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Vouvray is the most famous, the most respected and probably the most confusing appellation of the Touraine, a wine district in the Loire Valley of western France. Created by decree in December 1936, the title covers white wines from eight parishes around the town of Vouvray, on the northern bank of the Loire river as it flows into the city of Tours.
With its long history, it is rather surprising that the Vouvray appellation has managed to remain a single title, given the array of styles it covers. Vouvray wines can be roughly divided into sweet, dry, still and sparkling, which the sweetness levels are broken down into Sec, Sec-Tendre, Demi-Sec and Moelleux, and the sparkling wines are categorised as Petillant or Mousseux. To add confusion, only the Petillant and Mousseux statements are efficiently regulated by appellation law, and even then it only states that the two styles of wine must be packaged in recognizably distinct ways. Apart from Sec (which is restricted to wines with less than 8g/L of residual sugar), the sweetness levels used for Vouvray wines are an unofficial guideline.
Vouvray is the flagship wine of the Chenin Blanc grape variety (or Pineau de la Loire as it is known here), followed increasingly closely by Savennieres and the sweet whites of Anjou. Few places in the world use Chenin to this extent, focusing on its organoleptic qualities in such a focused, yet diverse manner. South Africa's annual Chenin Blanc production far exceeds that of Vouvray (and indeed France as a whole), but the stylistic diversity and varietal expression of Chenin in Vouvray remains unmatched.
One key characteristic of Vouvray (and its neighbor Montlouis, just across the Loire) is its remarkable long life. More significantly, given the high proportion of wine consumed within three years of harvest, the wines actually require this time to show their potential. Like top Chablis, it is only after ten years or more that the best Vouvray even begins to retreat from its aggressive, steely youth into the complex, honeyed liquid it ultimately becomes. The secret behind the wine's age-resistance is simply acidity (also true of Chablis and some of the finest Rieslings from Germany), which acts as a preservative, allowing the other components of the wine to develop undisturbed.
There is a strong parallel between Vouvray and Savennieres, 70 miles (110km) to the west. Both Chenin Blanc specialists, they are located immediately outside the main town of their wine district (Tours and Angers respectively) and enjoy gravelly, free-draining topsoils with a deep bed of tuffeau – the highly porous sedimentary rock deposited all over the Loire region during the Turonian geological age. The key difference is that while Savennieres began as a sweet wine and has confidently developed into one of the Loire's finest dry whites, Vouvray has retained its multiple personalities (like Saumur). This has worked as much in its favor as against. After all, complex, intricate wines that demand cellaring patience are invariably of interest to wine enthusiasts; just look at the global following that Burgundy has amassed.
As in so many French wine regions, terroir is key in Vouvray; it is as much a part of the wines as the Chenin Blanc grapes used in their production. The climate here falls somewhere between maritime (the Atlantic Ocean is a full 140 miles/226km away) and continental. The topography, while not obviously complex like that of Burgundy or Alsace, is changeable enough to create variation in the local mesoclimates. Although Vouvray is situated on a solid plateau of tuffeau, a number of local streams interrupt the flow of land, creating shallow valleys with sheltered south-facing slopes. These slopes, on either side of Vouvray to the north, are where the most-prized Vouvray vineyards are to be found.
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