A drop of liquid gold – Quarts de Chaume

I’m always a bit mystified when people tell me they don’t like ‘sweet wine’. They eat dessert, they love chocolate, they adore ice cream but they don’t like sweet wine. I don’t get it.

What’s the difference? For me, a small glass of a delicious sweet wine IS the dessert. And not only that, sweet wine pairs amazingly with cheese. A pairing that is much more successful than your classic tannic red.

Last week we popped in to see Domaine des Baumard in Rochefort sur Loire in the heart of Anjou not far from the city of Angers. This area of the Loire is famous for sweet wines from the Chenin Blanc grape.

Domaine des Baumard in Rochfort-sur-Loire makes beautiful dry Savennières and glorious sweet Quart de Chaume

There are quite a few appellations for sweet wine in the hills of the Layon. You might be familiar with Coteaux du Layon, Coteaux de l’Aubance, Bonnezeaux or Chaume but the cherry on the cake is Quarts de Chaume, the first Grand Cru of the Loire valley and for sweet wine only.

We tasted several sweet wines at the estate but it was the 2008 Quarts de Chaume that stole my heart. A truly delicious wine that still lingers in my memory today.

A truly beautiful wine. Chenin blanc with its beautiful acidity is pefect for high quality sweet wines;

2008 is one of my favourite vintages for Chenin. It has a beautiful creaminess backed up with a really tropical mango aroma that is unique to this vintage.

This is a heavenly wine that you could just sit and contemplate for hours (if you could control yourself that is). That beautiful mango note takes you through to soft ripe apricots, waxy white flowers and orange blossom. It’s rich and ripe on the palate, smooth and velvety with beautiful acidity on the finish. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

All Florent Baumard’s wines are bottled under screwcap which is nothing short of controversial for the region but one that has stood his wines in good stead I think. They have an amazing capacity for ageing and retain all their freshness and cleanless as the years tick by.

There are around 20 producers that make Quarts de Chaume at the moment with production varying hugely from year to year. As sweet wine becomes less and less popular there is a pressure for growers to vinify dry wine whenever possible.

It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen!