2022 Domaine de la Colline Muscadet Sevre et Maine 750 ml

The word “Muscadet” provokes a Pavlovian response in us.

The second we hear it, we practically salivate at the stony, orchard-fruit-inflected flavors, light body, and zesty acidity. The white wine is tailor made to slake our thirst on any sunny day—but too often we’re disappointed by what we can find here in the States.

So everytime we make our way to Nantes—Muscadet’s backyard, and now one of the absolute coolest cities in France—there’s no discussion about what to order. On our last trip, we were hanging out with our friend Romain at one of the hip cafes full of bare wood and exposed brick, that seem to have sprouted across the city in the last decade, and issued a challenge: Pick out a bottle we hadn’t tried before and blow us away.

With a distinct Nantais swagger, Romain looked at the wine list and ordered the Domaine de la Colline, a locals-only bottle he said was sure to blow us away. 

He was right.

Vincent and Damien Papin run a cracker of an estate out of their winery in the hamlet of Le Parveau. Their holdings sit just outside Clisson, the most prestigious growing area in all of Muscadet, famous for its granite soils and ageworthy wines, right by the Moine River. The winery itself isn’t much to look at—a glorified warehouse, basically—but it houses the stainless steel tanks that transform their perfectly ripe Melon de Bourgogne grapes into brilliantly crisp Muscadet.

The result is a bottle that’s becoming a go-to for us whenever we’re after something light and fresh to drink on the porch—or with peel-and-eat shrimp at a summer cookout.