Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

A Vignerons Barbecue

Wineterroirs will be on the road for a few weeks...Laurent & Noëlla with a friend Pouillé, Loire
Photo story - First festive gathering at la Boudinerie : Noella Morantin and Laurent Saillard invited friends, among whom many artisan vignerons, for a barbecue and lots of great wines (and artisanal beer). These vignerons sharing the same love for real wines often meet for such heartening lunches or dinners, and this happens all around France. Sometimes, these gatherings take place on the side of bigger meetings and wine fairs, jumping on the opportunity that they're around together, sometimes like here, just for the fun to be together and celebrate. Of what I heard, this is always casual and relaxed, the food is great, and as the vignerons bring their wines, you drink lots of good stuff, some of it not even on the market.
Here, this was also the opportunity to celebrate a friend's birthday : Arnaud Ehrart's birthday.
People began arriving at the winery at noon, lots of familiar faces and a few whom I met for the first time. Joe Dressner, Denyse and his children were there too, as well as several other Americans. I spoke to Sam, a close friend of Arnaud who is from Mexico, and who worked along with James in Arnaud's early ventures. I spoke also with Caribou who with Julie created La Mise, the small-but-hot natural-wine gathering which takes place yearly in the south of France. I also discovered that many vignerons had hidden skills, like they know how to sharpen knives, cut muttons and things like that...

Dard & Ribo (Rhone)

Jean-René Dard in the vatroomMercurol, northern Rhone
Mercurol is a village sitting near the A7 toll highway, north of Valence and east of Tournon and Tain-L'Hermitage. Dard & Ribo's facility lies outside of the village near the A7, but to reach it you need to drive along narrow roads and know where you're going, as there's no sign and directions to the winery. Happily, we met Jean-René Dard shortly after leaving the toll highway and we followed his all-terrain, vineyard-proof vehicule (picture on left) right to the winery.
The winery looked unchanged compared to what we vaguely remembered of our 2004 visit (I had shot very few pictures then) : a nondescript building with little-appealing surroundings softened by the sunny atmosphere of the Rhone valley (pic on right). As we parked our vehicules, we saw Mr Hirotake Ooka [article in French] from Domaine de la Colline, waiting with his young child for Jean-René Dard. He is a Japanese vigneron based in St Peray nearby, and he needed parts for his press. He is also into natural wine, has been making wine near here for 9 years and knows also well Thierry Allemand (he bought recently 2 hectares of Cornas). Japan is often round the corner at Dard & Ribo, Jean-René's wife Hideko is Japanese, and also very long time ago there was this young Japanese traveller on his bicycle (Maruyama) who stopped at the estate for a few days and turned out to become a leading restaurateur after coming back in Japan. He ordered Dard & Ribo's wines through the importer enoconnexion (who discovered Dard & Ribo thanks to him) and helped put the winery in the spotlight in Japan... Maruyama's first Tokyo restaurant was Aux Amis des Vins, a very serious venue for wines, and he now has 10 restaurants among which the Brasserie aux Amis and Vinpicoeur.

Thierry Allemand (Cornas, Rhone)

Thierry Allemand on Le BoisCornas, northern Rhone
Thierry Allemand (whose last names means German in French) works on a vineyard surface of about 5 hectares in Cornas, northern Rhone. Cornas means "scorched earth" in the language of the Celts , which implies that the area has always been particulary hot, like Côte Rotie which means "roasted slope" in French. When you're down in Cornas looking up at the hills right behind the village (picture on left), it's obvious that you're very quickly on serious slopes, actually most of the surface of the Appellation is on slopes. Thierry Allemand lives with his family in the village of Cornas, in a charming old house wearing the patina of time. That's where he had his facility for years too, until he moved it to a larger building on the plateau above cornas.
Thierry Allemand's plots, which are part owned and part rented (fermage), are scattered in numerous small terraced surfaces, each with their specific terroir. The interresting thing to note is that when this vigneron selected and chose some of these (very) steep and terraced slopes more than 30 years ago to replant vines in the place of the trees and bushes which had since long taken over, he was alone with no competitor. Working in such conditions was considered too difficult or too costly because everything had to be done by foot & hand or with very small all-terrain caterpillars (which weren't easily available at that time anyway). Thierry Allemand did all this work mostly by himself, bringing back the age-old terraces to life one by one, and his choice proved to be a much better one (if painstaking) than choosing the easy option of making wine from a flat block down the slope. Cornas was then a neglected Appellation mostly under the radar even for knowledgeable wine amateurs and some vignerons preferred to bottle their Cornas under the generic Côte du Rhone label.

Wine News (32)

Foillard at the wheelReal wines are made by real vignerons who spend time in their vineyards and are there in person to pour their wines at tasting events (we'll not make it a law but there's some truth to it). Another unnoticed issue is that they often deliver their wines in person to the restaurants and cavistes in spite of the distance.
I shot this pictures in Paris where I fell upon Jean Foillard delivering a few cases to Gilles Manzoni, an artisan-wine distributor in Paris. I remember once walking near Denfert Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement and being honked by a passing van : it was Hervé Villemade who was samely delivering his clients himself. The reason of these self-deliveries are not only economical : that's the straightest way for a vigneron to be sure that his wines didn't wait for hours or days in wharehouses or trucks under unsuited temperatures. A real wine is alive, you just don't subject it to extreme conditions.
Delivering personally the wines is also the occasion to meet the buyers, get paid a couple of waiting payments, and open a bottle...

Snow White goes tasting

Snow White & wineCentre Pompidou, Paris (Visual story)
A bizarre happening took place a few days ago at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a cultural center also short-named as Beaubourg.
In the basement of the Contemporary Art Museum and in the midst of the public and onlookers, a performance art installation staged by Catherine Baÿ had a dozen of Snow White (Blanche Neige in French) characters impersonate wine tasters. The whole thing which unfolded around a long table took a little more than one hour maybe, it was very curious, at times disconcerting with a destructuration feel, there was purposely odd reactions and attitudes by the comedians/dancers who performed the show.
A real sommelier, actually a sommelière named Lindaboie (real name : Linda Grabe), was invited to speak about the wine tasting by a female speaker and this gave a partly-conventional screening of the event. If you immersed yourself in the visual experience of the Snow White characters and the waiters & sommeliers, there were many instant impressions, both pictural and conceptual to enjoy.
Here are a few pics that I shot there. There were many more visual snapshots that I enjoyed but hadn't the time or the right angle to immortalize, so this is just to give you a glimpse of the real thing.
At the end of the show, the sommelier took off the cloth hiding the bottle, but instead of a real-Chateau label, we could see "Le Banquet de Blanche Neige" with the names of all the comedians.

Ampelidae (Loire)

Ampelidae : manoir de LavauguyotMarigny-Brizay, Haut-Poitou (Loire)
Ampelidae is a relatively recent winery which is atypical in many regards. Let's look at the Haut Poitou first : this is a sub-region of the Loire, it lies on the southern flank of the Appellation (the dark-green patch on this interactive Loire map), it doesn't have its own AOC and it was instead labelled until recently as a Loire VDQS (the last step before the AOC). From a 30 000-hectare-peak around 1865, the vineyard surface of the region fell to around 700 or 800 hectares today, spread on 40 villages. The heavy weight of the region is the Cave du Haut Poitou, the local coop to which 280 growers (520 hectares) sell their grapes, and which is under the management of Georges Duboeuf since 1994 (as I understand).
Another player who has been growing in importance in the Haut Poitou is Frédéric Brochet : a native of the region, his winery grew from a mere 1,5 hectare to 75 hectares, and with a production spilt in three"brands" : Ampelidae, the upper cuvées, Marigny Neuf, the mainstream but constant-quality series, and Brochet, 3 cuvées meant to express the particular character of Sauvignon through particular batches. More than half of of the vineyard surface is planted with Sauvignon, including the rare Fié Gris which is a variant of Sauvignon.
Frédéric Brochet has family roots in this village, his father had retained a tiny surface of vineyard along with other family properties at la Mailletterie near Marigny-Brizay (picture of the village's church on left). Since his grand parents' time, the land including the vineyard was rented to a farmer (fermage) who in return gave them part of the harvested grapes. Frédéric's grand parents, who had a café in Poitiers, sold the wine from these two casks in their café, it was more for fun and tradition than a real business then. Frédéric Brochet was raised in this twice-yearly tradition in the improvised facility near the Mailleterie mansion : at the harvest they would all meet there, and same at easter, the family would gather there again for the bottling of the two casks and have lunch together...
As Jamie Goode notes in his Ampelidae report, Frédéric Brochet didn't take the winery trail immediately, and his early years, if connected with wine, were more on the scientific study and writing side of the trade.
[This Ampiledae visit was set up without notice because of my unplanned presence near there and Frédéric Brochet was alas not present at that time. This text is the result of a telephone interview]

Pierre Beauger, Auvergne (Loire)

Pierre Beauger in his cellar in Jussat Jussat-Chanonat/Champeix, Auvergne (Loire - bottom-right of this map)
The first one who told me about Pierre Beauger was Pierre Jancou at Racines, and it was in almost lyrical tones : this vigneron who started his winery in 2001 was making extremely pure wines, if atypical, on the slopes of the Massif Central in Auvergne right near Gergovia (located near the village of La Roche Blanche) where the Gallic armies led by their chief Vercingetorix defeated the Roman army with Julius Caesar at its head in 52 B.C. Beyond the symbolic resonance of the area, Pierre Beauger happens to be a vigneron who works hard to revive the vineyards of the region, making wine on the most uninterventionist way on terraced slopes which were planted with vines long, long time ago.
Pierre Beauger is a native from Auvergne, and he has a brother and a sister. His father was raised in the multi-crop 7-hectare family farm, working with his own father, but he later started a negoce of his own dealing with garlic (Auvergne is known for its qualitative garlic) because the farm was too modest to make a living. Pierre Beauger put his roots back into the farm life with this winery (which he started in 2001), but his father, who is now 78, helps him all along for the vineyard tasks.

François Dhumes, Auvergne (Loire)

François Dhumes pouring his roséPérignat-sur-Allier, Auvergne, Loire
The first wine that I had in Auvergne was François Dhumes' rosé, and it was a welcome and refreshing respite in this sunny summer day.
François is a soft-spoken young vigneron, a native from Auvergne who shares his time between his own small surface of vineyards and outside work he makes for Patrick Bouju's vineyards and also for Vincent Tricot, another vigneron working organic. This helps him make a living and face the expenses of starting a winery.
Making a pause in the middle of the day, he and Patrick started to picnic under the shade of a tree with me as guest when Patrick had to drive back to his facility because a truck driver was waiting for a pallet of wine there (the freight company was supposed to call ahead to come take the wine but the truck just dropped without notice instead).
With the company of his two lovely dogs whom I discovered are keen amateurs of cheese rind, we chatted about his own work and winemaking. François Dhumes's vineyard is located at a short distance of Clermont-Ferrand (south-east of) on slopes with volcanic soils (browse to the bottom-right of this Loire Appellatios map and zoom when centered on the pink patch of the wine region of Auvergne).

La Bohème, Auvergne (Loire)

Patrick Bouju in la Bohème vineyardGlaine-Montaigut, Auvergne (Loire).
The Auvergne wine region is the south-eastern-most Loire Appellation, it's so outcentered that few people know it's part of the family of Loire wines. Actually, two other small Loire Appellations are even further east : the Forez and the Côte Roannaise wines [Scroll down to the bottom-right on this interactive Loire map and thereafter enlarge the map to visualize these Loire Appellations].

Auvergne is part of what the French call the Massif Central, a mountain range in central France resulting from volcanic activity. What is striking is that out of a total of maybe 50 wineries in activity in Auvergne, 10 stand out for making additives-free wines from organicly-grown grapes. Patrick Bouju is one of these daring growers and vintners, this young vigneron who is originally from Tours further west along the Loire river settled in this remote mountainous region a few years ago and started his winery on rented vineyards, some of them being planted with very old vines. He makes several cuvées there, out of a total surface of 4,7 hectares, all labelled as table wines. He used to ask the agreement for his red Côtes d'Auvergne Corent (Corent is a terroir from Auvergne), but the new Appellation rules don't recognize the Corent reds, only the rosés, so he sticks to the vin-de-table label, or as they call it now, vin de France. He has lots of Gamay, and the interesting thing is that this is a local variety of Gamay with quite a few differences compared to Gamay elsewhere.
I reached the region by motorcycle, the trip was beautiful (I used the regular highway, not the toll one). After parking the bike near the vineyard where Patrick and his aide François were working, I could eat with relish these bird-scarred cherries. In Auvergne, there seems to be cherry trees (often complanted in vineyards) and walnut trees everywhere, and it seems that the Auvergnats are now too rich to bother picking the fruits...

Wine News (31)

Josh Adler & Meg ZimbeckParis, between le Louvre & Chatelet
That was a few weeks ago in Paris : a few bloggers with a taste for good food, mostly American expats living in Paris, started a new blog named Paris by Mouth, and the inauguration evening took place at the Spring wine shop in Paris. Meg Zimbeck who is the editor along with Barbra Austin, contacted me through Sharon and here we go, good company and good wine to go with. the new website or blog will deal with tips on food, restaurants and other venues in Paris. Most of the contributors of Paris by Mouth are expats, but they include a couple of French like Clotilde Dussolier and Bruno Verjus with a keen knowledge on food and chefs. Expect insider tips, expats know often better than longtime residents in any city.
Lots of people during this evening, are there so many american expats in Paris or did they come from abroad for the good wine and Daniel Roses's mini-dishes ? I loved the wines that Josh filled my glass with, this Melon de Bourgogne, this Breton's Dilettante and a Mercurey that I was happy to discover. The mood of this evening was excellent, some people even came with their baby and it was so crowded that the party took place mostly on the sidewalk, Josh passing through the guests with a bottle to fill the glasses.
Later I sneaked into the restaurant a few meters away with Daniel Rose and a couple of persons, it's still under construction, with a street level and two in the basement. The chef doesn't make any predictions about the opening day, it should be in the next weeks or months.