- Touraine, Loire, France
Thank you to importer Louis/Dressner for this estate profile:
And click here and scroll down for Jules' very informative interview with Valérie!
While I sometimes still think of Valérie Forgues as “new” to the Loire and New York wine world, Louis/Dressner and Bowler are on our seventh of her vintages! Her story and wines fly under the radar and are worth getting to know. Valérie is a small grower in the Cher Valley of the Touraine. Her knowledge, skills, experience and confidence have evolved beautifully, as have her wines as a result, over the last decade+. Like Valérie, they are down to earth--unpolished, pure, exuberant, expressive--with a soupçon of quirky charm and intensity.
Valérie’s start was inauspicious and challenging. She had had an international business career, then became a stay-at-home mom. Her husband had bought and was running a vineyard property called Domaine de la Méchinière in the 1990’s. She was not involved in growing or making wine… until suddenly in 2008, she found herself on her own, with the babies and the business. Her only financial option was to fight to keep the domaine afloat. Enter her generous-spirited neighbor, Didier Barrouillet of the storied Clos Roche Blanche: he quietly stepped in to teach Valérie how to farm [properly] and makewine [naturally]. Didier saw the property’s potential: parcels totaling 12 hectares of vines, local varieties only, many of them quite old.
But the land had been worked hard, not farmed well, over time. With Didier’s gentle guidance and her own guts and grit, Valérie gradually converted herself into a vigneronne and her vines into an organically farmed oasis of true biodiversity (see her Insta: as many wild beasts as bottles!). She booted commercial yeasts in favor of spontaneous fermentations; cut sulfur usage dramatically; started cleaning up the rustic cellar; and most crucially, started harvesting by hand. Those shifts and more set her on the path to her eponymous label, which debuted in France in the 2015 vintage (2017 was the first here).
The Forgues mainstays are single-variety Sauvignon Blanc, Gamay and Côt. They are made traditionally and read as pretty typical Touraine—tropical Sauvignon, grippy Gamay and earthy Côt. To be sure, in Valérie’s early days, there was a zig here and a zag there, as the learning curve sorted itself out; but the arc of her success is evident in this line-up of authentic, minimally sulfured, tasty Touraine wines. One of her sons returned home during the pandemic and never left, adding a second pair of hands to this tiny but complex operation and thus enabling continuing improvements and even experimentation. The range has expanded to include unique, delicious blends featuring their pre-phylloxera Pineaux (Pineau d’Aunis, Menu Pineau and Pineau de la Loire, aka Chenin) and Cabernet Franc.
What began as a scrap for survival morphed into a true labor of love for Valérie: love for her tiny corner of the Cher, its history and tradition, its forests and rivers and creatures, for her land and its vines and their individual personalities. You’ll find her unpretentious, unfiltered expressions of that special Touraine character in these Forgues bottles—Bowler Wine’s Louis/Dressner portfolio manager Juliette Pope