When you have already tasted hundreds of wines and your pulse-rate hasn’t quickened at all, you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you not the wines, until you stumble on a wine like this stunning Jasnières and your heart starts racing, your pupils dilate, you feel giddy and you recognise that old, familiar feeling: you’ve fallen in love.

We're actually on the Loir here, not the Loire, a small tributary about an hour south of the racing town of Le Mans. Jasnières is a tiny appellation with just 70ha declared and Domaine Gigou have 8 of those. Ludovic is using old vines grown on silex-flecked clay soils to produce outstanding and age-worthy Chenin Blanc.

If you need a reminder of what a ‘mineral’ wine tastes like, do give this wine a try. It’s made from Chenin Blanc, but it feels like it has found its way into the bottle via fissures in a rockface, over crumbled stone and through broken flint that was split with a pickaxe. That would be no good if it didn’t have the balancing succulence of sweet fruit and in-between the cracks you will find yuzu, apricot, lime and pineapple. Old vines here, averaging 70 years in age, from soils rich in silex. Barrel fermented then aged 50% in foudre and 50% in smaller format oak. Barrels vary in age from 2 to 6 years old. 12.5% alc. Drink now-2029.

Organic.

Press review:

Tamlyn Currin for JancisRobinson.com: “Sweet woodruff, honey, lanolin and pears. While Mabileau’s Chenin tasted like the gods were at war over the firmament, Gigou’s Chenin tastes like the dryads are holding a Spring flower festival in a wild meadow around a stone circle. It’s so damn pretty but also, beware, bewitching. The honey (light, redolent with acacia blossom) and pears (golden skins, dripping, a little raspy) are framed in herbs so perfumed and intoxicatingly pungent that I am sure they’re used for spells. The energy at the heart of the wine is tiny but fierce, as if the dryads harnessed a bee to power the light that fills every liquid-sunlight molecule of this wine. Wild orange on the finish. And then the stones. Stones on the finish. Flowers growing out of the stones. Good Value. Drink now-2034.” 17.5 points