Mathilde Magne spent the better part of a decade in wine before making any of her own, first as an agronomist and oenologist in Bordeaux at Château Lilian Ladouys and Château Figeac, then in Tuscany with Stefano Amerighi, and finally three years in the cellar of Sylvain Pataille in Marsannay, one of our favorite producers in all of Burgundy. It was Pataille's aligoté that turned her toward terroir-driven white wine, and a single bottle of Bruno Rochard's chenin that pointed her to the Loire. In April 2022 she and her husband Nicolas settled in Rochefort-sur-Loire, the schist country known as Anjou Noir, with just under seven acres of chenin blanc. She called the domaine Terres d'Imaginaire, terre for the ground and imaginaire for the creativity she brings to it, a shorthand for the meeting of terroir, personal taste, and experiment that she says every wine she loves comes from. The domaine has since grown to about 22 organically farmed acres, with pineau d'aunis, grolleau, and sauvignon blanc joining the chenin, every wine fermented with indigenous yeasts and bottled with the barest touch of sulfur.

Temple is one of three single-parcel chenins at the domaine and the last plot Mathilde harvests each year. The vines went into the ground in 1964 on deep sandy-clay loam shot through with sandstone, gray-black schist, quartz, and veins of rhyolite and phtanite. The fruit is foot-crushed and pressed for four hours in a vertical press, ferments for three to four weeks, and then ages a full 24 months in 400- and 600-liter barrels, 30 percent of them new, through complete malolactic conversion. It is bottled without fining or filtration; 4,600 bottles were made.

Yellow apple and quince open the nose, layered over wet stone and a thread of smoke that comes straight from the schist. The new oak, noticeable during aging, has folded entirely into the wine and reads only as a faint toasted edge. The palate is crystalline and tense, with a saline finish that lingers. Drink from 2025 through 2035.