Château de Suronde, 2024 Update
While the Papin family of Château Pierre-Bise – who featured in a tasting update added to this site yesterday – have been making wine on the banks of the Layon since at least the 1950s, a much more recent arrival in this corner of the Loire Valley is Kathleen Mareels-Van den Berghe (pictured below).
Kathleen is perhaps best known as the proprietor of Château de Minière in Bourgueil, where through Herculean efforts she has reshaped an old estate (with some suitably old vines) to produce an interesting range of wines which display nice typicity and which includes, in her Vignes Centenaires cuvée, one of the leading wines of the appellation.
Eager to add a white wine to her portfolio, and perhaps as a precursor to planting some white vines at Minière, she subsequently the bullet a second time and purchased an estate in Anjou. That estate was the highly renowned Château de Suronde, an estate which has been more widely appreciated in France than in foreign markets. This was especially true after proprietors the Laffourcade family, who seemed to own most of the vines on the Quarts de Chaume appellation at one time (more recently, they also sold a lot of vines to Domaine Belargus), sold the estate to Francis Poirel in 1995.
