Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Baumard 2004 Quarts de Chaume reflects painstaking, multiple pickings of perfectly botrytized fruit, with plenty of gold-green grapes to insure juiciness, vivacity and flux. An intense and complex aromatic mingling of candied grapefruit and pineapple, quince jelly, pear drops, white raisin, musk and truffle leads to a palate of intense richness yet buoyant elegance and transparency to mineral, floral and spice nuances. The superb finish manages to be refreshingly, invigoratingly juicy and salty while at the same time possessing honeyed richness and implosive concentration of candied citrus and overripe orchard fruits.
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Wine Spectator
Ripe and stylish, with fig, pear tartine and green plum flavors gliding along a lovely, creamy palate. Its accessibility belies the vibrant minerality on the finish for now; this should be cellared a bit.
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.
Known for its delightful whites and sparkling Pétillant and Mousseux, made predominantly of Chenin blanc, Anjou has a temperate and dry maritime climate. The region's limited temperature variations are admiringly referred to locally as the “douceur angevine,” or “Anjou sweetness.” Fruit forward rosé and red wines from Cabernet Franc and Gamay merit Anjou its success within the Loire subregions.