A Visit to Domaine Bernard Baudry, May 2024
Having recently published my Loire 2023 Vintage Report, and my first set of notes on wines of the 2023 vintage in the Loire Valley, my thoughts suddenly turned to my visit to Domaine Bernard Baudry just a few months ago. Principally because, alongside all the reds (from Les Granges up to La Croix Boissée) I tasted, from bottle, from barrel and from cuve, I also tasted the current releases in white and rosé, and the majority of these wines also hailed from the challenging 2023 vintage. Now seems like a good moment to add these tasting notes to the site.
As is customary Matthieu Baudry and I started with the white and rosé, before progressing through the portfolio in red, covering the last two vintages. This results in a circuitous tour of his cellars as we move from the tasting room to cuverie (where climbing atop a pallet of outgoing stock might be required to access the cuves) and then from cuverie to barrel cellar tasting the most recent vintage, before doing the rounds of the cuverie and barrel cellar once more for the preceding vintage. And we often end up in the tasting room, closing the circle; if I have been well behaved Matthieu sometimes rewards me with an older vintage, such as (a year or two ago) the 1997 La Croix Boissée or the occasional oddity, such as the 1997 Vin de Presse he and Bernard bottled (a few years before that).
Before we get started though, we usually have a chat about the most recent vintage, which in this case was of course 2023. This is another good reason for publishing these notes now, because I will soon be moving on from this vintage, as my trip to the Loire Valley to see how the 2024 harvest is going is only a week or two away.
