Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Christian & Nathalie Chaussard (Loire)

Christian Chaussard in his cask cellar Marçon, Coteaux du Loir (Loire)
The Coteaux du Loir region, which is France's northernmost Appellation area with neighboring Jasnières and Vendomois, is interesting for several reasons : First, it's largely under the radar of the international (and even national to some extent) markets, which makes them very affordable in spite of their quality. The other reason is that you find here two prized varieties, the Chenin Blanc and the Pineau d'Aunis, the latter having become quite rare as the Appellation system in the Loire at large favored what it deemed as more commercially-pertinent varieties. Before the Phyloxera, say, in the early 19th century, viticulture was very extended in the region, but as it happened elsewhere, the phyloxera and the railways turned this once-vibrant wine region into a sleepy one.
When Christian Chaussard settled here, he was looking for Chenin, but he learnt to love Pineau D'Aunis as well. Domaine Le Briseau, Christian & Nathalie Chaussard's estate, was founded less than 10 years ago, in 2002. With a previous experience in the Vouvray region, Christian Chaussard looked for available vineyards in different places and possibly with planted Chenin because he got addicted to working with this variety in the Vouvray area. He settled his choice on a few relatively old vineyards on this plateau near the Loir river. For beginners, the Loir river is a much smaller river than the mighty Loire, and it flows into the Sarthe river further, north of Angers.
[pic on right : the church at Marçon, with the monument to the sons of the village fallen during WWI]

Fake Wines & Liquors How-To

How to make (or fake) wine... An old book with many facets
Here is a book upon which I stumbled while doing some research for my first cocktail story. The bottomless treasures of the online digitalized libraries are there just a few clicks away and we don't pay enough attention most of the time. This gem of a book is a very insightful essay which was printed in the United States in the year 1857 and sold on the street for $ 1,5. In there, you find plenty of details on how the different spirits and wines are made. The author says that he spent time on both sides of the Atlantic (Bordeaux and New York) and acquired a good first-hand experience on the down-to-earth methods used by distillers and manufacturers in their trade. The title page of the book states the author is a Practical Liquor Manufacturer. This would already make this book worth to read, but the other, bewildering facet of this book is that it offers recipes on how to counterfeit these wines and spirits....
While probably many commercial books of this range were written along the 19th century, many of them mixing fantasy to reality to sell better, there are undoubtly some truths among the informations and data reported in this treatise.
It's also a good read because in 2011 when we come across stories of large-scale counterfeited wines and spirits (like in Russia or China), we may be easily induced into thinking that this is the way our modern times and greed go, while the past was all rosy with honest/artisan merchants and producers selling real products made the most artisanal way without tricks. In one of my mini-stories a few years ago I pointed to the incredible occurrences of wine doctoring that took place routinely in France in the 19th century Read this page in French about the common ways to enhance the wines or make more wine from a given volume of grapes in the late 19th-early 20th century. In 1907, fed up by dishonest practices, some vignerons had printed flyers praising natural wine (Vive le Vin Naturel)...
Generally speaking, you'll see by yourself how this book echoes many of the themes debated nowadays regarding the correction of wines through modern additives, it's like the reality had only shifted into a more blurred picture, but the stakes remain the same.

Cocktail Shaker Juggling

Flair bartendingParis nights
I don't intend to veer from wine to cocktail, but I thought that after my last story, I owed you this other visual contribution on the cocktail scene.
I don't know if all of you have already watched a bartender performing cocktail-shaker juggling, but that is a very enjoyable experience : you're already high and happy sipping a drink and this guy suddenly shows up in the stroboscope light behind the bar performing incredible acrobatics, tossing full bottles in the air and catching them who-knows-how without loosing a drop, all this with harmony and ease. And at the end of that they manage to pour the right proportions for their cocktail. This type of performance is called flair bartending and it is a fixture in the cocktail bars or events. And guess who is the first documented flair bartender ? it was Jerry Thomas, the author of the cocktail recipe book (How to Mix Drinks) published in the mid-19th century...
I shot these picture in Paris during a private [corporate] event and these bartenders here were so skilled in their art, j'étais bluffé like we say in French...

Experimental Cocktail Club (Paris)

Gladys and Romain, bartenders at the ECC Rue Saint-Sauveur, Quartier Montorgueil (Paris)
Cocktails are breathing a new life here in Paris, and the French against all odds are liking it
I first heard about the Experimental Cocktail Club through the monthly FT supplement "How to Spend It", a glossy magazine targetting the very rich which is mostly a base for whole pages of luxury-goods ads featuring Swiss watches and Vuitton bags. While most of this brightly-colored magazine is appalingly-boring stuff intended for a high-heeled conformist elite with no clues about the real life, this supplement has always a few good pictures (fashion photography in particular) and also now and then an interesting report like this story that they run a few months ago : That's how I learnt about this new thing striking Paris, Le Shake, c'est Chic, or how three young French entrepreneurs decided to introduce the cocktail culture in Paris, France.
There aren't many cocktail bars in Paris, usually, demanding cocktails amateurs would head to the bars of luxury hotels to enjoy the art of mixology, places like the Four Seasons/George V or the Hemingway bar at the Ritz where you'd pay 25 or 30 € for an expertly-made cocktail. These high-end venues offer athentic mixology designed by professionals, not just the sugary drinks with flashy colors that you find in the bar next door. But still, at 30 € a glass, you can't bring in crowds and start a trend, at least in Paris nowadays.
The pic on the right shows the rue Saint Sauveur with the shop window of the ECC on the right. The picture on left shows the rue Montorgeuil.

Wine News (37)

Oysters straight from the rocks Best wishes for 2011, may this new year be for you all as fresh and opulently vivid as these oysters...
We made a small trip to a region that we aren't familiar with for a change : Brittany, known in French as Bretagne, this region has lots of specific traits, beginning with the architecture and the maritime landscape.

There isn't wine produced there but there is cider and Calvados, and Bretons are known to drink well.
One of the gastromy hot items of Brittany is the oyster, and as we were walking at low tide on the shore, we went across wild oyters. There were plenty of them, most of very good size, on the rocks along a small bay in the area of Paimpol (you'll not know where exactly, go to brittany and find out...). We had a couple of bottles of Muscadet in the trunk of the car, that I had bought at the Leclerc supermarket of Paimpol, and these oysters sounded like a good opportunity to pop up for a new year treat. I was not sure how legal it was to pick and eat oysters on the shore but the friend we were staying at in Paimpol told us later that as long as it is on the shore, it's public space and picking is allowed. The heath concerns may be why these oysters could grow quietly and not be picked, as people are wary of getting sick because they are above the water level at each low tide. I took a risk and survived (this is winter and the risk seemed negligible to me), B. choosing to abstain and just sip some wine. If you know the size of a Swiss-Army knife, you may check with the picture on the right and understand that these oysters were the biggest I ever had the chance to eat. They're proof that there's lots of wild life in Brittany.
See on the left another great spot of this region, the pink granite rocks at Ploumanach.
The Muscadet is a Chateau Thébaud, Reserve du Fief Cognard 2009, it was fruity with freshness, and had a perly feel. It cost 3,3 € at the supermarket.

Natural Sparkling Disgorgement

Laurent, Noëlla, Pascal : the disgorging team Domaine Noëlla Morantin (Touraine, Loire)
This is the first time Noëlla makes natural sparkling in her own estate (she has made some repeatedly when she worked for Junko Arai), but she'll now make some every year, as she has a one-hectare plot of Chardonnay which suits perfectly for this type of wine. Yer yields for this Chardonnay was 29 or 30 hectoliters/hectare this year, and in 2009, she put aside a large cask of Chardonnay to make this bubbly.
The natural-sparkling winemaking process requires like for Champagne wines to get rid of the sedimented lees that accumulated in the bottleneck right under the crown cap (the bottle having stayed a long time upside down on the riddling tables). While large and medium wineries do that with sophisticated machines (like the one on this video), sometimes with a freezing system to solidify the lees and expel them out of the bottle, many artisan wineries still do that manually like it was done in the past centuries, and this is an operation that requires a very particular expertise. Noëlla Morantin asked Pascal Potaire to help her for this very special task for her own sparklings, as Pascal is an expert in the natural-sparkling making (depending of the vintage, 50% to 75% of his wines are sparklings), and he masters the art of manual disgorgement as if he learnt do do it from the age of 7...

Whisky Tasting in Paris

A whisky event A tribute to Rita Taketsuru (when Japan meets Scotland)
Whisky is at home in Paris : the Fromagerie Julhès, with the importer and retailer La Maison du Whisky (LMdW) and a few other people, have organized a whisky-tasting day with both Japanese and Scottish whiskies. This took place in a back room of the shop, which is located at 54 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in the 10th arrondissement. First, let me write a few words about Julhès (pictured on left) : I discovered this place which is both a cheese shop with a very good selection of authentic cheeses from the French provinces, and a wine shop with a samely well-inspired wine and spirits list. Plus, you'll find here good bread and excellent charcuteries. It is located in a diverse neighborhood, out of the tourist beaten path and it embodies the good old professional food shop where you feel a continuity in the quality and service rooted in the early 20th century. You find there the good wines and all the good artisan delicacies to go with, beginning with cheese and saucisson.
La Maison du Whisky is an European heavy weight in the whisky importation business, and they are doing a great job for the popularization of Japanese whiskies on the continent. To be frank, I came to this tasting for the Japanese spirits but I was very happy to discover excellent bottles of fine Scottish whiskies here.
Let me now pay my tribute to Rita Taketsuru, a Scottish woman named Jessie Roberta (surnamed Rita) who fell in love in the late 1910s' with a young Japanese who had travelled to this faraway country to study whisky making : Masataka Taketsuru was to become later the founder of one of the most lauded whisky distillery, Nikka, which is labelled as possibly the best whisky maker in the world today... This love story sort of epitomizes the special relation between Scotland and Japan in their pursuit of excellency. Read their story on this Japan Times article (thanks to Nonjatta for the link).

Tasting at Autour d'Un Verre

Stéphane Morin Rue de Trévise, Paris
Kevin Blackwell, the Mountain-View, CA native who manages Autour d'Un Verre, organizes every year a small natural-wine tasting in his wine bar. Although this tasting is for professionals (restaurateurs and sommeliers), this is a relaxed event and the entry is free and without business-card checks. The event has the same friendly and laid-back atmosphere than the wine bar, and as the place is not big, only a dozen vignerons take part, which is the right human size for a tasting, I think : you can meet everyone, take your time...and swallow some wine, which is the only real way to gauge what wines are worth and how they make you feel when you pour them to your friends and dear ones. Kevin's wine restaurant has a nice list of wines made without any additives (many even without SO2), and this tasting was a great opportunity to meet the very people who craft these wines. Pic on right : Kevin with Olivier Camus of Le Chapeau Melon (another wine bar)
I was happy for example to taste the wines of Stéphane Morin (Domaine Léonine in the Languedoc-Roussillon).
__ Léonine Amédée 2010. Very turbid red, with so much fruit, it's like you're crunching them. Real pleasure to drink, so much life. made with Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre. The grapes were picked early here, and went through 2 weeks of carbonic maceration. Stéphane made 4,5 hectoliters of this wine.
__ Léonine Que Pasa 2010. Will be bottled next january (2011). Grenache Gris & Grenache Noir. Light red color, some turbidity. The alcohol feel is higher here. Nice aromatic concentration in the mouth.
__ Léonine Fond de Tiroir 2009. Cariognan/Grenache. A bit of reduction at first on the nose. Also relatively high in alcohol in the mouth.
__ Léonine Carbone 14, Vin de Table 2009. 100 % Grenache. Very, very classy mouthfeel, and I think that you better watch what this wine will yield in a couple of years... We have here intensity and complexity, and while it goes down the throat you're still trying to put a name on the intricate puzzle of aromas and delicious vibrations...

Wine News (36)

Guy Bussière A very good surprise at the tasting organized by the AVN (acronym in French for Natural Wine Association) earlier in november in the Buttes Chaumont in Paris : the tasting, which gathered a few dozen natural-wine vintners, took place in this charming restaurant of le Pavillon du Lac in the middle of the scenic Buttes-Chaumont park (good place to eat by the way, the wine list is good and with such a setting you can't believe you're in Paris).

There was this Burgundy wine coming from outside of the known world of the Burgundy Appellations : Guy Bussière makes wine in Bonnencontre (few of you ever heard this name in Burgundy), some 40 kilometers east of Beaune. But when the winemaker is good, who needs a prestigious appellation ?
__ Domaine du Val de Saone Pinot Noir 2008. Nice light Pinot Noir, tasty wine which goes down so well. Guy Bussière says that he put some SO2 on the grapes in the vat and from then no more. He works from only 2 hectares of vineyards, his father's vineyards. Grapes picked in wooden boxes. Vinified in wooden open vats, stomped with the feet. When alc. fermentation is over, he puts the wine into casks for about a year (until the next harvest). The Domaine du Val de Saone is a very small estate but is fully certified organic. A bottle costs about 7,5 € at the estate. He sells almost nothing locally but half of his wines are sold in Paris and he even exports to Japan (François Dumas -(03)3412-3118).

Domaine Breton (Loire)

Pierre Breton with son Paul Restigné, Bourgueil (Loire)
Pierre Breton was very busy when we made a short visit there the other day, but he still gave us some of his time for a tasting of a few wines. As we walked through the vatroom, Pierre said a few words to a young man who was busy in the chai : it was Paul, Catherine and Pierre's son, who is 17 years old and gives a hand now and then in the winery. He seemed very concentrated and active in his work, and I even saw him some time later doing with the same attention to detail less glamorous tasks like sweeping the stairs going down to the cellar. The Bretons also have a daughter (who also helps now and then).