Exploring France's Garden
France’s Loire Valley has been known for centuries as The Garden of France, and a quick perusing on your internet browser, or better yet, a few days' visit of the region and you will without question understand why.
Visiting the Loire Valley, the 170 miles stretch across the north central part of France, is like stepping back in time. Harkening a time when poets, artists and writers wandered the lush rolling hills peppered with the nearly 1,000 Chateaux, lavish structures built by French nobility and the exceedingly wealthy. Stuffing themselves on local culture, the beauty of crisscrossed rivers overflowing with local fishes, ample and prolific produce and washing it all down with a dizzying array of fresh, bright, stirring local red and white wines.
Nowhere else in France will you find such diversity in wine and for such affordable prices. The reds range from super light, fresh and crushable to deep, earthy, brooding with dark fruit and tannin. The whites lean, fiercely day with raging acidity, to soft, plump with stone fruit and citrus, all the way to dessert level sweetness with thick and luscious textures.
There is quite literally something for everyone and now, with sharing of information globally, organic farming and newer generations open to new ideas, the wines of the region have never been better.
While scouring our suppliers' catalogs and setting up tasting appointments for the new year we were lucky enough to come across some really fun, traditional and utterly mouth-watering wines from our beloved Loire Valley. We discovered so many things we were charmed by that we packed a Friday night tasting and poured them for a group of wine lovers that, much like those poets and writers of old, walked away completely enchanted.