My first encounter with the wines of Moulin Touchais dates back to the early days of my love affair with the Loire. I discovered, quite by chance, that wonderful old vintages of Moulin Touchais were available, for not very much money, from a makeshift cellar inside the shop of the local Texaco garage in Doué-La-Fontaine. I used to make a point of going and filling up with fuel there, buying a few old bottles at the same time. Whilst I may never have considered them to be the best wines from the Layon, it was always difficult to pass over the opportunity of buying vintages that predate one’s own birth.
So, for thirty-odd years I knew of Moulin Touchais, but very little about Moulin Touchais. Speaking more recently to other merchants who remember the wines from old, they were viewed with a degree of suspicion. How was it that ‘unlimited’ amounts of pristine-looking stock could be so readily available? The answer is innocently apparent, since each bottle is labelled to order, and old vintages are checked and reconditioned (topped up with the same vintage and given a new cork) before they are despatched. Even now, its location appears to remain somewhat confidential.
On a quiet street within the town, with the cellar located at an address behind a dilapidated bourgeois house in an unremarkable concrete edifice. Clearly, Vignobles Touchais successfully succeeds in concealing itself from the outside world and there remains a sense of mystery around the industry that goes on here and in the network of 15 kilometres of tunnels that run below your feet. The cellars here must contain one of the largest and oldest collections of any winery anywhere in the world, with the miles of cellars containing close to two million bottles at any one time, including a rare collection of ancient wines; the oldest dating back to the mid to late 19th century.
The general principle behind the picking of grapes for Moulin Touchais is that around one-quarter of the crop is harvested relatively early (about 80 days after flowering) and whilst the fruit is slightly under-ripe. This component part helps to maintain the acidity in the final blend. The balance is then picked up to 120 days following flowering, ensuring the grapes are loaded with sugar, although are not generally affected by noble rot, the reason being that the Touchais vines are at the back of the appellation and away from the river where there is less humidity to encourage the botrytis spores. Little has changed in the viticulture and vinification process, with the traditional values of low yields, hand harvesting and a long, slow fermentation. The wine is then committed to bottle early, as soon as March the following vintage, and allowed to age for a minimum of ten years in the cellars before release.
Whilst a Coteaux-du-Layon is produced in the cellar every year, it is not systematic that each vintage will be released under the Moulin Touchais label. Typically, the wines all contain between 70 and 80 grams of residual sugar and, like with many other similar examples from the Loire, they only really come into their own after two decades in bottle. The greatest vintages for Moulin Touchais correspond to the best years in the Loire (they also tend to produce the largest quantities too) and legends include the 1945, 1947, 1949, 1953 and 1959, 1961 and 1969. Sadly, these are no longer commercially available, but occasionally crop up on tasting and at auction.
Richard Kelley, Master of Wine, Dreyfus Ashby Wine Merchants
