France · Loire · Muscadet

For a long time considered as a region with little media coverage and lower quality, Muscadet is now in the spotlight thanks to talented winemakers such as Jean-Baptiste Hardy. After travelling the world to experiment with different approaches (Domaine Roulot, Leflaive, Patagonia, New Zealand...), he took over the family vineyards in 2018, in Mouzillon, a village in the heart of the Muscadet Sèvre et Maine appellation, 25kms from Nantes.

His playground? a typical Muscadet terroir with a complex soil of gabbros (volcanic rocks), silica and clay. On 4ha of old vines 100% Melon de Bourgogne, Jean-Baptiste Hardy draws all the substance from it, practising an organic viticulture centred above all on a perfect sanitary state of the grapes. The result? Wines with a lot of precision, elegance and texture that sometimes remind us of the great Chablis.

The vinification lasts about a year with maturation on fine lees, mainly in 450L oak barrels. The wines are then matured for 6 months in vats before being bottled without filtration or fining and with the level of sulphur reduced to its simplest expression. A Burgundian approach that makes Jean-Baptiste Hardy the rising star of Muscadet!