The Baumard 2008 Coteaux du Layon Carte d’Or offers lily-like sweet perfume and a vivid amalgam of quince preserves, marzipan, and really ripe red peach – with the subtle, invigorating tartness and bitterness that suggests peach flesh close to the fruit’s core. A saline streak and sorbet-like dollop of lime serve for further stimulation and counterpoint, all woven into an almost syrup-like matrix in such a way that the wine does not finish syrupy sweet, sticky, or heavy, but instead luscious and buoyant. This jaw-dropping value and nobly sweet elixir of purity, refinement yet intimacy should be a delight to follow over the coming decade if not also beyond. I finally had the pleasure to taste personally with Florent Baumard (for more about whose domaine and methods, consult my report in issue 172) and found him a disarmingly astute critic of his own wines whose confidence I share that the best is yet to come from this vast and already justly renowned estate. I find a freedom from bitter or coarse elements and a clarity of flavors in the more recent wines that is welcome and which, when pressed, Florent Baumard suggests might in part be attributable to increasingly selective and watchful (though not necessarily gentler) pressing. The envelope-pushing here is evident in the quality of Baumard’s relatively high-volume sparking wines, rendered from blends unfamiliar outside of the Loire. The wines I tasted five years ago were good, but only modestly-recommendable (and I elected not to publish notes on them in issue 172). The lot numbers of Baumard non-vintage sparkling wines appear on the front label in very tiny, faint letters under the words “sparkling wine,” but cannot be read without good eyesight, and not if the bottle is wet! The Baumards’ “regular” bottling of Savennieres is from their Clos St. Yves vineyard between the Clos du Papillon and Roche aux Moines, and a fact of which I was not aware when I published my notes in issue 172 is that two different labels are used interchangeably, one of which indicates the vineyard name.Importer: Ex Cellars wine Agencies, Cambridge, MA; tel. (617) 876-5105