Elegant sparkling Chenin Blanc, with a lean, linear expression. Giving some flint-y reduction on the nose, once opened up it gives way to bright yellow citrus fruits and salty minerals. Sharp freshly-squeezed lemon and green apple cuts the palate nicely, with fine bubbles and a delicate, savoury lees flavours to underpin. The whole thing is harmoniously balanced and bound up with an electric coil of acid that lingers long into the finish.
Following the havoc inflicted by hail in the 2022 vintage, Noëlla bought grapes from neighbour Mikaël Bouges to make this wine. His terroir is heavier on the limestone, lending this wine its edge. The grapes were harvested in early September and pressed directly into steel tanks to start the ferment, little over a week later it was in the bottle to complete. Nine months later, the following summer, the wine was disgorged and sealed with a cork closure.
Since starting to make wine in 2001, Noëlla has trained with and worked alongside some of the great names of the Loire. A couple of years with Agnès and René Mosse in Anjou led to her becoming the vineyard manager at Les Bois Lucas after becoming friends with Junko Ara, then on to renting parcels of the feted Clos Roche Blanche estate in Touraine from Catherine Roussel and Didier Barrouillet. She now makes wine with fruit from a mixture of owned and rented parcels at her beautiful cellar carved out of the hillside in Thésée; a testament to her hard work and determination over the last 20 years. Noëlla chooses to work under the more general VDF denomination rather than AOC and her wines stand apart from the perceived notion of Touraine. “If it doesn’t smell like cat piss, you don’t get the appellation” she quips - but only half-jokingly. She refers to early picking and the prevalence of industrial yeasts used in the area to enhance supposedly typical flavours in the wine. Noella ferments with native yeasts and seeks a longer maturation period in old barrels than is usual, meaning her wines are released much later than many other producers nearby. This patience is rewarded with sublime depth and texture in the wine; her unique and varied expressions of Sauvignon Blanc range from the zippy to the tropical and often confound expectations of the grape. Her red wines, made with Gamay, Cabernet Franc and Côt are deep-fruited and velvet smooth.
