Vouvray (wine) often the last in France to be completed, potentially lasting until November. When sweet and botrytized wine are being produced, the harvest is often very labor-intensive, involving successive "tries" or passages through the vineyards with harvesters hand-picking only the ripest berries. Vouvray produces more than a million cases of wine a year. The traditional style of winemaking in Vouvray is a minimalist approach, often using neutral fermentation vessel such as stainless steel and not submitting the wine to malolactic fermentation. While some winemakers are experimenting with oak, very few wines are made with new oak. Vouvrays are usually bottled early
Loire Valley list of World Heritage Sites. In choosing this area that includes the French "départements" of Loiret, Loir-et-Cher, Indre-et-Loire, and Maine-et-Loire, the committee said that the Loire Valley is: "an exceptional cultural landscape, of great beauty, historic cities and villages, great architectural monuments - the "châteaux" - and lands that have been cultivated and shaped by centuries of interaction between local populations and their physical environment, in particular the Loire itself." The Loire Valley chansonniers are a related group of songbooks attributed to the composers of the Loire Valley and are the earliest surviving examples of a new genre which offered