Winemaker Notes
Serve chilled and enjoy with appetizers, seafood and poultry.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
This grows at a parcel within the Clos de Nouys; the wine aged for several months in three-year-old casks from Cognac. This wine’s acidity may feel steely and unforgiving right now, but a day or two of air takes it into realms of wildflower honey and spring rain. The fruit fills out, saturating that lean frame with notes of beeswax and lanolin. Tuck this in your cellar and you’ll be happy to find it in ten years.
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Wine Enthusiast
This is a dry wine, although still retaining those enticing honey flavors that are typical of Loire Chenin Blanc. Apple and ripe pear flavors are laced with intense acidity. Its delicate white-flower perfumes are ethereal.
Editors' Choice
Unquestionably one of the most diverse grape varieties, Chenin Blanc can do it all. It shines in every style from bone dry to unctuously sweet, oaked or unoaked, still or sparkling and even as the base for fortified wines and spirits. Perhaps Chenin Blanc’s greatest asset is its ever-present acidity, maintained even under warm growing conditions. Somm Secret—Landing in South Africa in the mid 1800s, today the country has double the acreage of Chenin Blanc planted compared to France. There is also a new wave of dedicated producers committed to restoring old Chenin vines.
An important white wine appellation in the Touraine and one of the top in all of the Loire, Vouvray uniquely specializes in a wide range of styles from dry to sweet, and still to sparkling, each with its own definitive character. Vouvray is almost always 100% Chenin blanc (however up to 5% Menu Pineau is theoretically allowed but not often used).
Vouvray is also the name of a pretty little town just east of Tours on the northern bank of the Loire—its vineyards surround it to the northeast. Houses and cellars are carved out of the local tuffeau, a chalky or sandy, fine-grained limestone. Vineyards inhabit clay and gravel topsoil over tuffeau on the plateau, the best of which have a slight slope with a southerly aspect.
Chenin blanc’s high acidity and natural adaptability allow it to produce a wide range of styles with enormous success. Styles under the Vouvray name include sparkling, both Brut and Demi-Sec and still: Sec (dry) and Tendre (off-dry) as well as Demi-Sec (noticeably sweet), Moelleux (very sweet) and Liquoreaux (botrytized). Most can age about five years but the best quality versions will continue to improve over decades.