Winemaker Notes
Despite it being a challenging growing season, I’ve heard more than one vigneron from Chinon express a particular fondness for their 2021s, and when you taste an exceptional one like Baudry’s La Croix Boissée, it’s easy to see why. The nose takes a minute to open up, but when it does, the wine unfurls with plush, dark fruit and high-toned blood orange notes, autumnal woodsiness, and sleek tannins. It’s a classic Cabernet Franc with verve and a sense of place, built for the cellar. Vintages like 2021 serve as monuments to the wines that have defined Chinon for generations, like time capsules, giving pleasure to vignerons and wine drinkers alike.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Matured for two years in used barrels and an additional nine months in tanks, the 2021 Chinon La Croix Boissée reveals a complex bouquet of plums, mulberries, spices and smoke, intertwined with carnal, meaty notes. Medium to full-bodied, layered and textured, it is chiseled and tense with an enveloping core of fruit and structured, firm tannins that transition into a meaty finish. While the phenols slightly detract from the powdery, delicate texture of the tannins, it remains poised.
Cabernet Franc, a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, is the subtler and more delicate of the Cabernets. Today Cabernet Franc produces outstanding single varietal wines across the wine-producing world. Somm Secret—One of California's best-kept secrets is the Happy Canyon appellation of Santa Barbara. Here Cabernet Franc shines as a single varietal wine or in blends, expressing sumptuous fruit, savory aromas and polished tannins.
An important red wine appellation in the Touraine district of the Loire, Chinon produces fanciful, light-bodied reds from the Cabernet Franc grape. Chinon also makes charming rosés from the same grape as well as white wines from Chenin blanc. But the reds give the area its fame. Often scented with fresh herbs, black tea and violets, Chinon reds show a lovely combination of fruit and acidity. However, styles have become more concentrated and ripe in recent years from improvements in vineyard management. Modern methods include planting grass between vineyard rows, using higher trellises and deleafing to increase sunlight to berries and therefore improve ripening. Even still, red Chinon is intended to be a light to medium bodied, refreshing wine to be enjoyed in its youth.
Fuller-bodied Chinons come from vineyard sites on the clay and tuffeau limestone slopes, usually from the southern exposed slopes of Cravant-les-Coteaux, and the plateau above Beaumont. Lighter styled wines come from the sand and gravel vineyards near the Loire or Vienne Rivers with the most refined examples coming from the area around Panzoult