Chateau de Bonnezeaux La Minee Basse 2023

La Minée Basse comes from one of the more improbable vineyard rescues in the Loire. The plot's 70-year-old Chenin Blanc vines, planted on a distinctive seam of schist in Anjou, lay abandoned for more than three decades before Guyonne Saclier de la Bâtie took over the historic Château de Bonnezeaux estate in 2012 and began nursing them painstakingly back to health, applying the biodynamic methods she'd learned working alongside the legendary Mark Angeli at Ferme de la Sansonnière. The first vintage of La Minée Basse wasn't released until 2020 — a genuinely new addition to the range even by the standards of an estate still finding its feet after decades of silence. Pierre Boisseaux and Léa Meslet have since taken over the winemaking, continuing the same trajectory of rising quality and shrinking availability that's made every Bonnezeaux bottling increasingly sought after. As with the rest of the dry Chenins here, archaic French appellation law means this wine — grown in one of the Loire's most celebrated sweet-wine zones — can only be labelled the humble Vin de France.

The result is exactly what that ancient schist promises: precise, richly textured, and intensely mineral, full-bodied without ever losing its cut, with the kind of depth and tension that has made this one of the most talked-about Chenin bottlings coming out of the Loire today. It's a wine built on patience — both the vines' decades of dormancy and the careful, unhurried winemaking behind it.