Loire AOCs

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 25. Chapters: Bourgueil AOC, Chinon AOC, Coteaux du Layon, Jasnières, Muscadet, Orléans AOC, Pouilly-Fumé, Pouilly-sur-Loire AOC, Quincy AOC, Reuilly AOC, Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil AOC, Sancerre (wine), Saumur (wine), Savennières wine, Touraine-Amboise, Touraine AOC, Valençay AOC, Vouvray (wine). Excerpt: Touraine-Amboise is an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) for in the Loire Valley wine region in France. It is situated within the wider Touraine AOC wine appellation. It is produced by ten communes bordering both sides of the River Loire. To their west lies the town of Amboise with its famous royal château. Since its separation from the Touraine AOC in 1954, it has constituted an AOC in its own right. Annual production stands at 9,000 hectolitres of wine, spread between red, rosé, and still white wines. Effervescent wines are also produced within this AOC's boundaries, but they are not entitled to use the Touraine-Amboise appellation, belonging instead to the Touraine appellation. Wild VineThere is evidence that people were living on the sloping hillsides of this middle stretch of the Loire as early as palaeolithic and neolithic times. The Châtelliers plateau, on the edge of which the Château of Amboise is built, contains one of the Loire region's most important Chasséen neolithic sites. An axe made with local stone and a dagger made with stone from the Grand-Pressigny region, have been discovered to the west of the market town of Limeray. Significant permanent settlements seem to have grown up at the start of the Bronze Age (approximately 5,000 years BC), while large-scale planting of the valleys dates from the final period of the Bronze Age, between 1,200 and 750 BC. At that time, following the last glacial period, vines already existed in their wild state as a kind of creeper growing on the edges of forests and on stony soils, but wine-making was as yet undiscovered. In the first century AD the geographer, Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD), described wine-growing in Gaul as well-developed, but made no specific mention of wines produced along the banks of the Loire. Whereas the Nantes wine-growing area dates back to the Roman occupation, popular tradition links the start of vine cultivation in the province of Touraine (in the middle section of the Loire's course) to