Domaine Gadais

A five-generation family estate in Saint-Fiacre-sur-Maine, at the heart of Muscadet Sèvre et Maine, growing nothing but Melon de Bourgogne.

The Gadais family has farmed in Saint-Fiacre-sur-Maine, where the Sèvre and Maine rivers meet south-east of Nantes, for five generations. In 1947 Louis Gadais decided to concentrate on wine, and he became one of the first growers around Nantes to bottle his own rather than sell it in bulk to the cooperative. In 1958 the American importer Frank Schoonmaker came to buy, and the following year Gadais Muscadet was on tables in New York.

Louis's sons Michel and Marcel developed the estate, adding the prized La Faubretière vineyard in 1973 and keeping yields low when the trend ran the other way. Christophe Gadais took over in 1994 after working in Sancerre and abroad, and built a range of single-terroir cuvées, among them Les Perrières Monopole, first made in 2009. His son Pierre-Henri returned in 2016 after studying in Burgundy and Bordeaux and working in California, Australia, England, New Zealand and Switzerland, and has moved the wines towards fewer interventions and less added sulphur.

The estate grows only Melon de Bourgogne, on more than 50 hectares split into around a hundred plots. The soils are old metamorphic rock (orthogneiss, mica schist and amphibolite) with a sandy structure that drains naturally and sends the roots deep. A semi-underground cellar works by gravity, and every wine is aged on its lees, from six months for the classic cuvées to far longer for Les Perrières.