Loire Tour du Vin 2023

I cannot believe that this was our 19th official tour – and our third visit back to the Loire Valley in France for the Loire Tour du Vin 2023.

We had a brilliant party of fifteen tourists on this trip on our driving tour from the UK to Loire Valley – spending three days wine tasting to tick off many of the main appellations of this fabulous wine region, that often gets put in the shadow of many of the other French regions.

On Day 1 of the trip, the tourists assembled in Jasnières, an appellation that i had not heard of before arriving on this trip. We visited Domaine de Belliviere, that was a very small producer, that had a nice selection of wines, a couple of which feature in Michelin star restaurants in London. The Chenin blanc grape is very suitable for ‘spicey’ meals, so features in some of the more gourmet curry houses in London.

We then moved onto the more familiar Loire space of Vouvray, where we returned to Marc Bredif – an estate with an extensive range of wines, from fizz, white, red and sweet. As you can see from one of the photos below, there wine cellars are amazing, where they hold some of their sweet wine, called Nectar, back to their oldest vintage of 1893.

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Day 2 we headed back West originally to Savennieres, to visit the super duper estate of Domaines des Baumard, where we were looked after by Florent Baumard and his son Charles. This really was a masterclass of knowledge – and the group certainly learnt a huge amount and we look forward to relisting Florent’s wines in the very near future.

Then we head towards Saumur for a tasting at Langlois Chateau – a pretty famous estate, primarily dealing with sparkling wines. It was very interesting to understand the scale of sparkling cremant here – compared to others such as Akerman, who make circa 25 million bottles per year of sparkling apparently!

Our last tasting of Day 2 was to the red wine making region of Chinon, where the majority grape variety in the region is Cabernet Franc. After a tour of the Domaine Grosbois estate, that is organic and biodynamic, we learnt about their pigs, cows, truffleing and of course about the vines. There were some super wines in the range here – and again we look forward to welcoming them to the Waud Wine Club list in the near future.

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Day 3 was a long first up drive East to Sancerre – we had three great tastings lined up here – including Pascal Jolivet, Henri Bourgeouis and Domaine Vacheron. All big names, all with fine wines, all with subtle differences in between. It was a super day to finish on the tour – and again, all of these estates will return to the Waud Wine Club range shortly.

After a final night in Sancerre, enjoying an amazing meal in a restaurant called Momento (highly recommend this to anyone visiting the area)