2023 La Rive de Loire Menetou-Salon 750 ml

Antoine de la Farge’s 2023 La Rive de Loire Menetou-Salon is an exceptional Sauvignon Blanc from a criminally underappreciated region. Crafted with painstaking techniques that you just don’t see in under-$40 wines from this area—native-yeast fermentation, a gravity-flow winery, sustainable farming, and hand-harvesting—it’s a pure example of Loire Sauv Blanc that will thrill lovers of racy white wine. 

Antoine de la Farge is the grandson of the immensely respected winemaker Gerard Clément, who helped create the Menetou-Salon appellation in the Loire—an obsession with quality was a given. Antoine was sent out to learn about the wine trade for over a decade before returning home to helm the family domaine—and he worked his way up the retail wine world until he was one of the most important wine buyers in France.

The Ménétou-Salon appellation has a deep tradition of making sophisticated wines in a uniquely snappy style. Nestled in the eastern nook of the dreamy Loire Valley and virtually unknown outside of France, winemakers in this tiny region can’t rest on their notoriety the way producers in next-door Sancerre can. Instead they have to win fans the old-fashioned way, with charming wines that offer serious value. 

Antoine’s 2023 is a vibrant, terroir-driven wine with all the raciness and nuance you want in a primo Loire Sauvignon Blanc, and it stands with bottles made in the big-money AOCs of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. Perfect on its own, a dream with oysters or an opulent seafood tower, it’s the kind of white wine we want in our glass year-round. Chill, pour, savor, repeat!