Stéphane Bernaudeau press
"During his years working with Mark Angéli, Bernaudeau acquired about 3.5 hectares of land; he finally left Angéli’s property in 2015, tired of “running between the two, racing like I was a Parisian,” and moved into his own minuscule cellar. His specialty is intense, sublimely-textured chenin from Layon, including Les Ongles, from 30-year-old vines on schist; Les Terres Blanches from a tiny head-trained parcel on limestone; and the stately Les Nourrissons, from century-old vines on schist; plus several reds."
- Jon Bonne, The Top Producers in France’s Capital of Natural Wine
"Anjou arguably felt like the right place to work precisely because there was so little precedent for the sort of things its new pioneers wanted to make: complex, dry wines from both chenin and red grolleau (plus some cabernet franc and other things), farmed organically or biodynamically, sometimes bottled under the relatively lowly “Anjou” appellation but often marked simply as vin de France. Their ranks grew rapidly, and included important figures like Leroy, who arrived in 1996, and Réné and Agnes Mosse, wine-bar owners in nearby Tours who were inspired to make their own wine by the 1990s Loire revitalization, helmed by winemakers like Jo Pithon and Marc Angeli.
Successive waves have never stopped coming. Today it’s possible to locate at least a couple dozen emerging talents, including Vincent and Stéphanie Deboutbertin in Faye d’Anjou, who had a desire to work by horse and a sentimentality for chenin and grolleau; Geneviève Delatte and Nicolas Bertin of Bertin-Delatte, who bought their own land in 2008 after working for other winemakers; and Angeli’s former assistant Stéphane Bernaudeau, who finally set up his own cellar in 2015 and makes some of the region’s most compelling, savory examples of chenin."