Mar 25 2010
Loire Wines – Quincy and Reuilly
A Loire valley vacation wouldn’t be the same without at least a little time spent sampling the famous Loire wines. Our gite is situated to the east of the Loire valley but, in typical French fashion, it is classified as the Centre-Loire wine region.
There are several well-known vineyards here – Menetou-Salon, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé – all well worth investigating, but our nearest are less well known and a few bottles from here will be of great interest to wine fans back home as they are unlikely to come cross them very often. Not only are the vineyards small but only about 10% of production makes it outside France.
The vineyards I’m talking about are Quincy (pronounced kan-see) and Reuilly (roy-yee), both of which are less than half an hour south of us. I won’t go into huge detail because there are Loire valley wine websites packed with great info (links below). I will just mention a couple of things I hope you’ll find interesting.
Quincy wine is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape. In fact the grape variety is originally from this part of the Centre-Loire region. As they are only allowed to use this one grape variety, Quincy growers only produce white wine. It’s a tiny area by wine-growing standard with even the best known producers having only fifteen or twenty hectare domaines.
Our personal favorite is by Philippe Portier and his small vineyard is a lovely place to go for a Quincy wine tasting. He produces three different white wines, all quite different. His vineyard (domaine) is actually just outside the village of Brinay, rather than Quincy, but the Quincy appellation covers both.
You will usually find someone there during the day but we recommend making an appointment. This is a particularly good idea if your French isn’t very good because they do have a member of staff who speaks English – which is not always the case around here!
Moving over to Reuilly we have red, white and rosé wines. The local name for the rosé is actually gris – which translates literally as grey! Rest assured they’re not – they’re a very light rosé, a lovely summer drink. Much less sweet than the better known Anjou Rosé which is produced at the other end of the Loire valley wine region.
The name actually comes from the grape variety used – Pinot Gris. Reuilly reds are made from Pinot Noir and Reuilly whites from Sauvignon Blanc. Top producer here is Claude Lafond although our favorite is Les Roches from the village of Lazenay.
We continue to taste as many different Quincy and Reuilly wines as we can – purely in the interests of research you understand! I’ll leave the tasting notes to the experts but we think they’re delicious. There’s a lot of variety in the whites – you really do need to taste them for yourself. The reds are on the lighter side though still full of flavour. We have friends who don’t like red wine at all but will drink the red from Les Roches.
At local open markets you can often find a reasonable bottle of either Quincy or Reuilly for around €3.00 a bottle. Top names like those mentioned above will cost you around €7.00 a bottle. Not a lot for very good wine.
Here’s a couple of useful websites:
http://www.loirevalleywine.com
http://www.vins-centre-loire.com
