Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Wine Pairing Story (19)

Tongue in action while mooingBeef-tongue cooking in the Loire
Less than a year after a wine-pairing story featuring the other end of the cow, the tail, here is one about a very different type of meat : the beef tongue.
The cow's tongue has something in common with the tail in the sense that it almost never stops moving and working, but it's a very different style of meat : while the tail has this lovely sticky feel brought by its cartilaginous parts, the tongue has a soft and fine texture with the sauce playing a central role for the taste of the dish. I decided to make a try and do the cooking of this dish after spoting well-priced (and well sized) beef tongues on the meat aisle of a supermarket in the Loire. I was checking for special sales at this time of the year, like they often sell pork parts for 1 € a kilo. There was indeed cheap pork that day (not at 1 € though) in the refrigerated cabinets, but these huge, fresh tongues took my attention. I had never cook one, B. was busy in another part of the small town and I took on me to make the leap and go straight cook it. I asked a couple of people about how to prepare a beef tongue, I was said the sauce was important for that dish, which made me hesitate, but Laurent Saillard, whom I shortly visited as he was busy pruning Noëlla Morantin's vineyards, gave me good tips about ways to prepare this crucial sauce, leaving room for improvisation, which was fine with me.
The beef tongue that I bought that day weighed 1,514 kilogram and cost 8,93 €.

Bouilleur de Cru (Burgundy)

An artisan distillery in BurgundyMorvan, Burgundy
Traditional distillers or bouilleurs de cru are very difficult to find in France. Even though they work legally, their activity is strictly reglemented and as they don't sell alcohol but only provide the distillation service to those allowed to make alcohol from their fruits, they don't need to have a street shop in plain view. Many of them do that as a side job during the winter time and thus make the distilling in an outbuilding in their farm. In short, outside of their clients, the bouilleurs de cru rarely see visitors.
This story takes place in a lesser-known region of Burgundy, the Morvan. Morvan is a thickly-wooded and sparsely-populated region of central Burgundy. Its winters are known to be very cold, and as it is the only area in Burgundy with altitudes over 700 meters, it has features closer from the central plateau than from the rest of Burgundy, with many rivers and streams originating from the area (see on map, the green patch). Morvan is also an ancient Celtic land, the Celts having settled in these mountains as early as the last centuries B.C. (Morvan actually means "black mountain" in Celtic).
When I visited Joël Soilly's distillery in the Morvan, the region was thick with snow and along my drive from further east I went through beautiful landscapes with hills, forests and winding roads. I barely came across any other vehicule on my short drive as people prefered to avoid these side roads under the icy conditions.
The hero of this story is Joël, the man on the right on the picture above. Joël has a very busy life : in addition to his day job in the French Railways (so to speak, as he is doing the night shifts) and his position as city counselor in the village administration, he is a bouilleur de cru, that is, he distillates alcohol for people around his village.

Fred Cossard (Burgundy)

Fred Cossard in the cask roomSaint Romain, Côte de Beaune (Burgundy)
Fred Cossard is one of the new vintners of Burgundy. His wines have an appeal, they're alive and are an intense pleasure to drink, and I felt this trait immediately when I had my first bottle of Cossard, and it was one of his simplest cuvée, a Bourgogne Grand Ordinaire (the professionals say B.O.G. and it is a blend of Pinot Noir & Gamay), and I followed his wines ever since. This was love at first sight for this wine, and I learned later in full depth that Fred Cossard was making his wines on the most natural way, and without any additives including SO2. What counts most here is this particular feel of life and joy that these wines show, ant it happens that it often comes with the winemaking practices and vineyard managements associated with natural wine... At the end, the important thing is what is in the glass, and you just finish these bottles right away, that's all the difference...
Fred Cossard doesn't come from a family of vignerons, his father was in the milk trade. He found his way to the wine world almost naturally if not directly, after studying first in a milk school then doing other things including working shortly as an independant wine dealer. It helped him know the culture of wine in Burgundy, with the different style of wines and he also met many vignerons in the process. Of what he learned in his young years in the milk trade, some things helped him later, like the need of a strict hygiene which is so important for the natural winemaking using no SO2 at all.

Domaine Fanny Sabre (Burgundy)

Fanny Sabre in her Vatroom in BeauneBeaune, Burgundy
Fanny Sabre runs by herself 4,5-hectare estate in the Côte de Beaune. Her winery is one of the two or three last to have their faciilty located in the old city center of Beaune, most having moved outside along the years for space and convenience. As soon as you open the large wooden door on the cobble-stone street (rue Oudot) you find yourself in the vatroom with everything at easy reach : the wooden vats, several sizes of stainless-steel vats, a pump, the small press, the 4-spout gravity bottle-filler and an old sink on the side, with a wooden statue of Saint Vincent overlooking the whole scene. There's even a manual corker as she bottles the wines by herself....
This is indeed a relatively small room to do all the winemaking but she uses the available space as is, optimizing the space by moving the empty vats up when not in use, and let's remind that she has only some 4 hectares of vineyards, even if this translates into many small-batch cuvées.
Fanny Sabre handn't planned initially to become a vigneronne and a vintner but life and fate put her on this path and at the age of 25 she is already among those Burgundy vintners who make a wide range of terroir-rooted cuvées.
I met her and tasted her wines last december and liked her wines and also the passion that I felt she had for the vigneron's life, from the rigorous vineyard management to the samely-rigorous if un-interventionist winemaking.

Wine News (27)

The Japanese whiskies in ParisThe Japanese whiskies have now their own shopwindow in Paris (6 Carrefour de l'Odéon 75006, along the street going up to the Luxembourg). The major whisky retailer La Maison du Whisky, which is for example the exclusive importer of Nikka whiskies for Europe, has opened what it calls a temporary shop devoted to the Japanese whiskies. Japan has become in recent years a heavy weight of the whisky production and its whiskies have won medals year after year in the international competitions : In the last Malt Maniac Awards a month ago the trend was confirmed with Japan winning nearly half of the gold medals. And a couple of months earlier, Nikka literally triomphed at the International Spirits Challenge in London. Since they began taking part to the Malt Maniac Competition in 2006, Japanese whiskies won a disproportionately-high number of awards, proving to the sceptics (or simply to those who never tasted one of these whiskies) that Japan was a serious player in spite of their relatively recent history in this field. This has led the people on the Malt-Maniacs website to say that based on our experiences in the MM Awards it seems that the average Japanese whisky is fabulous ! and also : based on what we've experienced so far it would seem that the 'quality' of the average Japanese whisky has now surpassed the quality of the average Scotch whisky. They also address the price factor as while Scotch whiskies had their prices considerably raised in the recent years, the Japanese whiskies saw their prices become more competitive.
I learned about this Japanese whisky shop through Chris at Nonjatta, the reference for anyone interested in Japanese whiskies. Chris Bunting is a Brit who lives in Japan and offers priceless insight in the Japanese whisky world, including sometimes on the little-known history of its origin.
By coincidence, as I learned about this temporary shop (I heard that the temporary could last), our friend Junko from Osaka was staying in Paris for a few days as usual at this time of the year, bringing with her something that I ask her to buy in Narita or KIX each time she flies direct here. With the usual evildoers trying repeatedly to bring down airliners, we could even loose one day this allowance of tax-free alcohol in direct flights. We had dinner with Junko somewhere in Paris and I shot this picture of her with my coveted bottle of Nikka Single Malt 12 years Yoichi, price tag at duty-free Fasola at Narita : 3900 Yen or 30 €.... very good bargain especially compared with the listed price in the catalog of the Maison du Whisky : 84 €.
I Visited the Japanese-Whiskies shop where two very knowledgeable guys from La Maison du Whisky were present and eager to share what they know about the whiskies. One of them was I think Nick Sikorski the guy in Charge of the Japanese section at La Maison du Whisky. LMDW is a major player and offers (sells) some whiskies, collection whiskies, that you will not see elsewhere. Here are a few prices I took note of among their very long list of Japanese whiskies :

Wine Pairing Story (18)

Lone apple hangingThe simplest ingredients make the most elegant dessert.
The fruit on the pic above is not a kaki, these bright-colored fruits that dot the Japanese winter landscape. This is an unpicked apple which was nicely waving at us from this side-road orchard. We were driving through Northern Burgundy last november and we saw this partly-fenced orchard along the road in the Yonne with all these apples hanging on leaf-less branches. We stopped to take a few pictures and as the gate was half open, we walked in. This fenced lot was actually an orchard conservatory and had probably been set up by the Département of the Yonne, or by a group of villages with the help of passionate people devoted to protect little-known ancient varieties. That's a paradox in France : On one side, the French judges, the Administration and the major seeds companies regroup to limit biodiversity and impose heavy fines on the non-profit group Kokopelli for distributing seeds of ancient varieties [read about the lawsuit on this page in French and this one in English], and on the other side you have people who here and there (and oddly, with the funding of local administrations) devote their time & energy to plant and manage appletree orchards so that little-known apple varieties survive. This proves that the local people feel compelled to defend their biodiversity heritage, and that it may only take a few more rebels like these to successfully counter the French Bureaucracy's enmity to the survival of ancient vegetable varieties.

La Chapinière (Touraine, Loire)

Florence Veilex in the chaiChateauvieux, Touraine (Loire)
In another life, Florence Veilex, a trained mathematician, was living near Paris and working for a non-wine-related big company. From her child years she had the dream of having her own farm and living in the countryside and she ultimately quit her job to realize that dream. It all started with the discovery through her husband Eric Yung of this region on the far side of Touraine, a beautiful area with quiet villages, woods and vineyards at the south of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher. Eric Yung had also an atypical carrer : A high-ranking cop in Paris in the 1970s', he joined the Antigang (an elite police force), then quit, wrote a book about these shaky years in the force and became a journalist on the printed media and the radio.
Chateauvieux is indeed a beautiful village as you can see on the picture on the left. You just have to photoshop away this very ugly cement pole in your mind though to enjoy the scene, as the State utility EDF needlessly puts these horrors everywhere in the place of the former, more discreet wooden poles. Chateauvieux has its Chateau (in the far on the hill), which has been turned into a retirement home, and its old church dominating the village, and many houses have their own underground tuff cellar like the ones you can see on the left. This is a very nice village off the beaten path. Touraine is still an affordable region to start a winery : As the market prices of the wines here are often between 4 and 5 Euro a bottle, the vineyards are accordingly good-valued, with very interesting terroirs, beginning with Sauvignon but also for Gamay and Côt.
Florence Veilex looked around, visited many vineyards and wineries on sale before choosing this particular estate. She was helped in her initial research by Thierry Michaud, who manages the same-name estate in Noyers near Saint Aignan sur Cher.

Wine Pairing Story (17)

On the hunt for roe deersReal-meat story
This man on the left will be crucial for this wine-pairing story...
I went out in the woods several weekends in a row recently with hunters I know in the Loire. Most of us like good meat and we sometimes forget that there's an animal behind it. On one hand there is the painful side of shooting an animal, and on the other side, there is the fact that the way this animal lived has a lot to do with the quality of its meat.
There's by the way some striking similarities with the natural-wines' peculiarities here, as brilliant food engineers haven't yet found the way to make the meat of animals having been mass-bred in industrial farms taste as good as the one of wild animals. There's a gap here for which mother Nature seems to resist by clinging to its secrets.
Hunting is both a sport and a way to eat now and then a meat with such a unique taste. Sensible souls can understandly balk at going after these peaceful animals and I myself felt sorry for this cute animal after the initial excitement of the hunting party. But on the other side there are plenty of them in the woods and it's a question of balance when humans take their toll on the gamey population.

2007 & 2008 Burgundies

Philippe Pacalet with MonicaAnother great tasting day at Caves Augé
That's another great tasting on the sidewalk, at Caves Augé again (Marc, can I get a case of something I like ?...). the weather was quite awful that day, except that the temperature could have been worse for the last weekend of november. But albeit the rain and wind, those who had heard about the guests-vignerons (and their wines) that day couldn't but brave the ordeal and jump into the cold water...
This report is not in the proper order and my notes lack substance more than once but I decided to still make a story of it. And first, I thought that you could need Monica's warm smile for december if you didn't have the chance to be warmed up by the many beautiful wines offered on the sidewalk that day.
Monica was doing much of the pouring and explication at Pacalet's stand and her knowledge seems sharp on the matter. She says that in the office in Beaune, she still doesnt go into the administrative work because in France (she is from Brazil) it is pretty tricky and complicated with the data required by the different wine control administrations, but otherwise she can help a lot.
__Pacalet Pommard 2007 (no notes here)
__Pacalet Gevrey-Chambertin 2007. I like this one. But I have to fight to enjoy these precious sips : with the rain getting heavier, the crowd is pushing to stay in cover and drops are falling on us as the Pacalet stand (a cask actually) sits on the edge of the plastic roof...
__ Pacalet Chambolle : There's no more but Monica says that maybe we can ask to the caviste Marc Sibard if he can hand us one of his bottles (but I won't dare).
__Pacalet Ruchottes Chambertin 2007. A bottle brought here discreetly by Philippe and Monica (because it's not sold in the shop as I understand) and that they pour for a handful of happy few. I was in the middle of the crowd when Monica brings me a glass of it, wow. That's very, very nice indeed. oh yes... 3 casks only of this wine, or 850 bottles. 100% whole clusters.
Now, some news that may interest wine amateurs : Pacalet will add several new wines to his portfolio in 2009, a Clos de Bèze, an Echezeaux and a Chassagne Village...

The Bettane vs Richaud Debate

Marcel Richaud & Michel Bettane (photos Bertrand Celce/Vinifera)There's been an interesting debate lately between two important currents of the wine world in Paris.
This took place november 19th at a one-day public event named Autrement Vin which was organized by the Toulouse-based wine communication agency Vinifera : about one hundred vintners gathered at le Cent Quatre in Paris, along with wine critics, wine bloggers (like major French blogger Jacques Berthomeau) and a public of wine amateurs. The wines were split and grouped in several categories like Les Innovants, Les Inclassables, Les Oubliés and Les Durables and freely accessible to the visitors for tasting, with the vintners or the winery people nearby to explain the wines if necessary. See this page and click on a category to see which wines were presented. You could just help yourself freely or sometimes there was someone to help and fill your glass (the pours were generous).
In the evening, a debate between Michel Bettane (the wine critic) and Marcel Richaud (the winemaker) helped confront two different visions of wine. To help visualize the difference of approach between the two, let's remind who the two represent :
Michel Bettane is a leading wine critic in France and he is one of the two men behind the Bettane & Dessauve guide. He uttered very provocative statements against natural wines, speaking of ayatollahs to qualify the vintners of this sector, or speaking of biocons (I guess you get what the French word cons means, bio meaning organic) to qualify the amateurs following these wines, or saying blantly that organic wine doesn't exist in the first place (read his interview in L'Express - click above the add to access to the article)...
Marcel Richaud is a now-well-known figure in the natural, non-interventionist and additives-free wine world. He is one of these passionate vintners whose wines are now and then refused the Appellation for being pointed as "atypical" by the Agreement Commissions, as this post by Le Vin de Mes Amis relates in French.
This type of debate is set to multiply in the near future as natural wine is getting status among the wine amateurs and as the highest users of additives in the wine industry resist the transparency push by the consumers.