White winemakers of the Loire traditionally followed very similar principles to their counterparts in Germany, assiduously avoiding malolactic conversion and any new oak influence, preferring instead to ferment and store wines in inert containers, and to bottle wines early, possibly after some lees contact in the case of Muscadet. For years, Loire reds suffered from a lack of extraction.
The result of the particularly competitive wine market of the 1980s and a drop in demand for sweet wines in the late 1990s, however, was to stimulate a rash of experimentation in cellars along the length of the Loire. barrel maturation and in some cases barrel fermentation were introduced for both reds and whites (see anjou, specifically). Some producers encouraged their white wines to go through malolactic conversion, while red winemakers worked hard to extract greater colour and tannins from their red wine musts, by the use of prolonged skin contact, temperature control, and pumping over regimes. (It should be said that, in many a Loire autumn and winter, temperature control is just as likely to include heating the must as cooling it.) Skin contact prior to fermentation was also introduced for some white wines, especially Sauvignons.
