Identifying Chenin Blanc Grape Vines

Charles Morand from Chateau Gaudrelle gave me a quick lesson on how to identify Chenin Blanc grape vines recently, so here are the main things to look for:

The vines are trained and pruned into a goblet shape.

The top of the petiole (leaf stem), where it joins the leaf, is pink. Often the whole petiole and the leaf veins are pink. The young leaves have shallow lobes although very mature leaves can be deeply divided into lobes with lyre shaped cut aways.

 The bunches of grapes are long narrow cone shapes with small tightly packed berries. They are late maturing.

Of course, in Vouvray, where these photos were taken, identifying the grapes is easy because they are all Chenin Blanc, the only variety allowed by the appellation rules.

Many thanks to Charles for the lesson, and apologies to him if I have got anything wrong or misunderstood.

For my previous post on identifying grape vines see here.

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L'Art et Lard: The annual art and food festival held in le Petit Pressigny is on Sunday 13 October. For an idea of what you might see, here is our post about it from 2009.