Loire 2021 Releases

This is everything we’ve been looking for in a dry Vouvray: precise, chiselled Chenin fruit, balanced weight, sappy freshness, and flinty finish. It comes from clay and flint soils around the domaine, and is a great showcase for the 2019 vintage. So refreshing and well-made.

This sparkling wine is made by transferring the still sweet and fermenting grape juice into bottle, and then trapping the subsequent carbon dioxide as it continues to ferment to dryness in the bottle. No dosage is added, though the spent yeast cells are expelled, leaving a brilliant, crystalline sparkling wine behind. It has such a wonderful depth and complexity on the nose, with a vinous structure on the palate, and a salty zing. The creamy mousse wraps around crunchy apple fruit. Experience from tasting back vintages of this cuvée shows me this wine ages brilliantly, and will develop complex depth, and savoury precision with a few years in bottle. It’s one of the most exciting wines on the list this year.

This is the jewel in the crown of this domaine. It comes from a limestone (tuffeau) site overlooking the Loire which is so steep it has to be worked by horse instead of tractor. The nose has a chalky, mineral note alongside the apple and quince notes. The palate has a satisfying and silky weight, and a long, powerful finish.