Home to the domaine’s oldest Cabernet Franc, the 70-year vines in Au dessus de Vitré root down through a blanket of red clay and limestone before tapping into the Turonian limestone bedrock below. It’s a terroir that infuses a deeper register of floral and mineral flavour than the Première Cuvée listed above. There’s a change in winemaking, too. Maceration lasts considerably longer at 22 days, with the juice slowly infusing flavour and gentle tannin from the grape’s skins. Then, the pressing is soft and slow (for the pressing geeks, Valentin uses just one bar of pressure), and the free-run juice ages separately from the press wine. Aging occurs in two- to three-year-old 228-litre barrels from Château Mangot for 18 months, and the wine (which may include some press wine depending on the year) is bottled without fining or filtration. The name Grand Cuvée says it all. It’s a super-pure and refined Loire red with lovely, cool, pulpy fruit, suave texture and a surprising salty twist on the finish. A Charles Lachaux or Théo Dancer kind of Cabernet Franc. To appreciate its full range of flavour and texture, Valentin recommends decanting this wine for an hour before serving.

Valentin Desloges’ flagship white comes from the Bel Air terroir, a south-facing site on the left bank of the Cher River and home to the domaine’s oldest Sauvignon Blanc vines (some 60 years). It’s not simply the older, lower-yielding vines that contribute to this cuvée’s ravishing intensity. The soils are dominated by red clay, just below a layer of flinty sands, which further adds to the wine’s spicy generosity and textural breadth. The winemaking is not so different from the Chapitre I. However, this wine ferments in barrel and matures (for 18 months instead of 12) in ex-Coche-Dury barrels with 20% new oak from the domaine’s tailor-made barrels. The resulting wine is intense but nuanced, a superstar Sauvignon built on texture, crystalline fruit and smoky, rock-licking minerality. In the length, power, and wrought texture, there’s more than a hint of Pur Sang going on. In the words of French critics Bettane and Desseauve: “It’s a masterstroke.”

There is a real finesse to Valentin’s red wines, as you might expect, given that he has worked with Thierry Pillot and Rafael Coche in Burgundy. The first of two Cabernet franc wines, this larger cuvée stems from a parcel of 45- to 50-year-old (on average) mass-selection vines in the red clay and silex soils of Saint-Aignan. Desloges crops at half the permitted yield for this region, and this wine ferments (with 5% bunches) in stainless steel without sulphur for two weeks. It is then transferred to used barrels from Cheval Blanc to complete its year-long aging.

In terms of style, Desloges’ lithe and pulpy Cabernet Franc wines resemble more the elegant shape and slender tannins of Thierry Germain’s Saumur-Champigny than, say, the Chinon or Bourgueil archetype. The wines are silky and vividly fresh, with the sensation of biting into a firm, juicy redcurrant (what the French would call croquant).

Pineau d’Aunis is making a comeback in the Loire Valley. This enigmatic variety almost vanished in the early 1970s before starting a slow but steady renaissance. Today, nearly 500 hectares of Pineau d’Aunis are planted (so we’re told), chiefly in the lesser-known Loire regions such as the Touraine appellation and Coteaux du Loire. Loved by the natural people–not to mention a favourite of the thirsty fruit fly Drosophila suzukii–we’ve not had too much experience with Pineau d’Aunis outside of some lovely, fragrant reds from Eric Nicolas Domaine de Bellivière. Regardless, the finest wines for this variety seem to combine beautiful perfumes of wild strawberry, red flower and market-fresh berries with engaging peppery spice and rippling silky fruit—at least, that’s what you get at Les Quatre Piliers.

Low yields are key to the purity and quality on offer here, as is the sensitive winemaking ethos that includes just a little hand plunging and only a pinch of sulphur at bottling. Aging occurs in Valentin’s bespoke oak barrels, whose staves are personally selected and dried in-house before being coopered in Burgundy. The juice ages on lees for 12 months before being bottled, again, without filtration.

This incisive, Dagueneau-esque Sauvignon Blanc is drawn from vines aged between 20 and 50 years in the west-facing terroir of “Les Puits aux Chiens”. Sited on the right bank of the Cher River, it’s the highest point of the commune of Noyers, a cool terroir with shallow flint sands and white clay over Turonian limestone rock. Picked ripe, with barely any vestige of Sauvignon-ness, the grapes are pressed as whole bunches and ferment with indigenous yeasts in a selection of used barrels ranging from 228 to 500 litres. These vessels include those made using oak staves from the nearby Loges forest, selected and aged by Valentin Desloges himself (and coopered by François Frères). The wine ages for 12 months with a single racking and plenty of lees contact. It is bottled by gravity without filtration. Despite the negligible use of sulphur (1 g/L at the press and 2 g/L at bottling), it’s an incredibly focused, limpid, penetrating Sauvignon.