The first day of visits took us an hour or so west of Tours, from where we worked our way back.
In the morning we visited Château de Fesles in the appellation of Bonnezeaux. This beautiful estate is in prime ‘noble rot’ country, near the river Layon. On sunny south west facing slopes Chenin Blanc is affected by botrytis in the autumn, and the resulting shrivelled grapes are made into gloriously sweet wines. Chloë, our host, explained that in 2023 unseasonal rains in September reduced the amount of healthy noble rot, and so relatively little wine could be made under the Bonnezeaux appellation which only applies to wines made from botrytis affected grapes.
The weather was glorious and we enjoyed viewing the Chenin Blanc vines, which were just flowering, meaning it was 100 days to harvest! The estate is organic, so the wet spring had meant they had had to spray with Bordelais mixture (lime and copper sulphate) to combat mildew, but the vines looked very healthy. Alternate rows were tilled or left with grass to encourage beneficial insects.
In the winery we had a first – some Cabernet d’Anjou rosé was being filtered prior to bottling, and we could see the pinky wine flowing through hoses from one tank into the diatomous earth-filled filtration unit and then back into another tank. The barrel cellar was beautiful, with barrels of different sizes and materials, mostly full of dry Anjou Blanc wines given the low levels of noble rot last year. Just three barrels of Bonnezeaux were made.
Our tasting was super – a dry white from 2020, a demi sec Cabernet d’Anjou from 2023, an Anjou red from 2022 and then two vintages of Bonnezeaux, 2015 and 2018. All the wines were lovely, but the Bonnezeaux were superb, gloriously complex flavours, rich texture but lovely acidity keeping them really fresh. The accompanying cheeses were perfectly chosen – it was a great visit.
We took lunch en route to Chinon at the Auberge Bienvenue in Doué-en-Anjou, and enjoyed some Savennières with our langoustine mousee, and a Saumur Red with our steak.
Then on to Chinon and the famous Couly Dutheil estate. Tim and I visited the estate in 1998, and I fell in love with Chinon wines then. In recent years the focus of Arnaud Couly has been on expressing the innate qualities of the Cabernet Franc grape – with improved vineyard practices (and a warming climate) producing optimally ripe fruit, most of which sees no oak in the winery.
We visited the cellar, dug into the hillside on the north bank of the river Vienne, the limestone ‘tuffeau’ was used to build the many chateaux the Loire is famed for. It was really cool, a great place to store hundreds of thousands of bottles that are maturing before release.
Jimmy, our host, then took us into the tasting room, with a very splendid circular table, and we worked our way through most of their range of Chinons, a white, a rosé, and then five reds which showed progressive levels of concentration and quality, coming from different vineyard plots. We culminated with a bottle of the 1989 vintage of Clos d’Olive, one of their top wines, and it was a wonderful demonstration of how Cabernet Franc, the somewhat overlooked third black grape of Bordeaux, can make magnificently ageworthy wine.
The day was a perfect introduction to some of the key grape varieties and wine styles of Loire Valley.