The Muscadet “revolution” | The Press

(Château-Thébaud) Long perceived as a “little thirst-quenching wine”, Muscadet has taken its revenge in recent years in the Nantes vineyards, in the west of France, gaining in reputation to the point of achieving great success with winemakers. French amateurs and foreign customers.

Exported to the four corners of the world, Muscadet is produced between the ocean and Ancenis, on the banks of the Loire, from a unique grape variety, the Burgundy melon.

In Château-Thébaud, the Lieubeau family produces three of the ten communal crus considered to be the top of the range of the Nantes vineyards. Their recognition, from 2011, had started the “revolution” of Muscadet, according to François Lieubeau.

On this September morning, around thirty grape pickers are squatting in his vines, hats on their heads and secateurs in hand. Three porters, harnessed in green baskets, collect the grapes piled in buckets and transfer them into a large bin.

The plot offers a 180-degree view of the Nantes vineyards, its green valleys and its bell towers.

The Lieubeau estate, founded in 1816 and converted to organic since 2015, produces 350,000 bottles per year on 65 hectares, for three quarters of Muscadet.

“Today it is a wine in keeping with the times: white, dry, light, fruity. We tick all the boxes for current demand,” smiles the winegrower, associated with his parents, brother and sister.

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Marie Luneau, winemaker at the Luneau-Papin estate in Landreau, remembers well an opposite situation, not so long ago.

“When my husband, the son of winegrowers from the region, was studying in Bordeaux, he was looked down upon a little like the “little Muscadet guy”. Even 15 years ago, a local winegrower who worked with palaces or large foreign clients, we looked at him with wide eyes,” says the winegrower, who exports 40% of her production to 45 countries.

According to her, the popularity of Muscadet is also due to the agreement between current cuisine, “more dietary, light” and this “digestible”, “accessible” and low-alcohol wine.

François Lieubeau, for his part, works with “around a hundred starred restaurants”, “beautiful cellars like that of the Grande Épicerie”, in Paris, and exports his Muscadets to “around forty countries”.

American importer of European wines, Jon-David Headrick has seen the popularity of Muscadet skyrocket in his country over the past ten years.

“Americans have long seen it as a little thirst-quenching wine, sometimes confused with Muscat. Today, it is finally considered a complex, gourmet wine,” explains this distributor, whose biggest Muscadet customers are in New York and California, over the phone.

Climate deregulation

But if demand is flourishing, supply is drying up. Muscadet today has 400 winegrowers, on 6,500 hectares, half as many as twenty years ago.

The vineyard also suffers the direct consequences of climate change.

“The winter is getting milder and the grape variety is budding earlier and earlier. Which makes it more fragile in the face of episodes of frost, which previously occurred every 15 or 20 years and which we now experience almost every spring,” observes François Robin, communications delegate for the Nantes Wine Federation.

In April 2022, the Nantes vineyard had lost half of its harvest potential in one night of frost.

“My parents had only experienced one major frost episode, in 1991. In the 12 years that I have been an associate, I am already on my fifth,” says François Lieubeau.

Another threat is mildew, a vine disease favored by the combination of heat and humidity.

With her back bent and her knees bent, Inès Fadet, a 31-year-old grape harvester, carefully sorts the juicy, white grapes from those, dry and blackened, attacked by disease.

Once the juice is pressed, it will ferment in underground glass-tiled vats, characteristic of the Nantes vineyard. Muscadet, says François Lieubeau, “is not just a fashion, it is a whole know-how”.