Domaine des Baumard, 2023 Update
Too many years have passed since I last tasted with Florent Baumard. The last time he filled a glass for me was back in 2015, a full eight years ago. This was a time of controversy for Anjou, when some in the region were still licking the wounds inflicted during the course of several years of legal wrangling.
The issue at stake was the rebirth of the Coteaux du Layon Chaume and Quarts de Chaume appellations, with their respective premier and grand cru designations, and all the viticultural and oenological ramifications this entailed. The appellations were finally signed off in 2011, but derogations and grace periods meant the new rules would be instituted gradually, over the subsequent years. The wounds these rules inflicted were, it has to be said, largely borne by Florent Baumard and his father Jean Baumard, as they were to impact on their work both in the vineyard and in the cellar. I gave a full and detailed account of this in my 2015 Domaine des Baumard Report, but it is worth recapping here before we look at the domaine and its wines today.
The principal issue in the vineyard was the Baumard family’s preference for a particular pattern of planting, vignes hautes et larges, in which vines are tightly packed within the row, with less than 1 metre between each pied, while the rows themselves are widely spaced, often several metres apart. They are then trained high, and subject to carrying a huge crop. All this was made illegal in the new appellation rules, which specify all aspects of planting in the vineyard, not to mention the individual crop per vine. The result of this has been the declassification of several swathes of Baumard vineyard in the Quarts de Chaume appellation, and he is now experiencing similar difficulties with some of his Coteaux du Layon vines.
The declassification of vines in his Quarts de Chaume parcels was only one hurdle Florent faced in this appellation. In addition, Florent has long favoured the use of ‘freezing technologies’, a term I choose carefully, as Florent refers to it as cryo-selection, insisting it is just that – a different way of making a selection analogous to manual sorting, densitometry or optical selection – while just about everybody else uses the term cryo-extraction. Call it what you will, this methodology was outlawed in Quarts de Chaume, with new minimum figures for sugar concentration and potential alcohol at harvest, and a blanket ban on any methodology which lowers the temperature of the freshly harvested grapes below -5ºC, all targeted at ensuring the crop is concentrated in the vineyard, and not in the cellar.
The response to these new regulations was, it would seem, an inevitable upheaval in how Florent works. For the moment fruit produced by the vignes hautes et larges is excluded from the Quarts de Chaume appellation, necessitating the appearance of a new Vin de France label in the portfolio. His response to the outlawing of the freezing methodologies is more interesting though. Read on for more detail, as well as my thoughts on his most recently released wines.
