Domaine de La Renaudie

A hand kept close to the coteaux

Charlotte Denis works the vineyard before the cellar work begins, winemaker at Domaine de La Renaudie in Mareuil-sur-Cher, on the Cher valley hillsides. Charlotte Denis has been winemaker here since 2020, and vigneronne at the domaine since 2016, carrying a family formation rather than a borrowed house style. Her own sentence is plain: “We work our vineyard in an ecologically sustainable way.” At this estate, that line sits inside a family-run 30-hectare property, where the slope, the exposure, and the work of continuity matter more than display. Denis is also described as gérante, a role that keeps the technical and the practical close together: vineyard decisions, cellar direction, and the daily stewardship of a place worked by the same family across generations. The domaine’s public language returns often to patience, balance, and the Cher, not as scenery but as the ground of the method. In white, Denis names Touraine Sauvignon as the flagship, “a fruity, fresh Sauvignon with good balance.” In red, she speaks of Sang pour Sang Malbec as the cuvée of her great-grandfather, with black-fruit aromas and spice on the finish. Lineage here is not an ornament. It has a label, a grape, and a memory attached to it.

Chenonceaux within the family parcels

The work at Domaine de La Renaudie is anchored in AOC Touraine and AOC Touraine Chenonceaux, with 18 of the estate’s 30 hectares planted for Chenonceaux. The appellation was created in 2011 and covers 100 hectares, which gives the domaine’s Chenonceaux parcels a defined place inside a small Loire frame. The vineyard includes 26 hectares of vines with an average age of about 40 years, and the family works under Terra Vitis certification, a standard it has held for more than 15 years. Sauvignon Blanc and Gamay form almost half of the vineyard, joined by Cabernet, Cot, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pineau d’Aunis. That range explains the cellar’s spread across dry white, red, rosé, and sparkling wines without making the program feel diffuse. Denis’s stated emphasis is fruit, roundness, and balance, especially in the Touraine Sauvignon and the Sang pour Sang Malbec.

The cellar keeps the conversation close

The cellar reads as a working family room rather than a staged tasting room. Visitors come through the domaine for guided visits and comparative tastings, but the centre of the experience is still the cellar, the bottles, and the explanation of how a hillside in Touraine becomes Sauvignon, Gamay, Cot, or Chenin. The tone is warm and traditional, with enough quiet in the room for questions about soils, ripeness, and pairings to stay at a conversational pitch. Outside, the Cher valley hillsides give the place its shape; inside, the craft narrows to glass, label, and cellar air. The setting does not ask to be treated as spectacle. It asks for attention to the line between AOC Touraine and Touraine Chenonceaux, to the difference between a flagship white and a family red, to the hand that keeps both in scale.

A family cuvée held in the present tense

The estate’s next movement is easiest to read through the wines Denis already names. Touraine Sauvignon carries the house’s white line, while Sang pour Sang Malbec keeps a great-grandfather’s cuvée in present use rather than family anecdote. That is where Domaine de La Renaudie feels most exact: in a bottle whose black-fruit aromas and spicy finish still carry the name Sang pour Sang Malbec.