Montlouis is an appellation for various white wine styles (still, sparkling, dry and sweet) from the commune of Montlouis-sur-Loire, in the France's central Loire Valley. These are uniformly based on Chenin Blanc (known locally as Pineau de la Loire), the key white wine grape in this part of France.
The Montlouis name is not particularly well known in international wine markets, and neither are the town's wines. They are overshadowed by Vouvray, Montlouis' more famous sister appellation, just to the north on the other side of the Loire. In fact, until the creation of the Montlouis appellation in 1938 the commune's wines were actually labeled and sold as Vouvray.
One key characteristic of quality Montlouis is its remarkable long life; many bottles show stunning aromatic freshness after more than three decades. This is largely down to Chenin Blanc's naturally high acidity, a preservative which protects the wine from breaking down. Also vital is Chenin's intense aromatic composition, marked out by notes of acacia blossom, quince and green apples in the wines' youth and honeysuckle, quince and lanolin over time. It is only after several years' patience that the best wines retreat from their aggressive, steely youth into the complex, honeyed liquids they ultimately become. The rewards of a mature, good-quality Montlouis are well worth waiting for.
Montlouis, just like Vouvray, lacks an efficient, official labeling system to help distinguish the wine styles from one another. Its wines can be roughly divided into sweet, dry, still and sparkling. The labels can theoretically bare the sweetness terms sec, sec-tendre, demi-sec and moelleux but of these only Sec and Moelleux are used with any frequency. Any Montlouis wine labeled sec contains less than 8g/L of residual sugar. The moelleux wines are the very sweetest, and range anywhere from 50g/l to more than 200g/l (see Montlouis Moelleux).
It's a similar story with Montlouis' sparkling wines, which can be either petillant (spritzy) or mousseux (fully sparkling), labeling terms which appear on labels all too rarely. There is in fact no legally defined technical distinction between petillant and mousseux, which may explain why producers seem to prefer the generic and more marketable phrase methode traditionelle. Happily, Montlouis sparkling wines are relatively easy to spot on the shelf, thanks to the foil-wrapped, wire-secured cork common to sparkling wines all over the world. For specific information on these wines, see Montlouis Petillant - Mousseux.
In terms of terroir, the vineyards around Montlouis enjoy gravelly, free-draining topsoils with a deep bed of tuffeau, the calcareous rock type found in various locations in the central Loire, most notably in Saumur and here around Vouvray and Montlouis. Tuffeau is a soft, porous limestone formed during the Cretaceous period, roughly 90 million years ago. It has two key forms: chalkier, firmer tuffeau blanc and softer, sandier tuffeau jaune. Due to its porosity, tuffeau strikes an excellent balance of drainage and water retention, saving vines from both waterlogging and drought. The climate in Montlouis falls somewhere between maritime (the Atlantic Ocean is a full 140 miles/226km away) and continental. The topography, while not complex like that of Burgundy or Alsace, is changeable enough to create variation in the local mesoclimates.
