Surprisingly, this was our first visit to Jonathan and Nina Pabiot in Pouilly-Fumé. Of course, we’d met at a trade fair in France, which is how we came to be shipping the wines. However, our last two attempts to visit the domaine ended in heroic failure. The first missed appointment ended next to the cemetery in Vouvray with smoke bellowing from the car engine; the second when Air France misplaced our luggage, turning our schedule into a weeklong black comedy.Better late than never. Pabiot’s cellar lies just outside the hamlet of Les Loges on the banks of the Loire River, surrounded by some of the domaine’s beautifully tended vineyards. Before we arrived, one of our growers had already paid Jonathan Pabiot the ultimate compliment: “If you had no idea what was in your glass, you wouldn’t know it was Sauvignon Blanc.”Pabiot is what you might call the strong, silent type—a man of actions, not words. In 2006, instead of joining his father’s established estate, he set up his own small, 3.5-hectare organic domaine following an apprenticeship with Didier Barral in Faugères. Didier Pabiot was initially sceptical of his son’s retrograde methods but soon accepted that his son’s wines outshone his own. Within two years, he also began the road to organics, and by 2010, father and son joined forces (and names) to create the 20-hectare Domaine Jonathan Didier Pabiot.Already certified organic, in 2016 this became the first Pouilly-Fumé domaine to achieve biodynamic certification. Centred on the stony caillottes of Les Loges, the vineyards stretch across the entire appellation, with mature vines set across the villages of Villiers, Charenton, Tracy-sur-Loire and Saint-Laurent-l’Abbaye. The soils of Pouilly-Fumé vary considerably, and this geological range gives Pabiot access to mature vines on both Kimmeridgian marl and silex, an allowance he uses to full advantage in his range of single-terroir bottlings.The vines have an average age of 30 years across the domaine. Yields are low even at the young-vine level, dipping to 30 hl/ha for the core release and single-terroir bottlings, resulting in amplitude and richness that few in the region dare to achieve. The grower we mentioned earlier was right; this is not an address to come to for green varietal flavours or the Pouilly-Fumé you read about in textbooks. “There is so much green Sauvignon here,” says Pabiot, “and that’s what I am trying to avoid.”And avoid mean and green he does. The flavours are not of gooseberries, asparagus or micturating felines, as Andrew Jefford once so fabulously put it. Elisa, the entry-level Pouilly Fumé, is nuanced, silky and chiselled rather than acidic. The Aubaine cuvée floats out of the glass with enigmatic Alsace-like perfumes and lees-polished texture. Then, you have the smoke and chalk-infused intensity of Luminance. Cropped from a hillside of terres blanches limestone, it’s a rock-reared white of great texture and presence. Whichever wine you choose, you can expect a charismatic French white that articulates the stony soils of Pouilly-Fumé like few others.