Loire 2024: The Wines
During the course of the many years I have spent exploring the wines of the Loire Valley the region has undergone dramatic change, perhaps more so than any other French wine region you care to name.
Once renowned for white wines imbued with freshness, vigour and vivacity, and superb sweet wines with varying degrees of residual sugar cut through by rapier-like acidity, it was a region which often struggled with its reds. Wonderful vintages came along from time to time, years such as 1976 and 1989, but they were rarities. They were the memorable titillations that kept Loire Cabernet fans coming back for more.
You can choose your own starting point for what we might term The New Loire, but I would suggest 2003. A vintage frequently derided in Bordeaux (although some great wines were made on the northern Médoc) and other more southerly wine regions, paradoxically it lifted the reds of the Loire Valley – specifically, the top Cabernet Francs of the Loire heartland of Anjou and Touraine – to a new level.
Focusing purely on the red wines, further joy came with vintages which followed, albeit in a somewhat sporadic manner at first, with superb reds in 2005, 2009 and 2010. Then the delightfully fresh 2014 opened the door to an almost unbroken run of red-benevolent vintages, with good or even great potential in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022. In just two decades the region has shifted from being one in which Cabernet Franc exists on a knife edge, to one in which it ripens reliably in most vintages. This is a concept a handful of Ligérian vignerons are still struggling to come to terms with; two or three decades ago the best approach to the Cabernet Franc harvest would simply be to delay picking as long as possible, to eke every ounce of maturity out of this marginal climate. These days, however, a vigneron must make an active decision on when to pick, because now it is possible to pick too late, as well as too early.
The failure to wake up to this reality is why, over the past decade, some domaines in this region have produced wines at 15%, 15.5% or even 16% alcohol.
