Touraine-Amboise (French pronunciation: [tuʁɛn ɑ̃bwaz]) is an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) for in the Loire Valley wine region in France.

[4] At that time, following the last glacial period, vines already existed in their wild state as a kind of creeper growing on the edges of forests and on stony soils, but wine-making was as yet undiscovered.

[5] Whereas the Nantes wine-growing area dates back to the Roman occupation, popular tradition links the start of vine cultivation in the province of Touraine (in the middle section of the Loire's course) to the founding of Marmoutier Abbey by St Martin in 372 AD.

This was documented by Sulpicius Severus, writing about meals at Marmoutier Abbey at the end of the 4th century: "Everyone gathered to break the fast and eat together; there was no wine provided except when illness demanded it".

In the High Middle Ages, the oldest record seems to be that of Gregory of Tours who described the damage caused to the vines by bad weather in the spring of 587.

[7] From the 11th century onwards the majority of monasteries and abbeys strung out along the banks of the Loire were involved in wine-growing, taking full advantage of the opportunity for transporting wine by river.

[10] Touraine wine was also routinely served at the table of the French king, François I, who was apparently moved to comment: "Even though I was not born in Amboise, I grew up there, and all my life the taste of that divine draft from the beautiful city of Tours, so dear to my heart, has remained with me".

The latter installed agents, charged with overseeing their imports at close quarters, in several Loire Valley trading posts, including Amboise.

To all intents and purposes, the Dutch agents were middle-men, stocking and selling on French wines to the whole world and making a considerable profit in the process.

Colbert (Louis XIV's finance minister) attempted to break their monopoly by creating a trading company that could deal directly with the markets.

In 1954, the wine-growing area located around the Château d'Amboise, which was originally classed as part of the "Coteaux-de-Touraine"[15] AOC by the decree passed on 24 December 1939, was granted its own appellation of Touraine-Amboise.

It is made up of the name of the former province of Touraine (which derived its name from its Gallic inhabitants, the Turones[N 6]), combined with the name of the town of Amboise, the most famous of the appellation's constituent communes.

This is divided in two by the wide valley of the Loire, which lies, on average, at about 55 metres above sea level and is bordered on either side by often steeply sloping hillsides.

Beneath this silt lies a polygenetic puddingstone dating from the Upper Eocene Age, mixed with varicoloured clays and small pebbles of rolled silex, Jurassic cherts and quartz grains.

A series of east–west facing valleys, where the continental influence is less harsh, present ideal conditions for the creation of microclimates that are especially favourable to wine-growing.

Possible consequences of global warming According to the conclusions of two studies published in the United States (one of which was conducted by the Colmar branch of l'INRA (Institut National de Recherche Agronomique or French National Institute for Agricultural Research) on the consequences of global warming for wine-growing, the Loire Valley wine-growing area should be one of the prime beneficiaries of the gradual increase in temperatures.

Basing their calculations on Sotheby's auction statistics, these studies suggest that in the last ten years the optimum temperature for producing quality wine has already been reached in most French wine-growing areas, but that there is a margin for potential improvement of about 0.8 °C along the banks of the Loire.

[20][21] The wine-growing area, which is located in the department of Indre-et-Loire, covers the communes of Amboise, Chargé, Mosnes, Cangey, Limeray, Pocé-sur-Cisse, Nazelles-Négron, Saint-Ouen-les-Vignes, Montreuil-en-Touraine and Saint-Règle.

Over the last fifteen years or so, the use of mechanized harvesters has become increasingly common, especially since virtually all the wine-growing area lies on level ground.

In the past this was carried out by a process called pigeage, which involved repeatedly pushing the floating cap of grape solids back down into the fermenting juice.

The minimum and maximum yields for the AOC, stipulated by the decree of 12 July 1994,[24] are as follows: The Touraine-Amboise AOC wines must come from well-ripened grape harvests and must have the following natural alcoholic strengths by volume: The upper limit may be exceeded, provided the wine has been made without enrichment of any kind, and provided an investigation by the INAO has been requested by the wine-grower, carried out and filed prior to the harvesting of the vines in question.

Aubuis are a mixture of permeable, fertile, calcareous clays, which give the wine its powerful character and are perfectly suited to white grape varieties.

Wine fairs are organized on a regular basis at Easter and in the week of 15 August (the Feast of the Assumption is a public holiday in France), and are held in a tunnel dug out of the tuffeau rock beneath the Château of Amboise.

[27] La Commanderie des Grands Vins d'Amboise (the Order of the Great Wines of Amboise) is a guild for the promotion of fine wines founded on 15 April 1967 by a team of wine-growers who were backed by Michel Debré, honorary president of the Syndicat des Vins de Touraine Amboise (Touraine-Amboise wine-growers' union).

The Order has as its motto Nos Roys l'ont aymé (mediaeval French for "Our kings loved it"), a reference to Louis XI's charter decreeing that Amboise wine should be sold before all other kinds at the market in Tours.

Traditionally the Order holds two chapter meetings each year: The writer of regional literature, Robert Morin (1893–1925) was the author of Mélie Buttelière ('Mélie the Basket Carrier'), which was published posthumously in 1926.

His heroine, Mélie, lived halfway up a hillside in a cave dwelling between the hamlets of Fourchette and Moncé in Limeray, right in the heart of the present AOC wine-growing area.

By depicting a few brief scenes from her existence, the author painted a vivid picture of the lives and characterful speech of the local wine-growing community in the early 20th century.