The place#
The Loire is France’s longest river, and the vineyards I visit sit along its middle stretch, from Tours to Angers, through Touraine and Anjou, with a wider range of wine than any other valley in France can show. On the north bank east of Tours is Vouvray; opposite, between the Loire and the Cher, Montlouis-sur-Loire. Downstream the Vienne comes in under the fortress of Chinon, with Bourgueil across the water. An hour further west is Saumur, with the red-wine villages of Saumur-Champigny behind it: Chacé, Varrains, Champigny. Past Angers the rock changes, and Savennières and the Coteaux du Layon belong to Anjou.
What holds it together is a stone. Tuffeau, the soft pale limestone of the Paris Basin, built the châteaux, and its quarries became cellars and troglodyte houses. A tuffeau cellar holds about 12 °C all year, and the same stone lies under most of the vines. I like a region where the building material, the cellar and the soil are one thing.
Terroir: tuffeau, flint and the schist of Anjou#
Nothing here is high. The vineyards lie between roughly 30 and 120 metres on the plateaux above the rivers; Huet’s vineyards above Vouvray stand at about 80 to 100 metres.
In Touraine and around Saumur the tuffeau is capped by two soils every grower names: perruches, clay with flint, for tense, smoky Chenin, and aubuis, clay-limestone, for rounder wines that ripen earlier. West of Saumur the Paris Basin ends and the Massif Armoricain begins: schist, slate and volcanic rhyolite at Savennières, schist and quartz along the Layon. Locals call it Anjou noir against limestone Anjou blanc, and Chenin from schist is drier, stonier, slower to open.
The climate is Atlantic in Anjou and more continental east of Tours. Autumns are long and misty, so botrytis arrives in good years and sweet wine follows. The other side of that softness is frost: April 2016, 2017 and 2021 took much of the crop.
Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc#
Chenin Blanc, Pineau de la Loire to the old growers, is the white grape of the whole valley and the reason I built a tour here. High acidity, a texture of quince and beeswax, and the ability to be dry, off-dry, sweet or sparkling from one hill in one year. Savennières makes it bone dry. Vouvray and Montlouis make the whole range: sec, demi-sec, moelleux, and Pétillant or Crémant by the traditional method. The Coteaux du Layon is the sweet slope, and Quarts de Chaume within it is the Loire’s only grand cru. Montlouis is also where pétillant naturel came back into fashion, with Triple Zéro from Domaine de la Taille aux Loups; I explain the method in pét-nat explained.
Cabernet Franc, Breton around here, is the red. In Chinon, Bourgueil and Saumur-Champigny it gives mid-weight wines of raspberry, pencil shavings and green herbs, with an acidity that likes a slight chill and a plate of rillettes. On gravel it is light and quick; on tuffeau slopes it ages twenty years, as Clos Rougeard in Chacé showed. Grolleau, Pineau d’Aunis and Côt fill out the rosés and lighter reds; Sauvignon belongs to Touraine and Sancerre. Many of Anjou’s best growers bottle as Vin de France, so read the small type.
Producers to know#
Domaine Huet in Vouvray is where the Chenin conversation begins on my tour. Victor Huet bought Le Haut-Lieu in 1928; his son Gaston built the name and was mayor of Vouvray for over four decades; his son-in-law Noël Pinguet took the estate biodynamic from 1988. The Hwang family has owned it since 2003, with Sarah Hwang as president and Benjamin Joliveau making the wine since 2012. Three vineyards, about 30 hectares, Chenin only: Le Haut-Lieu on deep brown clay, Le Mont on stony green clay and flint, the walled Clos du Bourg on thin clay-limestone over tuffeau. The vintage decides the style, from sec to Moelleux Première Trie, and a Le Mont Sec, smoky and linear, is my reference dry Chenin. Visits are by appointment, and I make them.
Across the river in Montlouis, François Chidaine farms biodynamically, and Domaine de la Taille aux Loups, founded in 1988 by Jacky Blot and now led by his son Jean-Philippe, makes dry, barrel-raised Chenin (“Rémus” first among them) and the Triple Zéro pét-nat, with no chaptalisation, liqueur or dosage. In Vouvray itself, Philippe Foreau’s Clos Naudin is the classic counterpart to Huet.
For Cabernet Franc, Clos Rougeard in Chacé is the reference: eight generations of the Foucault family, old vines, long barrel ageing, release years later, new owners since 2017. It is not a cellar I can promise to open; I bring a bottle to the table when I can. Thierry Germain’s Domaine des Roches Neuves in Varrains is biodynamic; in Bourgueil, Catherine and Pierre Breton were natural pioneers before the word was common.
Anjou is the natural hub. Mark Angeli’s La Ferme de la Sansonnière in Thouarcé, biodynamic since the early 1990s and bottled as Vin de France, makes “La Lune”, dry Chenin of wax and salt; Richard Leroy and René and Agnès Mosse are the other names you will hear. At Savennières, Nicolas Joly’s Coulée de Serrant has been biodynamic since the 1980s. Classic and natural farm alike here; the difference is the cellar, which I lay out in natural wine explained.
La Dive Bouteille in February#
Once a year the natural-wine world drives to Saumur. La Dive Bouteille, founded in 1999 and run for most of its life by the journalist Sylvie Augereau, fills the tuffeau cellars of the Ackerman house on the first weekend of February with more than two hundred growers from France and abroad, Georgians among them. It is a trade fair, professionals only; I go as a sommelier, not as a guide. If you work in wine, tell me early and I will build a February around it.
What a day here looks like on tour#
We sleep in Tours or Saumur, and the drives are short. A Vouvray morning: coffee on the embankment, then a 10:00 cellar cut into the tuffeau. I ask for a sec, a demi-sec and an older moelleux from the same slope, so the group tastes the vintage deciding the style. Then across the bridge to Montlouis for the same grape on clay-flint, and a pét-nat before lunch.
Lunch is rillettes and rillons de Tours and a Sainte-Maure goat cheese with its straw through the middle. Around Saumur we eat fouées instead, small breads baked in a tuffeau oven and split open for rillettes and white beans.
The afternoon is red: Chacé or Varrains, Cabernet Franc from a cellar seven metres down, served at 14 °C, then a walk between the parcels. A château anchors the day, Chenonceau or Azay-le-Rideau in Touraine, or the fortress at Chinon where Joan of Arc met the Dauphin in 1429.
Practical#
The TGV from Paris Montparnasse reaches Tours in about an hour and Angers in an hour and a half; by road Tours is 240 kilometres, about 2 h 30. Tours to Vouvray is 10 kilometres, Montlouis 12, Chinon about 50, Saumur 70; Saumur to Chacé 6 kilometres, to Angers 45 minutes. From Brno I fly from Vienna or Prague to Paris, about 1 h 50.
Best months: May to June, when the vines flower and the cellars are open; September for the harvest, when small estates pick and do not receive; October for colour and the late moelleux picking. August closes many doors. Cellar visits are by appointment nearly everywhere.
The Loire is the whole of my Loire Chenin tour, Tours to Saumur and out to Anjou. For a shorter version, or a week that adds Sancerre or Muscadet, ask me about a private tour.
