Anjou-Saumur, Loire Valley
If Touraine is the heart of the Loire's "Garden of France," Anjou-Saumur is its most genuinely diverse half — a single region capable of making nearly every style of wine that exists: bone-dry, off-dry, lusciously sweet, sparkling, rosé, light red, and serious age-worthy red, often all from the same small handful of grapes.
Chenin Blanc's history here goes back further than almost anywhere else in France. Monks at the Abbey of Glanfeuil, south of Angers, are documented growing Chenin Blanc as early as 845 AD — making it quite possibly the oldest continuously recorded grape variety in the Loire. By the Renaissance, the region's sweet wines had become genuinely fashionable: in the 1500s, merchants from the Low Countries took advantage of Anjou's location to market substantial volumes of late-harvest dessert wine, and by the early 1800s, bottles of Anjou and Savennières were selling in Paris restaurants for princely sums.
That sweet-wine tradition is still central to the region's identity. The Layon and Aubance valleys remain home to some of France's great botrytized whites — Coteaux du Layon, Quarts de Chaume, and Bonnezeaux — with Quarts de Chaume holding the distinction of being the Loire Valley's only Grand Cru, only formally designated as such in 2011. But the more interesting modern story is dry Chenin Blanc, which has quietly become the region's calling card. Savennières, on schist and volcanic soils on the north bank of the Loire, produces a dense, powerful expression of Chenin capable of ageing into something genuinely velvety, and within it sits La Coulée de Serrant, a tiny seven-hectare monopole farmed biodynamically by the Joly family, regularly described by critics in near-mystical terms.
On the red side, Saumur-Champigny has become the region's most fashionable name. Created as an AOC in 1957 and covering around 1,550 hectares across nine communes, it's built almost entirely on Cabernet Franc grown on tuffeau soils, producing a bright, elegant, floral style of Cabernet Franc that trades opulence for finesse — generally considered one of the grape's liveliest, most distinctive expressions anywhere. Saumur is also, somewhat unusually for the Loire, a serious sparkling wine engine: the region's calcium-rich Turonian chalk soils are especially well suited to sparkling production, making Saumur the largest sparkling-wine-producing district in the entire Loire Valley.
What unites the whole region is the people behind it: many Anjou-Saumur producers come from families who've been making wine here for centuries — the Daviau family of Domaine de Bablut have been established in Brissac since 1546, and the Richou family started just four years later nearby. It's a region built on continuity rather than reinvention, even as newer arrivals — including, notably, actor Gérard Depardieu, who bought Château de Tigné in the 1980s — have added fresh energy.
In this collection you'll find dry and off-dry Chenin Blanc from Anjou and Savennières, elegant Cabernet Franc reds from Saumur-Champigny, and a few traditional-method sparkling wines for good measure — the Loire's most versatile region, all in one place
