The eight villages are Chacé, Montsoreau, Parnay, Saint-Cyr-en-Bourg, Saumur, Souzay-Champigny, Turquant and Varrains. They sit on the Turonian chalk escarpment and the layers above it, inside the wider Saumur area. The vines grow between 40 and 110 metres, on chalky soils topped on the higher slopes by sand and clay. Air shafts rise among the vines from old quarry galleries below, later used as mushroom farms or cellars.

The appellation allows only red wine. Cabernet Franc is the main grape, and Cabernet Sauvignon and Pineau d'Aunis together may not exceed 15 percent of a grower's vines. Monks of Saint-Florent cleared the hillside between Saumur and Montsoreau in 1066, for white wine at first. Red wine came in the seventeenth century, and Cabernet Franc spread slowly, helped at the end of the nineteenth century by Antoine Cristal, a grower at Parnay.

The wines are often deep ruby, with red fruit or violet, fresh and supple. Most are pleasant young, and some gain finesse over several years in bottle.

Clos Rougeard, founded at Chacé in 1664, was run by the Foucault brothers from the 1980s and has belonged to the Bouygues family since 2017. It ages its wines for more than two years in barrel, then in bottle in tuffeau cellars seven metres underground. The Cave des Vignerons de Saumur, a growers' cooperative at Saint-Cyr-en-Bourg founded in 1957, has vinified selected plots apart since 1992 and took the name Robert & Marcel in 2014. La Porte Saint-Jean, at Montreuil-Bellay, also makes Saumur-Champigny.

The wines above are the Saumur-Champigny wines in the cellar. See also Saumur, whose wider area surrounds it, Chinon for Cabernet Franc upstream in Touraine, or the full range of Loire Valley wines.