La Grange Tiphaine

Damien Delecheneau wanted to be an airline pilot. Wine caught up with him anyway, and on the oenology course in Bordeaux he met Coralie, who had studied biology and the wines of Champagne in Reims before that.

Neither went straight home. Damien worked with Verret in Irancy, Laroche in Chablis, Lafon-Rochet in Saint-Estèphe and Clos Pegase in the Napa Valley. Coralie worked for one of the oldest organic importers in the United States, for the Beaujolais trade body and at Cain Vineyard in California. They finished together in South Africa.

The farm they came back to in 2002 sits at the lieu-dit La Grange Tiphaine, on the edge of Amboise. It dates from the end of the 19th century. The family counts five generations on this soil; The Wine Doctor, starting from great-grandfather Alphonse, the first Delecheneau to call himself a vigneron, counts four. According to iDealwine, the family was already bottling all its own wine in 1941, and Damien's father Jackie later ended the mixed farming to concentrate on vines.

Damien started with the 2002 harvest and took over the domaine in the years that followed, turning it towards gentler, terroir-led farming. He runs the vines and the cellar. Coralie first sold the wine school's own wines in Amboise, and joined in 2008 with a new cuvée named Quatre Mains, four hands. She runs the office and the selling, from the accounts and the labels to orders and promotion abroad. Damien also teaches, at the same wine school and at the university institute in Tours.

The vineyard covers about 15 hectares across Montlouis-sur-Loire, Touraine-Amboise and Touraine, iDealwine reports, with Chenin and Sauvignon for the whites and Côt, Gamay, Grolleau and Cabernet Franc for the reds. The same source dates the organic certification to 2007 and the biodynamic one to 2014, and notes old vines, some over a century, grassed rows, and teas of nettle, horsetail and willow.

iDealwine describes the cellar as quiet work: native yeasts, concrete vats and old barrels, juice moved by gravity, whites neither racked nor stirred. Some cuvées, such as Quatre Mains and the old-vine Côt, are wax-sealed by hand, bottle by bottle. The couple's stated aim is wines that are precise, fine and elegant, and above all make you want to drink them.

Coralie tells the pilot story with a pun. Instead of the sky, Damien chose le plancher des vignes: the French phrase for solid ground, with the cows swapped for vines.