Hard drive failures, like acts of God, can offer a useful perspective on what’s important. But mostly, they serve to highlight how badly prepared you are. In any case, my data are now residing on a redundant store whose blue LEDs periodically, reassuringly, blink at me. Time to open another bottle of wine.

Here’s a curiosity, then. The Baumard web site, combined with my spotty French lead me to believe this wine from the Loire Valley is made from the Verdelho grape. I gather, also, Verdelho is rather a novelty in France, or has increasingly been so since the 1950s. In any case, it appears some of it was found within the estate’s plantings, from which this wine (and a sweeter variant) is produced.

This wine bears some resemblance to Australian Verdelho-based wines but, perhaps unsurprisingly, tastes more of the Loire Valley than anything else. An aged aroma profile of some residual freshness but mostly of a waxy minerality that reminds me of the Loire Chenin-based wines lately consumed. This wine currently lacks the complexity and detail of, say, the 1995 Baumard Savennières, although it’s certainly interesting enough. There are edges of softer tropical fruit that, to my palate, are this wine’s nod to its varietal origins.

The palate is more varietally-identifiable, showing a high toned, vaguely tropical fruit character. Not hugely flavoursome on entry, it shows good palate weight and some more intensity of fruit flavour towards the middle palate. Again there’s no great complexity here, but the flavour profile is undeniably distinctive and, to my taste, quite attractive. Intensity drops off quickly through the after palate, and there isn’t an especially remarkable finish. Some lift at the back of the mouth carries things through to a soft conclusion.

A tasty, characterful wine that pairs well with fresh, strongly-flavoured food.

Domaine des Baumard
Price: $NA
Closure: Cork
Date tasted: September 2008