“It’s a magnificent, brooding, enigmatic wine.”
- Jancis Robinson, 18/20 points
 
Saumur Blanc 'Chenin du Puy', Frederic Mabileau, Loire, France 2023

‘As affordable white Burgundy slips further out of reach, something rather exciting has been filling the space it left behind.’
We are standing on the harbour wall, waving goodbye to affordable white Burgundy, as it sails away on a mega-yacht, clinking glasses with whooping tech bros chest-pumping on the pool deck. We will miss it, but as we turn our back to the ocean, we notice a wine that has always been there, sitting quietly in our peripheral vision, not begging for attention, but waiting for us to realise that we’ve been chasing the wrong quarry for several years. Its name is Saumur Blanc and we owe it a huge apology.

A recent trip to the Loire proved something of a revelation — though not via the well-trodden paths of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. Instead, we found ourselves exploring the less familiar appellations of Saumur, Jasnières and Anjou, where expectations were modest, but curiosity was high. It certainly wasn’t a universal beauty pageant, and plenty of the wines made little lasting impression, but then came the small handful - perhaps 5% of what we tasted - which stopped us in our tracks, the ones that had us reaching for our notebooks and superlatives (and underlining them twice in certain cases) and right at the top of that very short list sat the pageant queen, this Saumur ‘Chenin du Puy’ from Domaine Frédéric Mabileau.

 
‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’
This wine doesn’t need one; it has you at hello. A sweep of sensory fireworks bursts from the glass, oscillating between crisp apple, preserved lemons, sweet grapefruit, charred lime, gunflint, light toast and crushed limestone, with a mineral intensity that would not look out of place - or price - in white Burgundy’s upper echelons. In fact, it brings to mind the crystalline precision of wines like Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey’s Saint-Aubin ‘Les Perrières’ or Bernard Bonin’s Meursault ‘Les Tillets’, where crushed stone, smoky citrus and flinty drive are pushed to thrilling extremes, the sort of bottles that routinely have wine lovers quietly reconsidering their mortgage arrangements.
 
Then comes the palate — and, frankly, “kerpow”! There’s Grand Cru-level energy and concentration here: deep, textured and quietly powerful, yet brilliantly dry and sappy, with creamy softness sliced through by electric citrus freshness and that unmistakable Chenin tension. It manages to feel both rich and weightless at once, which is no small trick. 
 
It’s one of our finest discoveries of recent years and we are proud to be the exclusive importer, shipping directly from the producer with no middleman, so the price only has our (modest!) margin between you and Mabileau’s cellar door. The vines are celebrating their 50th birthday this year and have imbued the wine with astonishing energy and flavour intensity. It underwent a wild fermentation in barrel before aging for 2 years in French oak barrels, going through full malo. At 12% alcohol, it somehow feels both generous and poised, and should drink beautifully now through to 2038. Organic certified and biodynamically grown.

Saumur Blanc 'Chenin du Puy', Frederic Mabileau, Loire 2023
6 bottles – £192.00 (£32.00/bt)
buy online here
 

Wine Reviews
 
Tamlyn Currin for JancisRobinson.com: We sent a sample to Jancis Robinson’s team and we received an email from Tamlyn Currin that began with the words "I have to say that the Mabileau Saumur had me on my knees. OMG!!!!” We rushed to see the tasting-note and were thrilled to see this glowing review: “A wine like this is very hard to write about. It defies words. It’s the kind of wine that anyone with a soul will taste and instantly put the glass down and look at you with a ‘WTF just happened?’. If you’ve ever watched a blood moon rising, sat there still in the mouth-watering silence of a lapis-lazuli velvet night, watching an impossible orb of beauty break the line between earth and sky, burn (coldly) ever more intense and bright, you will get a sense of this wine. It even smells like moon flowers; like moon flowers and smoke. Moon flowers in the deep iris blue of warm summer night. Smoke from the wraith of campfire embers. Heady scent, sultry decay. It’s as gold as a harvest moon, has the belly and the still, silent curves. Luminous with portent. But it also carries smokiness through its bones, as if the earth cracked open down the middle and now you can taste the breath of an underworld. A structural fracture, a sepulchre filled with moonlight, a fissure of rock filled with flowers. It’s a magnificent, brooding, enigmatic wine. Drink now-2040.” 18 points

The Wine Advocate (previous vintage): “The wine definitely needs a big glass and lots of time to release its characteristic chalky, ripe and elegant fruit notes with dashes of lemon juice that are at first covered by intense sur lie and oaky notes. Full-bodied, rich and very elegant on the thoroughly fresh and mineral palate, this is a highly complex and textural Chenin with fine tannins and a long, intense and impressive finish. The acidity is remarkably fine and perfectly interwoven with the chalkiness of this big but also refined and elegant wine whose evolvement in the bottle should be interesting to follow. White peach aromas populate the aftertaste, which adds a super sexiness to this long and salty Chenin that is one of the finest I have tasted from Saumur.” 95 points

Domaine Frederic Mabileau
Domaine Frederic Mabileau, based in St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, comes from a long line of family vignerons who have worked in wine since 1620. Frederic set up on his own in St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil in 1991, sharing winemaking facilities with his father Jean-Paul and taking over his father’s vines in 2003. Long wanting to make a Chenin Blanc, he found a small parcel of old vines on the slopes of Le Puy Notre Dame in the Saumur appellation (which is where this wine comes from), on tuffeau soils that make this stretch of the Loire so special – that pale, chalky, fossilised limestone that seems almost purpose-built for Chenin Blanc, locking in freshness even in warmer years. When Frederic’s life was cut tragically short by a light-aircraft accident on the eve of the 2020 vintage, sons Charly and Remy stepped unflinchingly to fill his shoes alongside their mother, Nathalie. The 2023 vintage gave Domaine Mabileau exactly what they needed: generous sunshine to ripen the fruit fully, but enough of the Loire’s natural cool-climate tension to keep the wine singing with life. It’s the sort of wine that we think would turn even a Chenin sceptic into a Chenin evangelist.

Saumur Blanc 'Chenin du Puy', Frederic Mabileau, Loire 2023
6 bottles – £192.00 (£32.00/bt)
buy online here