Domaine Guiberteau Saumur Blanc Le Bourg 2021

100% Chenin Blanc. This is Romain Guiberteau’s first release from the celebrated Brézé terroir of Le Bourg. Despite the name, this vineyard bears no relation to the Le Bourg in Chacé of Clos Rougeard fame. Guiberteau’s single hectare of vines (pictured below) sits below Clos des Carmes, sloping towards the village with sandy-clay soil over a soft, tuffeau limestone bedrock. The vines were planted in the 1940s, and the old-vine density from these gnarly old dames—matched with the site’s pungent minerality—creates a wine of significant intensity matched by deep-set tension. Romain jokes that one of the main challenges here is children from the neighbouring school kicking their football into the vineyard! Each year, the children are allowed to pick some grapes to make jam, too! Only in France.

Pressed as bunches and naturally fermented, Le Bourg ages for 12 months in used barrels before bottling. It’s a wine of menacing nerve, with more slate-like minerality than Guiberteau’s other Brézé cuvées. There’s real beauty in the waves of pithy citrus, crushed rock and smoky complexity, yet the penetrating length, flecked by chalk dust, aniseed and sherbert, tells us the best is yet to come. A striking wine that will benefit further from decanting.