Grapes: Cab Franc
Region: Bourgueil, France
Vintage: 2019
Viticulture: Organic
Soils: Gravel + clay + sand
Vinification: Short maceration then fermented in concrete vats
Aging: Aged in concrete + old barrels
Fining or Filtering: None
Sulfur: Minimal
Notes from the Importer: Since 1640 this domaine has been in the Caslot family. Their house, office, and winery sit upon one of Touraine’s largest cellars — a great cavernous affair dug out between the 11th and 13th centuries to provide stone for the local village of Restigné. On my first visit to the domaine two decades ago, Pierre Caslot the reigning patriarch led me to a flight of stairs plummeting to the depths. “Entrez,” he laughed: “le Paradis!” It’s down there that he would take clients on tours, walking through vast chambers hewed out by hand. Here and there neat rows of bottles lay on the ground and barrels line the walls. It’s down there too, in one dark corner or another, that Pierre would conduct tastings that might go back fifteen vintages. In 2014, he left this world, and the Loire lost one of its great bon vivants.
In the early 2000s, his son Emmanuel and daughter Stéphanie (pictured below, and taken too soon by illness in 2021) joined Pierre in running the domaine. The primary task he gave them was to take the domaine on an organic footing. He himself had quit using herbicides in the previous decade, but he wanted to go 100% in with organics for all of their vineyards. Thus in 2008 Chevalerie received its first certification, and in 2012 it received Demeter certification for biodynamic farming.
