Interview with a winemaker from the Loire region: Jérôme Billard, owner and winemaker, Domaine de la Noblaie, Ligré.
📽️ Interviews with Loire winemakers & Loire winery proprietors
I’m Jérôme Billard, I’m a winemaker in Chinon, in the Loire. La Noblaie is our wine estate. It’s a small family-run estate with 24 hectares.
Wines and soils
All 24 hectares are farmed organically. We harvest entirely by hand, separating everything.
We currently have quite a large range of wines, with two rosés, two white wines and four red wines made from Cabernet Franc.
For the rosés, we pick mostly from the lower slopes where the soils are quite generous and rich; the same goes for our sparkling wine.
We keep all the rest of the slopes for growing elegant red wines with slightly longer macerations and a more extracted style.
In my range of four red wines, my first wine, called Le Temps des Cerises, is made from grapes from across the vineyard.
Then we have two terroir-focused wines:
- Les Blancs Manteaux, made from a single parcel
of pure limestone, - and Les Chiens Chiens, which grows across the
plateau up at the top there, on kaolinite and
clay, so it has a very, very unique soil too.
Sales and export
For me as a winemaker, I am extremely proud to be able to export these wines.
I was lucky enough to meet our American importer in 2004.
Our export business is really about a relationship with a distributor in whom we have total confidence, who will showcase our wines, find suppliers for them, promote them and allow people to discover them.
So the partnerships and ties that we build are very, very strong.
We see each other once, sometimes twice, a year and are in regular contact by email.
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