"Intense aromas of green apple, honey, apricot and white flowers with a hint of gun smoke. The chenin fruit on the palate is clean and bright and combined with the minerality its just perfect. Ripe fruit yet zesty acidity ensuring that there will life in this bottle for many years to come."
One of the Loire’s most lauded producers, Domaine Baumard’s history can be traced back to 1634 but the recent history begins in 1955 with the arrival of Jean Baumard who began the search for the best vineyard sites in the region. Having acquired fantastic sites in Quarts de Chaume as well as the remarkable Clos du Papillon in Savennières, Baumard has crafted some of the best wines from France. Florent Baumard joined the family business in 1987 and has retained the desire to respect the vineyard and make wines that are a true, sympathetic reflection of the remarkable soils in which they are grown. While much at the property remains true to the past, Baumard was amongst the first to embrace the move towards screwcaps and now bottles the majority of its wines with these closures to retain the purity of the carefully harvested fruit - truly world class wines.
The Baumard approach to viticulture is a notable one, and it does make it easy to spot the Baumard vines in any given appellation. They are trained in a fashion Baumard describe as vignes hautes et larges (sometimes abbreviated to VHL); the larges refers to the distance between the vines, a remarkable 3 metres between the rows and 0.8 metres between each vine, whereas the hautes refers to the high trellising system employed, taking the vines to a height of more than 2 metres, the object being to obtain a large surface area of foliage. During the vegetative period they see limited leaf-thinning along their base, but otherwise there is little intervention at this time, not even topping-off of the upper shoots as they reach for the sky above. Between the rows, the soil is alternatively ploughed and grassed over, a methodology the Baumards have been following for well over 30 years. The harvest is manual, and the fruit transported in small plastic cages to minimise damage.
