Château de Coulaine: Tasting & Drinking

Château de Coulaine is a domaine where, if you ask five wine critics what they think of it and its wines, you are quite likely to get seven different answers. The wines are certainly not subject to universal praise, and indeed I have at times found them to be quite divisive. Certainly not as divisive as the wines of Nicolas Joly, for example, but the wines of this estate do tend to stimulate similar levels of discussion in some quarters, and generate similarly diverse opinions. As it happens, for similar reasons.

On the one hand we have in the wines of Château de Coulaine some remarkably pure, bright, lifted flavours. Looking specifically at the red wines, the colours are dark and rich, and yet the concentration that follows is never corpulent or leaden, instead it comes as a very pure, defined, vinous concentration, with lovely purity of fruit, well-defined, with pencil-drawn lines and fine, dry but ripe tannins. The style is distinctive, perhaps not entirely typical of the appellation (not every bottle, anyway), and at times it calls to mind the sort of pure-fruit vibrancy you might expect to encounter at a natural wine fair. In short, they can be delicious.

And that leads us to the other side of the wines. When Etienne Denys de Bonnaventure got it right, with the sort of wine I describe above, he hit the target dead centre. Not every bottle has been like that though. Sometimes, instead of finding wines of exciting lift, the fruit coming with a very pure, floral definition, the wines instead exhibited a troublesome inconsistency. I have had wines marked with the animally scents of Brettanomyces, and some displayed mouse taint in the finish, which usually reflects the minimal intervention of a naturally-minded vigneron. This is no problem for me when I taste the wines at La Levée de la Loire or some other tasting event, because I can simply move on to the next bottle. But if you have paid for the wine, this is exactly the sort of experience you don’t want.

Nevertheless, some do show well, and I encountered attractive wines from Les Picasses, Les Diablesse and the Clos de Turpenay especially in vintages such as 2009 and 2010. They have the structure to age, lovely purity, and great character. Having not taste the wines for some years, I returned to reassess the standard of wines in 2025 and 2026, taking a look predominantly at the 2024, 2023 and 2022 vintages. Happily, I found some wines here that showed rather well, not least the 2022 Clos de Turpenay and even the 2023 La Diablesse, the latter not an easy vintage for the appellation.

Having said that, I still believe, however, that there is untapped potential here, as this is a domaine which, with the right direction, could be challenging the likes of Philippe Alliet and Bernard Baudry on the very top tier of the appellation. I am crossing my fingers and hoping that one day I see this potential realised. (10/11/15, updated 09/11/18, 14/7/26)

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