Loire 2010 First Taste: Touraine & Central Vineyards
During my visit to the Loire in 2010 I found it impossible to get hold of Frantz Saumon. I mentioned this to Richard Leroy, who is a friend of Frantz. As it turned out they had been talking on the telephone the preceding evening, and Frantz had reported thunderstorms, with plentiful precipitation including hailstones, only the previous day. Nothing unusual about that, except this was the middle of July; hailstorms aren’t expected (although having been caught in a particularly heavy shower of hail just outside Chaudefonds sur Layon in July 2007 I know from personal experience that mid-summer hailstorms in the Loire are no myth). And so it was perhaps unsurprising that I couldn’t track Frantz down; he was out in the vineyards from dawn until dusk, tending to his vines, some of which had been damaged by the impact of the hail. It was an early indication to me of some of the difficulties the vignerons faced in this particular vintage.
Touraine
Catherine Champalou certainly projected a guarded and circumspect opinion of the vintage when I spoke with her in early 2011, describing it with refreshing honesty as “not an easy one“. The spring was cool, she reported, and the summer months were, apparently, no better than “OK“. Bernard Fouquet, meanwhile, used the perhaps rather euphemistic term “interesting” to convey his opinion of 2010. None of these statements would measure up very well in the search for a ringing endorsement of the quality of the vintage.
