In the pretty riverside village of Noyers-sur-Cher you'll find a young grower described by impeccable sources as one of the Loire’s hottest talents. Valentin Desloges worked with soul brothers Raphaël Coche (Coche-Dury) and Thierry Pillot (Domaine Paul Pillot) before taking control of his father’s vines in Noyers-sur-Cher. His first vintage was 2020. There are currently 10 hectares in play, split evenly between two terroirs. In the village itself, Valentin works with five hectares planted to Pinot Noir, Pineau d’Aunis, Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc. The white varieties are rooted in the lieu-dit Le Puits aux Chiens, a cool, shallow terroir dominated by flinty sand and white clay over limestone.   

Desloges’ second terroir lies across the river at Saint-Aignan, on the left bank of the Cher. The older vines and red clay soils give Valentin his top single-vineyard wines: Bel Air from Sauvignon and Au dessus de Vitré from Cabernet Franc. In some ways, not least the piercing amplitude of his Sauvignon wines, Valentin’s story reminds us of Didier Dagueneau, who we first met not far away 20 years ago. Like Dagueneau, he is a driven young maker, headstrong even, heavily influenced by great growers in other regions, particularly Burgundy. Like Dagueneau, he returned to his home in an area without much of a reputation for greatness. He proceeded to farm at the highest level and work ultra precisely in the cellars to produce quality far surpassing anything seen before in the region.

He knows healthy fruit from low-yielding vines produces the purest, most intense and vibrantly authentic wine. Valentin’s self-imposed yield limits and next-level organic farming have everything to do with his wines not being ‘typical’ of the appellation. They possess an intensity, purity and subtlety far beyond those of his neighbours near and far. And as with Dagueneau, Valentin is a man in a hurry, reassuringly charging prices well beyond the region’s standard.

Valentin’s winemaking style would not look out of place in the more progressive cellars of the Côte d’Or.  He focuses on micromanaging the pressing to obtain the most balanced juices possible. Desloges is experimenting with whole bunches for his Pineau d’Aunis and Pinot Noir, but the reds are mostly destemmed. They ferment slowly with indigenous yeasts in stainless-steel tanks before aging in older casks sourced from Burgundy and Bordeaux. The whites are pressed as whole bunches and ferment and age in the same oak barrels. In the near future, Valentin hopes to exclusively use his own barrels, made from oak staves personally sourced and aged in-house from the nearby Loches forest. All the wines are bottled without filtration.

Without exaggeration, Valentin’s Sauvignon strongly reminds us of Dagueneau, or at least these are the closest wines to Dagueneau that we’ve tasted from any other producer. Intense but nuanced, they are post-varietal wines of great texture and presence but not weighty at all. The red wines are no less exciting. The cool, creamy Cabernet Franc textures replace any green tannins or rawness, and mineral flavours combine with elegant, seamless fruit and distinctive length. The delicately extracted Pineau d’Aunis is a revelation—a future reference for this beautifully enigmatic variety. Insane in the Touraine.