10 minute read
hurrah for the loire
A group of stir-crazy independents were itching to take part in their first post-pandemic buying trip – and what better destination could there be than the multi-faceted Loire Valley?
David Williams reports back on an eventful five days
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Photography by Riaz Syed
If, after nearly two years without so much as stepping in a vineyard, you were casting around for the best European region to make your first postpandemic wine-buying trip, it would be hard to think of a better pick than the Loire Valley.
Here, after all, is a classic French wine region that, in terms of sheer variety – of grapes, terroir and winemaking approach and style – is like several regions rolled into one: nowhere else can offer so much in one place, while still retaining an underlying, regional identity.
Indeed, as our party of seven independent wine merchants soon discovered after converging on the Loire from their homes across the UK in midNovember, the better part of five days in the region may only scratch the surface of what’s available.
But where else in the world could you move so seamlessly from vibrant, fragrant
young dry whites to exquisite lateharvested elixirs, via some of the world’s best (and best-value) sparkling wines, red wines both youthfully juicy and built to age, incredibly complex barrel-fermented dry Chenin, and rosés filled to bursting with character and gastronomic potential?
Vouvray: A classically styled beginning
The trip began in one of the Loire’s most historic and famous appellations, and one of the best places in the world to grow Chenin Blanc: Vouvray, and the cool cellars of one its most fastidious and qualityfocused producers, Domaine VigneauChevreau.
A long-term advocate of sustainable victiculture, winemaker Christophe Vigneau, who runs the 33ha family domaine with brother Stéphane (the fifth generation), explained that “organics is a way of life,” at the domaine, and has been since he took over from his father in 1995.
Only the second estate in the region to go biodynamic, the green pioneers’ production is a study in fine Chenin Blanc in all its forms, with the Vigneau frères convinced their approach is the best way to help preserve Vouvray’s characteristic freshness as the climate warms.
For Camilla Wood of the Somerset Wine Company, these wines “were among the most memorable of the trip. Taut, baked apple and stone-fruit layered sparklers and the most sublime Chenin Blanc, Cuveé de Silex: now in a richer style due to hotter vintages but no less complex and beautiful for it, in my view. Their 1990 Clos Baglin dessert wine was a very special conclusion to the tour here.”
Another pair of passionately committed brothers were on hand to welcome and guide the merchants at fellow family-run Vouvray cellar, Caves Gautier. And a guide was most certainly necessary as Benoit Gautier led the merchants through the byzantine network of caves carved out of the tuffeau (limestone) below his winery.
The erudite, professorial Gauthier was an endless source of fascinating details of the region’s history and terroir, which he dispensed as the merchants followed, sometimes crouching into the darkness, the chalky taste filling the senses, just as it runs through the Gautier family’s extensive and expressive range of sparkling, dry and sweet Chenin Blancs.
“I’d certainly keep an eye on what he’s doing,” said Stonewines’ Riaz Syed. “I thought the quality was good. And I loved his enthusiasm.”
Alex Edwards of York Wines
Touraine: Freshness and variety
After a memorable homemade lunch deep in the caves with the Gautiers, the group left Vouvray behind. But the themes of family and careful stewardship of the land continued throughout a fascinating afternoon in Touraine.
First up was the immaculately tended 60ha family estate Domaine de la Renne, which is run on organic lines (including 6ha in official conversion) by Patrice Dupas and Laurent Brunet.
The pair’s efforts have transformed the look of the domaine, with vineyards that, in Dupas’s words, “looked like the moon” before the current generation took over now filled with cover crops and flowers.
The vineyards are planted to a broad palette of grape varieties, both red (Cabernet Sauvignon, Gamay, Malbec aka Côt, and local speciality Pineau d’Aunis) and white (Sauvignon Blanc plus a little Chenin), with production in Touraine, Touraine-Chenonceaux and IGP Val de Loire, while the winemaking is modern, clean, focused.
For York Wines’ Alex Edwards, the Domaine de la Renne Touraine Sauvignon was a standout. “Straightforward, fresh and light, with hints of blackcurrant, nettles and gooseberry, and prickly – in a nice way” it was “really quite good for the price”, said Edwards, who also enjoyed the domaine’s cherry-scented Gamay.
Working in the same trio of appellations, but at a considerably smaller (12ha) scale, Domaine du Vieil Orme charmed the merchants with the quality of its wines and what Marc Hough of Cork of the North called the “lovely vibe of the place”.
“This is exactly the sort of place you hope to find when you’re on a trip like this,” Hough added. “The wines are great and are going in the right direction, and the people are warm and lovely – the kind you want to work with.”
Victoria Platt of Vagabond
Camilla Wood of The Somerset Wine Company
Winemaker Laurent Benoist and family’s vineyards near their home in the village of Saint Julien-de-Chédon are just 5km from Château de Chenonceau. They yield impressively balanced Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Chenin, for dry, sweet and crémant styles. The group was particularly impressed with the fragrant, ageworthy reds made either exclusively or with a little Cabernet Franc from Côt.
As Camilla Wood said: “This was an adventurous, adaptable, pioneering but typically modest farming family letting the land talk for them.”
A red-letter day
For the second day of the trip, the focus
Will Honeywell of Vinological
was at first glance narrower: all the estates visited were red-wine specialists, and Cabernet Franc specialists at that.
As it turned out, however, that didn’t make the visits – or the wines tasted – any less diverse than the previous day’s multicoloured tour of Touraine and Vouvray. Modern-day Loire Cabernet Franc speaks in a variety of very different accents, it seems.
At the group’s first stop, the benchmark Chinon producer Domaine du Saut au Loup, for example, everything owner Eric Santier does is geared towards getting the best expression of the clay-limestone terroir.
Santier, who bought the 13ha (12ha Cabernet Franc, 1ha Chenin Blanc) estate eight years ago after leaving his career in the food industry, is currently in the process of converting officially to organics, as well as changing the name from the previous Domaine Dozon (which you can still see on some labels).
He makes a variety of Cabernet Franc cuvées from different plots, with his top wine, Le Grand Saut, coming from a plot of 70 to 80-year-old vines. As Albertine’s Rob Freddi, for whom the domaine was a highlight, said, Santier’s wines show just how versatile Chinon Cabernet Franc can be.
“Chinon Cabernet Franc like this works in every season,” Freddi added. “It works when it’s the summer and served cold, and in the winter it can still offer the comforting hug, the warming hug. I think it has a really great future in the market.”
From Chinon, it was on to another classic Cabernet Franc appellation: SaintNicolas-de-Bourgueil. As Carine Rezé, of Domaine de la Jarnoterie told the group, Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil is a “very small village” appellation, but its expression of Cabernet Franc is “unique”.
Certainly, the merchants were charmed by the Jarnoterie experience. The fifthgeneration family firm uses neutral chestnut and old oak for ageing, as well as fermenting all its production in concrete tank, as it looks to make the fruit the star in its range of Cabernet Franc cuvées, which all take their name from musical terms, a reflection of the music-teacher background of Rezé who runs the domaine with her winemaker husband, Didier.
The wines also benefit from being aged in another one of the region’s remarkably deep limestone cellars, hidden some 30 metres down, and accessed via a 250-metre drive ever deeper into the earth’s interior. The visit was “the highlight of the trip” for Will Honeywell. “A wine library trapped in another age, with the atmosphere of a villain’s secret hideout” was how he described the experience.
“We were presented with a beautiful lunch, fit for the elite of Paris, surrounded by rows of chestnut barrels and a roaring fire fuelled by Cabernet Franc vine cuttings.”
No less impressive, to Honeywell and the rest of the group, was another feat of innovative engineering, this time from
Riaz Syed of Stonewines
a mere century (rather than several centuries) into the past.
Based around a very special 10ha clos (or stone wall-enclosed single-vineyard), Clos Cristal represents an audacious bid by leading Loire co-operative Alliance Loire to establish Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil in high-end restaurants and retail.
The clos was developed by Antoine Cristal, the debonair textile magnate and friend of artists such as Claude Monet. Cristal came up with a way of planting vines in which the roots are placed on the northern side of a wall running across the vineyard, while the vine itself is trained through a hole so that the canopy grows onto a south-facing wall.
The idea was to balance freshness with ripeness. And while the jury may still be out on the science, the results of the first (2017) vintage of the wine produced since Alliance Loire took over the vineyard and began renovations in 2016 suggest there may be something in it. “Tasting the Clos Cristal in the vineyard, surrounded by the red-speckled Cabernet Franc leaves, really brought the flavours to life, and I was delighted to experience an expression that I didn’t know Saumur-Champigny was capable of,” said Honeywell.
Anjou, Saumur and the diversity of the Middle Loire
The trip concluded with a return to the exuberant diversity of styles that characterises this beautiful corner of the wine world.
As well as in the wines themselves, there’s a healthy diversity of approach, too, in ways of making, marketing and selling wine. At Domaine Moncourt, for example, Jean-Charles Moreau’s raison d’être is to provide “as many people as I can with good-value wine”.
Having started working with his father selling wine “door-to-door”, the entrepreneurial Moreau has grown his business from 34ha to 120ha, supplying competitively priced varietal wines to export markets including Russia and China.
It may not be the most glamorous job in wine, but, as Edwards said, “someone has to do it” and Moreau’s affordable cuvées no doubt bring new consumers to the region and its array of small artisanal producers.
Vincent Esnou, whose Domaine de La Belle Etoile is based in the Anjou-Brissac appellation and produces wines of all colours and styles – from impressive oakaged dry Anjou Chenin to gloriously sticky, apple-tangy Coteaux de l’Aubance sweet wines, and vibrant crunchy Anjou-Brissac Cabernet Franc – is certainly in the latter, artisanal camp.
Esnou, who worked for many years in South Africa, also impressed with a Crémant de Loire rosé. “I get through the best part of a pallet of Prosecco rosé a month, and this is a much better wine that will appeal to the same audience,” said Marc Hough of Cork of the North.
For Riaz Syed of Stonewines, the penultimate visit was a validation of his buying choices. Syed already stocks a handful of wines sourced by Richard Kelley MW from the extensive portfolio of Les Caves de la Loire, which represents nine sites and 180 growers across the region.
So it was particularly gratifying for Syed to see the positive reaction to a number of Les Caves de la Loire wines, notably the opulent dry Chenin Feuille d’Or Anjou Blanc and the lusciously complex aged Coteaux du Layon dessert wines Moulin Touché 2003 and 1977.
The balanced golden richness of the very best Coteaux du Layon also provided the highlights of the group’s final visit, to the beautifully situated Château de Bellevue, which has some 35ha of vines, specialising in rich but balanced Chenin Blanc in Anjou Blanc, Savennières, as well as the sweet wine Coteaux du Layon Premier Cru Chaume et Quarts de Chaume Grand Cru.
With sweeping views across the Loire Valley, the estate was the ideal place to reflect on a week of stunning wines and fascinating visits, as the complex honeyed scents of Château de Bellevue’s Quart de Chaume 1997 Cuvée Polite lingered in the glass.
MARC HOUGH, CORK OF THE NORTH
