Domaines Landron: Vineyards
Domaines Landron is located in Les Brandières, just to the east of La Haye-Fouassière, one of several significant communes for the Muscadet Sèvre et Maine appellation. The village sits very close to the Sèvre, on the northern bank. The commune of Saint-Fiacre sits a little way to the south-west, on the other side of the river, closer to the Maine. Le Pallet, home to one of the first of the Muscadet crus communaux to be signed off, lies just to the east.
The domaine has continued to grow even during the time I have known it; Jo had 36 hectares when I first met him a decade or two ago, but today Hélène Landron tends 46 hectares of vines. Of these, 10 hectares came to the domaine in the shape of the Clos la Carizière, in 1991. The remaining 36 hectares were built around the vines which Jo inherited from his father, in 1990, Jo continuing to expand during the thirty-plus years which followed.
The parcels which were part of the domaine at its inception provided Jo Landron with three distinctive and defining terroirs, and they give the domaine its modern-day identity.
The first of these three terroirs is amphibolite; there is a thin streak of amphibolite, 200 metres wide and between 3 and 4 kilometres long, which runs through the Landron vineyards. He regards the soils overlying these rocks as ‘colder’, the vines yielding fresher and more acid-rich fruits, the resulting wines tending towards citrus and iodine flavours. The vines here are, on the last check, between 35 and 40 years of age.
