Marking Milestones with Moulin Touchais
BY REBECCA GIBB MW |
In search of something to drink to mark a milestone birthday, those of us with a less-than-legendary birth year are resigned to the fact that our first breath did not coincide with the perfect growing season in Bordeaux. Revealing your date of birth to châteaux owners keen to open a special bottle often leads to a pitying shrug of the shoulders and a gallic ‘Bof’ when you disclose your parents poorly timed your entry to the world. But there’s hope for us yet: an underground cellar in a small Loire Valley town could be the answer to that elusive anniversary bottle that doesn’t require you to remortgage your house simply to mark a special date in the diary.
Moulin Touchais owns 150 hectares of vineyard but just 35 are located on gentle slopes in the Coteaux du Layon.
I have to thank Richard Kelley MW, for introducing me to Moulin Touchais. Kelley recalls that he first encountered the wines at a store attached to the town’s gas station, revisiting to fill up his car and buy up a few older bottles!
The reason that the back-vintage offering is so impressive requires us to wind-back the clock: a few million years ago, the town of Doué-la-Fontaine, was submerged under the Faluns Sea and, as the water receded, it left behind a bed of limestone that is now home to a network of tunnels, quarries and houses dug into the local limestone, many of which have been turned into accommodation and tourist attractions. There’s even a troglodyte zoo, the hewn-out rock providing natural enclosures for everything from giraffes and lions to penguins and parrots. Below street level, Doué is not dissimilar to a Swiss cheese, and it is in this easy-to-excavate rock that you’ll find an enviable library of sweet Chenin Blanc. It could have been very different. The town was under German occupation during World War II, but troops failed to unearth its treasures: owner Joseph Touchais walled up the cellar to protect his most valuable wines – the sweet whites of Côteaux du Layon – but in the post-war years, the economy was in disarray with few having the means to buy his wines. Awaiting the return of better times, Touchais discovered the wines lying in his cellar were improving; to this day, the company releases its wines at least 10 years after the harvest.
In search of something to drink to mark a milestone birthday, those of us with a less-than-legendary birth year are resigned to the fact that our first breath did not coincide with the perfect growing season in Bordeaux. Revealing your date of birth to châteaux owners keen to open a special bottle often leads to a pitying shrug of the shoulders and a gallic ‘Bof’ when you disclose your parents poorly timed your entry to the world. But there’s hope for us yet: an underground cellar in a small Loire Valley town could be the answer to that elusive anniversary bottle that doesn’t require you to remortgage your house simply to mark a special date in the diary.
