Marie Thibault

There is the Loire of tourist brochures: châteaux, cycling routes, river light, the flawless French pastoral. And then there is the Loire you enter through a door in the rock. Around Tours, soft limestone has for centuries been carved into houses, cellars and long underground tunnels, where wine matures in coolness and silence. It is here, in this less ceremonial and far more interesting Loire, that Marie Thibault and Frantz Saumon work — two winemakers, two spouses, two independent voices. Their wines do not try to be “correct”. They do not polish local varieties until they shine with international gloss, nor do they turn natural wine into a circus act. They simply allow Chenin, Grolleau, Gamay and stone to speak in their own language — alive, precise, free, but never unruly.