Bretonniere Cuvée Parcellaire Monopole

Jim Budd described La Bretonnière in 2014 as a four-hectare plot at Noizay, on the premières côtes above the north bank of the Loire, and difficult to work because of its clay. Blot had been renting the vines; the château they belonged to was sold that year, which let him buy the clos outright. The domaine's US importer puts the vines at 50 to 60 years old, facing southeast on a very thin layer of clay over pure limestone. All Chenin Blanc, and a monopole.

The clos sits inside Vouvray, but the wine is not allowed the name. Vouvray's 2009 decree requires the wine to be vinified within the appellation, and Blot has always worked from his cellar at Montlouis, on the other bank. He held a derogation from the INAO that ran through the 2013 vintage; once it lapsed his Vouvray-grown parcels were pushed out to Vin de France, as were François Chidaine's. That is where this one still sits.

Vinification is the house pattern: ambient yeasts, fermentation and élevage in barrel, and no malolactic, so the malic acidity is never converted away. The same importer sheet gives the barrels as 20% new and the rest one to four years old. Jon Bonné describes Blot's method as borrowed from Burgundy, the must given air before a long, slow fermentation and the finished wine then left in steel tank for months before bottling, which firms up the texture. The 2022 went into bottle on 25 August 2023, a little under a year after picking, at 12.5% and 1.5 g/l of residual sugar.

The domaine's 2022 harvest reports look back on frost, hail and drought, and credit organic farming, old vines and the deep limestone under Vouvray and Montlouis for carrying the crop through. Picking started in the first days of September, and Bretonnière was one of the parcels uneven enough that the pickers went through the rows two to four times. The domaine called the acidity not the highest it had seen and the style a bit rounder than usual, though not high in alcohol, and better balanced than the recent warm vintages that ran hotter. Volume, unusually, was not the problem: bringing in the full legal crop was, in the domaine's words, one of the first times in a long career.

Jacky Blot saw this vintage through harvest and most of its élevage. He died on 15 May 2023, at 75, and the wine went into bottle that August.