Until phylloxera, Sancerre was red country: Pinot Noir and Gamay, shipped down the Loire to Paris. The louse razed the old vineyard in the 1880s, and replanting on grafted vines turned to Sauvignon Blanc — a reversal so complete that the appellation of 1936 was granted to the whites alone.
Three soils write its registers: terres blanches, Kimmeridgian marls, for breadth; caillottes, shattered limestone, for perfume; silex for the smoky gunflint the faithful chase. The Paris bistros of the interwar years made its fame glass by glass, and it remains the world's benchmark for Sauvignon without oak — taut, saline, unadorned.