Domaine des Baumard & Quarts de Chaume

2019/10/14, after 2019 RVF world wine tasting champion contest

Originally, I could have a leisurely lunch, but because I left at Nicolas Joly (Château de la Roche aux Moines) slowly in the morning, I could only park on the side of the road to eat food (?) Winery, it is rare to have a leisure time when waiting for the door to open.

Chatting with owner Florent Baumard, he decided to take us on a tour of the vineyard first, so we waited in the reception hall. In addition to the decoration of the wine bottle, there is also a menu of Japanese cuisine. Later, I asked the owner to know that it was the menu of the dinner and wine party when I went to Japan before.

The Baumard family had settled here as early as 1634, but the vineyard was abandoned for a while until the previous owner, Jean, re-established it in the 1950s. At present, in addition to dessert wines, the winery also has Cremant de Loire sparkling wine and Savennières wines, but they are widely known for their chenin blanc noble rot sweet wine from Coteaux du Layon.

After a bumpy ride (which would have crashed a bit without the Humvee) to Quarts de Chaume, the best vineyard, the owner started explaining the coteaux du layon appellation. This is located in Anjou-Saumur in the middle of the entire Loire Valley. It is the hilly land where the Layon River flows into the Loire intersection. In addition to the initial coteaux du layon, certain villages can be marked with the name of the village on the top, becoming Coteaux du Layon. Layon Villages (including Beaulieu-sur-Layon, Faye-d'Anjou, Rablay-sur-Layon, Rochefort-sur-Loire, Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné, Saint-Lambert-du-Lattay. Among them St-Aubin-de -Luigné is called Pearl of the Layon, see Loire guild information for details), the soil contains a lot of schists (schist), as well as clay (clay), silica (silica).

The first-class garden of Chaume (COTEAUX DU LAYON PREMIER CRU CHAUME) is located on the hills on the north bank of Layon on the east side of Saint-Aubin-de-Luigné. The gentle slope facing south provides good sunshine, allowing the chenin blanc grapes to reach better maturity. Spend. The southernmost piece is the QUARTS DE CHAUME GRAND CRU.

(Click below to see the panoramic view)

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When I saw Quarts de Chaume at the scene, I felt more. This small super garden is not a completely connected area. Instead, it looks like a few fingers sunk into the hills of the Layon River from north to south. In the early morning and evening sunshine, no one is planting grapes at all, and they cannot be linked to any production area. The soil of Quarts de Chaume is also different from Chaume's umber (Sols Bruns) and "l'Anjou noir". It has more metamorphic rocks due to orogeny (Brioverian), as well as Spilite (fine-grained igneous rock), quartz (quartz), rhyolites (rhyolite, also volcanically related), and more Schist (schist). And because there is a river to regulate the temperature and it faces south, the slope is steeper and the sunlight is more abundant, which has the advantage of greater temperature difference between day and night than Chaume, which is farther from the river.

Harvesting is not standardized across the region, and higher-quality wineries are harvested multiple times to ensure grapes with a higher degree of noble rot infection. Some grape clusters will also decide whether to cut off only part of the grapes depending on the situation, and let the ones infected with noble rot continue to hang on the tree.

It was only after asking the owner that day that he found out that because the situation of dyeing noble rot was relatively slow this year, he decided to wait a few more days, but because the forecast said there might be unstable weather with rainfall, he was also very worried (later we returned to the winery for tasting only) Not long after the start, there was a violent storm QAQ).

I went back to the winery to do tasting. I don’t know whether it was because the northwest rain made the owner feel unpleasant, so he planned to open the wine to relieve stress, or because the chat was too happy, so the wine was kept open and opened. Quarts de Chaume opened many bottles. The extra code is added to make everyone feel scared.

Coteaux du Layon does not stipulate the method of aging, but Domaine des Beaumard only uses stainless steel barrels (all wines in the winery do not use oak barrels!), Florent Beaumard said that it is to let the grapes show his own characteristics, and nothing else taste intervention. It is rare to see the Savennieres made by wineries in Taiwan, and this time I got a bunch of them and it was quite amazing.

In addition to not using oak barrels, another feature of Domaine des Baumard is that it is bottled with a rotating cap. With the high air tightness of the screw cap, it is more conducive to the aging of the wine and greatly slows down the oxidation rate. Some wine critics believe that the tasting period is not long, and some even say that the entry-level Coteaux du Layon wine Carte d'Or has only five years of aging potential, but the 2015 and early 2019 drinking at the winery are divided into 2013. It just feels like it's just entering the tasting period.

The following is a recording file, there may be a lot of noise, if you are interested, you can listen to it yourself

Postscript: I came across Domaine des Baumard's wine in teaching for several years. Although it is a basic Carte d'Or, it is really delicious, with a little yeasty smell, good acidity, and a Some loquat aroma.

Original link: Phanix's Blog