Founded in 1990, Domaine André Fouassier crafts wine in both the Touraine (6 hectares) and the Valençay (6 hectares of white and red) appellations. The Valençay vineyards are centred around the Loire river’s Cher tributary and lie to the eastern end of the much larger Touraine region. The area was first awarded its official appellation status for wine back in 2003 whilst the town has much longer been recognised for its famous pyramid-shaped goat cheese. The impressive Chateau de Valencay was once owned by Talleyrand, the famous foreign office minister to Napoleon.

André Fouassier’s plots of vines are located in the villages of Lye and Chabris with the vines being between 20 and 30 years old and planted in a variety of soils including clay, chalk, flint and gravel. His winemaking facility is set up in several different old buildings in a hamlet located just a couple of kilometres from Lye.

Here André prefers to use small tanks in order to maximise the contact between the lees and the wine whilst also allowing him to work with small batches of wine that more precisely reflect the variances in terroirs, soils and age of vines. He prefers to retain a cover of grass between the rows of vines so as to promote vegetative and insect life and diversity (he has more than 40 different species of grasses in his vine plots) whilst also helping to avoid the use of pesticides. During the winemaking process André only uses his own indigenous yeast and keeps the sulphur dosage as low as possible.

"I want to make wine easy drinking and healthy” André Fouassier