Our Estate is located near the famous Château de Chenonceau, east of Tours in a small village Pouillé (41). Proud of our 45 hectares in the Touraine and Touraine Chenonceaux appellations, the green lines of our family vineyard adorn the hillsides bordering the Cher.
It offers an exceptional point of view over the beautiful Cher Valley and is part of the Loire Valley wine route, a famous touristic route richly sown with winegrowers’ villages, royal castles and preserved natural landscapes.
Our white and rosé wines reveal all their subtlety and charm while our red wines express fully the character of the terroir. Their secret? A soil of flint-clay-stones called "perruches" for our parcels on hillside and "bournais" for our parcels on the plateau, where the soil is more clayey and dense. Also, added to the equitation, being under the oceanic influence that protects us from the first spring frost produces a micro climate that gives an optimal maturity to our grapes. It is the winning formula to produce all of the different types of wine, each with its own particular character.
Sauvignon Blanc, the internationally recognized grape variety, is the flagship of the Touraine Appellation and, it makes up 2/3 of our vineyard. In addition: we have Gamay, Cabernet Franc and Malbec varieties to elaborate our reds and Pineau d’Aunis blended with Gamay for our rosés. All these grape varieties our found in our range of Touraine wines called “classique”. Our Chardonnay is used for elaboration of a fine sparkling wine using the traditional method.
Thanks to our parcels which are classified and planted on the slope, we also vinify two parcellar wines: A white wine, Touraine Chenonceaux cuvée “La Voûte” made with 100% Sauvignon Blanc and a red wine, Touraine Chenonceaux cuvée “L’Esprit des Dames” blending of Malbec and Cabernet Franc.
In the Delaunay family we are winemakers from father to son for 5 generations and we have succeeded in making this Estate what it is today.
Formely a multicrop farm, in 1965 my father Joël Delaunay focused entirely on winemaking and the Estate was established and shaped, the first bottles were marketed in 1970. Year after year, he restructured and expanded the vineyard and started the first export sales in the early 1980’s. The year of 1992 saw the construction of a new modern winery with stainless steel tanks in projection of my upcoming arrival on the Estate.
In 1998 after graduating from a viti-viniculture training course in the Bordeaux region, I took over from my father in 2003 and settled down on the Estate with my wife Marie. Both of us wished to extend this family tradition, to develop our Estate and to use our know-how to move forward.
In 2015, we inaugurated a new bottling facility, a storage zone and the office building and we enriched a new technical and modern bottling line to satisfy our different markets with the screw capping.