Vouvray

Vouvray is six kilometers east of Tours along the north bank of the Loire, and you notice the cliffs before you notice the village. The tufa — that pale cream-white limestone — rises in a low escarpment above the road, and into it the local inhabitants have carved over centuries everything they needed: wine cellars, mushroom farms, storage rooms, and the cave houses that some families still live in, with their cliffside facades of glass and wooden shutters set directly into the stone. I pulled off the road and walked toward one. A dog barked from somewhere inside the cliff. Someone had a geranium in a pot by a door that was, improbably, just the cliff face itself.

Chenin Blanc has been grown on this north-facing slope above the Loire since at least the ninth century, which gives you a sense of how seriously this grape takes itself. What makes Vouvray strange and interesting — and sometimes maddening for people who want a wine to be one predictable thing — is that the same domaine, often the same vine age, produces wildly different styles depending on the vintage. In a dry year you get Vouvray sec: lean, mineral, flinty, the kind of wine that tastes like cold stone and quince. In a wet September, moelleux: golden, honeyed, apricot-thick, the kind that lasts twenty years. Between them, demi-sec and pétillant and the full mousseux crémant. A single producer’s cellar may contain six styles in the same year, and the vigneron’s job is partly meteorologist.

I tasted with a producer whose cellar went forty meters back into the hillside — the temperature dropped noticeably as you walked in, the stone sweating cold, the smell changing from river air to something mineral and slightly mushroomy. He poured without explanation: a 2022 sec first, then a 2020 demi-sec, then a 2015 moelleux from a small parcel he said hadn’t been picked until November. The sec was the kind of wine I could drink every day for the rest of my life and not be bored. The moelleux was something else — the nose alone, that concentration of quince and candied citrus, stopped the conversation.

Back out in the sunlight, the Loire was visible below the road, wide and slow. A barge was moving upstream, barely. Everything felt unhurried in the specific way of wine country on a weekday afternoon when the tourists haven’t arrived yet and the locals are doing things at their own speed. I walked along the cliff road to the next cave entrance, which turned out to belong to a mushroom farmer who was delighted to show me his operation — several underground chambers, the walls white with mycelium, trays of Paris mushrooms in every stage of development. He’d been growing in the same cave for thirty years. His neighbor had been making wine in the cave next door for forty.

The village itself is small and not particularly picturesque by Loire standards. There is a church, a square, a few restaurants where the wine list is almost exclusively local. You eat pike-perch from the river and drink the local sec. The simplicity is the point. This is a place where everything is organized around the cellar and the slope, not around the visitor.

When to go: September and October for the harvest, when the vignerons are at their most communicative and you can sometimes watch the hand-picking. May and June are quieter and the vines are green and new. The cave visits — both wine and mushroom — run year-round, but call ahead for the smaller domaines; many only welcome visitors by appointment.