“The Mad Dog”, “the Wild Man of the Loire”, “a man possessed”, Didier Dagueneau was a famously outspoken French winemaker whose forthright views made him many friends among the more iconoclastic winemakers and writers. His fondness for New World wines gained him admirers outside Europe too. But it was not only Americans who raved about Dagueneau’s talents: even Professor Denis Dubourdieu of the University of Bordeaux, and the greatest authority on the Sauvignon Blanc grape that was Dagueneau’s idiom, referred to him as “one of the greatest winemakers of his generation”.

Other authorities were prepared to state categorically that he was the world’s greatest exponent of Sauvignon Blanc wines. His wild tongue was matched by an even wilder, Viking-like appearance: standing over six foot tall, he sported a mane of hair, often wrapped up in exotic, brightly-coloured bandanas, and a bushy beard streaked with grey. His death has robbed French wine of one of its most prominent characters.

Didier Dagueneau was born in Cosne-sur-Loire in 1956. There was nothing unusual about his background: like virtually everyone else for miles around his father, Jean-Claude Dagueneau, and his mother Odette, née Rapeau, were both involved in wine in a small way and possessed a few vines that they were later able to pass on to their son.

But Dagueneau was reluctant to pursue the career laid down to him by destiny and did not come to wine until 1982. In his youth he was happier racing motorcycles with side cars, a sport he only abandoned after two nearly fatal accidents. By then he had children, and he saw the falls as an omen that he needed to stop amusing himself and make some money to feed them.

When he created his three-acre estate at Saint Andelain in Pouilly he set out with the modest ambition to create the greatest Sauvignon Blanc in the world and show the neighbours and rest of his family what he thought of them. Other Dagueneaus make wine in Pouilly, notably Serge, and with time he would trounce the lot. He was less blinkered about wines from beyond the region than most and was passionate about Burgundy. Dagueneau felt that if they could bottle separate “climats” or crus such as Charmes-Chambertin and Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, that it should have been possible for him to do the same in Pouilly.

His wines were classically dictated by “terroir”. His tastes included not only the cult Burgundies of Henri Jayer, but also the new-wave Alsace wines of Marc Kreydenweiss. He liked Château Ausone, in Saint Emilion, whose ursine former winemaker, the philosophical Pascal Delbeck, in some ways resembled him. He liked Californian wines too, particularly Au Bon Climat. It was on a visit to California during which he behaved particularly mischievously that he was dubbed the “Mad Dog”, and in “Le Chien Méchant” a Californian wine was created in his honour.

With time he built up the domaine to 27 acres including some of the steeper sites of Les Monts Damnées and honed down his range to a handful of labels. In ascending order these were En Chailleux, made in a fruity style without oak ageing; Pur Sang, which matured in large oak tuns; the old-vine cuvée Silex, which celebrated the classic flinty soils of the region and was entirely fermented in new oak; a blend of old and young vines called Buisson Ménard (the name was changed to Buisson Renard after a French wine pundit called it that by mistake); and a tiny quantity of Asteroïde made from a few rows of vines he planted on their own roots despite the risk from the aphid phylloxera.

Characteristically he decided to revert to an old name for the appellation, calling the wines “Blanc Fumé de Pouilly” as opposed to “Pouilly Fumé”. Although he was known as the master of Sauvignon Blanc, consciousness of climate change made him interested in increasing the acidity in his wines and he experimented with Riesling and the sharp Petit Meslier grape. He also had a small venture in the Jurançon region of southwest France.

One English wine writer, who found him unusually “monosyllabic”, summed up his individual approach to the Sauvignon Blanc grape when he said he was not trying to produce the aromas of asparagus, nettles or gooseberries, or even the smell of cats’ urine so common to unripe Sauvignon fruit: Dagueneau’s wines reproduced the redolence of spring in a glass.

He was eclectic in his approach to winemaking, adopting aspects of every school. He kept his yields down to a minimum and farmed his vineyards with a horse (which lent its name to his “Pur Sang” — thoroughbred — wine), but he did not use wild yeasts and was not ready to adopt the extreme tenets of biodynamism. Grapes were picked during a number of sorties to the vines, which is more commonly the practice of sweet winemakers. This allowed him to select grapes bunch by bunch.

He was a believer in “skin-contact”, leaving his grapes to macerate for a number of hours before pressing in order to release the flavours from the skins. He fermented his top wines in barrels made to his own specifications and stirred the lees according to Burgundian techniques. On the other hand Dagueneau abjured the secondary or “malolactic fermentation” that would have robbed his wine of precious acidity.

Dagueneau was famously generous with his time and every year he entertained the local winemakers — “les anciens” (the elders) — to a lavish meal. He had recently restored an old chapel and put on an art exhibition there, but his taste for excitement never left him. He enjoyed archery, dog-breeding and racing, and recently he had been to Finland to run huskies, winning both the European and World Championships for sled-racing. It was this love of dangerous sports that proved his undoing. He died in Hautefaye in the Dordogne, where he was a flying a microlite aircraft that stalled at 50 metres sending him crashing to the ground.

Dagueneau had a son and a daughter by his wife Martine, both of whom have worked at the domaine; he also had two younger sons by his more recent partner, Suzanne Cremer. All survive him.

Didier Dagueneau, vintner, was born on June 7, 1956. He died in an accident on September 17, 2008, aged 52