing. The Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins du Centre-Loire reports that in 2023, of the nearly 2 million cases of Sancerre blanc produced, 32 percent was exported to the U.S., 6 percent more than in 2022.
Eric Harris, wine director at Durham, North Carolina’s Nanas, says he used to buy Sancerre wholesale at $144 a case for his by-the-glass pour a decade ago; today, he’s paying $240 a case for Jean Reverdy’s Sancerre, which translates to $21 a glass at the restaurant. These price increases, a result of intermittent scarcity, demand and standard-issue inflation, have led many sommeliers to reconsider the “whatever the customer wants” adage in favor of offering a wine they feel is a better value. Often those wines come from neighboring regions.
“There are a few Sancerre satellite appellations sommeliers will pour, so as not to cannibalize the rest of the by-the-glass list,” says Schubert, pointing to appellations like Menetou-Salon, Quincy and Coteaux du Giennois. These regions are similarly defined by ribbons of Kimmeridgian limestone soil, the vaunted dirt of Sancerre, and produce wines from sauvignon blanc. The relative obscurity of these regions means that the wines are often priced more affordably, making it possible to include them by the glass in the $15 range. That said, Harris notes that he’d originally had a $15 glass of Menetou-Salon from Domaine Chavet on the Nanas list, but once he was able to get his hands on the Reverdy Sancerre, he swapped it in; sales were double that of the Menetou at $5 more per glass. Such is the power of Sancerre™.
Has Pét-Nat Jumped the Shark?
The category of lightly fizzy, sometimes cloudy sparkling wines has gone from somewhat-niche party wine to full-on brand.
Where’d You Go, Piquette?
Just a few years ago, the low-key, fizzy category was wine’s coolest new fad. Now it’s practically endangered.
For the natural wine inclined, it’s the philosophical reputation of Sancerre that has kept it off current wine lists. “Consistency is the ultimate goal for a lot of those wines,” says Ellis Srubas-Giammanco, wine director at New York’s new Penny restaurant, pointing to the broad use of mechanical farming and added yeast in the region. “I think we’re getting past the narrative that an appellation on the label necessarily translates to quality,” he says, pointing to the proliferation of declassified wines across France.
At Penny, Srubas-Giammanco keeps two Sancerres from Vincent Gaudry on his by-the-bottle list (“I always want to support his wines; they have transparency and depth and don’t taste like most Sancerre in the best way possible,” he says) priced at $90 and $125. When it comes to by-the-glass offerings, he directs Sancerre drinkers, those looking for a “a bright, crisp, fresh white wine that’s not overly weighty,” to pinot blanc from Domaine Schoffit in Alsace or Spanish xarel-lo from Bodega Clandestina. In his estimation, the person who comes in looking for Sancerre (and they do, all the time) is simply asking for a wine that is “fresh, salty, food-friendly, and it’s not overly demanding.” Directing that guest to a lesser-known region that, he says, ticks even more of those boxes than a lower-priced Sancerre, is a greater service to that drinker.
Hoffman of Stir Crazy likewise always has “a white wine in a ‘Sancerre style’ that anchors the by-the-glass white wine offerings.” In that slot, she is currently pouring a weissburgunder from Germany’s Pfalz region, though she’s also subbed in Austrian grüner veltliner and aligoté from Burgundy. “The demand for this style sustains regardless of trends,” she says.
Most sommeliers are now inevitably faced with the decision to embrace a juggernaut of a wine that will cannibalize sales of the other wines on their list, or explain to guests why it’s not there and what will satisfy them in its place. “[It] isn’t going away any time soon,” says Evelyn Goreshnik, wine director of Last Word Hospitality and buyer for Michael’s in Los Angeles. “Sancerre everyone knows, and many love.”
