Where la vigne is queen

I don't think I've yet confessed in these pages how much I've come to love wine since I've lived in France. I mean, wine was always my drink of choice back in the U.S. But I had absolutely no idea of the diversity, the subtleties, the infinitely varied aromas of wine until I moved here. I think that was because really great American wines were simply beyond my budget, at least for everyday exploration. But France produces so much of an almost infinite diversity of wine that you can buy a really good bottle for around €25, even back in 2000 when €25 equaled roughly $23.50. (Now, sadly, that bottle would cost around $40, but that's another story.)

As I'm blessed (or cursed) with an abnormally sensitive palate (meaning that oral gratification is, well, not everything, but...close!), I've tasted my way through a lot of wines since my arrival in 2000. A lot of them have been in the 25-30 euro range, but quite a few have been considerably more than that. Needless to say, this opened the way for a very warm relationship with Jérôme, my wine merchant. We share an appreciation of good wine, he sells, and I buy! But before I visit his shop, I make sure I've got a good (e.g. legal) parking space, because he and I may spend half an hour chatting before we even decide what I should buy that day. To inform this decision, Jérôme will ask me what I'm cooking. Then he will swallow the saliva that floods his mouth when I tell him. This for me is one of Jérôme's most endearing traits, and the best evidence that we are fellow gourmands.

We recently passed a milestone in our friendship when Jérôme invited me to join his twice-annual wine-tasting expedition. This spring, it was to be the Bordelais (region around Bordeaux). As this was one of the only regions of France I hadn't yet visited, I agreed. He'd pick me up early Sunday morning, he said, and we'd be gone 4 days. In all, around 15 people would join in the trip, all driving in rally fashion from one vineyard to another. We'd be graciously hosted by George and François Nony, at their vineyard Château Caronne in the Médoc. Jérôme had a program all put together, and had even made restaurant reservations for our group.

Our caravan arrived in the Bordelais in the late afternoon, and we stopped at our first vignoble, the Château Cantinot. Now, there are around 14,150 wine-producing châteaux in the Bordelais. While you try to get your mind around that little factoid, I'm going to indulge in a digression for the benefit of those not too familiar with the world of French wines. Remember what I said about the diversity of wines here? Well, nearly every region of France, except Brittany, Normandy, and the north has vineyards. Each wine-producing property will consist of a few to many parcels of land, which have been delineated according to a complex combination of differing soil types and exposure called terroir. Each parcel yields a wine that is different, even if planted to the same grape variety, because of the distinctive inflluence of the terroir on its character. For the French, terroir determines the character of wine. And that is why, in France, wines are named first after the parcel where the grapes were grown, next after the domaine or château owning the parcel, and finally after the appelation, or "neighborhood" where the wine was produced, which often corresponds to the name of the closest village. Traditionally, French wines are never named after the varietal (chardonnay, merlot) as they are in the anglophone tradition. (Some wines destined for export now are labeled with the varietal as the traditional label disorients many American consumers.)

But back to the Château Cantinot. Not only were we able to taste the fine wines--a pleasant proposition after several hours on the road--but the family had put out a lavish spread for us. We flitted from wine, to foie gras and charcuterie, to lovely verrines of a refreshing shrimp and cucumber salad. Although in a serious dégustation, you actually spit out the wines you taste without swallowing them (if you didn't you'd soon become roaring drunk), with all that great food not much spitting was going on! After our lavish snack, Yann took us on a tour of his chailles (building where vinification takes place). The freshly placed grapes are first placed in tanks (or cuves), which may be either concrete
or stainless steel. Most winemakers in the Bordelais had both; apparently there are advantages to each. In this relatively small winery, the progress of each cuve was noted on a small slate attached to its aperture.

Yann even had us taste the wine-in-progress direct from the cuve. From there, the wine is filtered off into oak barrels or barriques. The life of the barrel itself is around 3 years maximum. Some wines are only aged in new barrels. This had me wondering what was being done with all those used barrels. Many of the barrels were made with American oak, by the way!

The Bouscasses' welcome was so warm that it got our trip off to a wonderful start. From there, we went to the Château Caronne, unpacked, and then got together around a huge table for dinner accompanied by a vertical sampling of the "house wines." We began with a 2004 and moved back in time from there (a vertical tasting is a tasting of the same wine over different vintages.) I seem to remember the 2002 was the best.

The next day was dedicated to vineyards in the Médoc, an AOC region on the left bank of the Gironde estuary that comprises the most prestigious Bordeaux appellations. I have to say the look of this region surprised me. I'm used to seeing vineyards on hillsides, yet here the land is flat and barely above sea level. Many areas remain marshy. In fact, no grapes were grown here until a relatively high-tech drainage project engineered by the Dutch allowed what had been salt marshes to be planted to vines. The soil itself is strange-looking--sort of a bicolored mix of white sand and brown clay particles. Yet, as a billboard proudly proclaimed at the region's boundary, this is the earth that the entire earth envies!

Why? Because this earth is practically worth its weight in gold. It is home to appellations such as Margaux, St-Estephe, Pauillac, and others. That very morning, we were to visit the (almost) inner sanctum of one of the holiest of holies, Château LaTour. Now, Jérôme doesn't even sell their wines. Not because perhaps he wouldn't want to, but because Château LaTour decides who will have that privilege. In other words, it's not enough simply to have the money to afford them. A LaTour primeur (new wine just offered for sale) goes for around €180 a bottle; within a couple of years that same bottle is valued at over €1000. As you might imagine, that constitues a wine speculator's heaven.

After we identified ourselves, a guard pushed a button to open the fortress-like iron gates. Our vehicles filed down a long drive through vineyards that to me looked surprisingly desolate. Of course, this was partly because they were barely breaking bud, but it also had to do with how immaculately cultivated they were (not one weed or wildflower anywhere) and the flatness of the land. In the photo at left, you can catch a glimpse of the Gironde estuary on the horizon.) A sign directed us to a low-slung, modern building where we were ushered into an ultra-contemporary tasting room. Wide, narrow windows framed views of the same landscape: vines to the horizon. On a long, white-clothed table in the center of the room, glasses of wine had been arranged by threes resting on austere printed cards identifying them: Pauillac, Les Forts de LaTour, and Château LaTour. These are the three wines produced by LaTour, in order of ascendingly precious price. The wines we were to taste had not even been put in bottles yet and would not be offered for sale until 2010. They weren't even at the primeur stage.

You can see from the photo at right that this was not quite the warm, boisterous tasting offered by the Cantinot. We all waited a little stiffly for our hostess to arrive before we dared to touch the precious vessels before us. Beneath each window were long, stainless steel, built-in spittons which whispered every few minutes as water automatically sluiced through them. Given the rarefied aspect of both the wines were were tasting and the atmosphere we were in, not many of us used them. Our hostess arrived, very pleasant, very professional, and very determined to have us out of there in no more than 20 minutes. No visit to the chailles here. Their opulence was left to our imaginations.

Although I of course appreciated Jérôme's getting us into Château LaTour, something stuck in my craw about our visit there. There was something terribly cold about that fortress of wine in the middle of its desert of vineyard. And that chill came from the icy clink of money. In fact, all the wine money in the Médoc has made it into a rather strange place--very different from any other part of France. On the one hand are the wine chatelains, in their châteaux, and on the other hand, there are all the people who work for them--mostly skilled agricultural laborers (remember, all those vines are hand-pruned.). The villages of the region were some of the most run-down I've seen in France--a sad contrast to the opulence of the surrounding châteaux. My guess is that the superwealthy aren't spending their money locally, and the workers don't have much to spend. So the villages languish.


The Château Charmail that afternoon was a more human-scale winery. The owner, Olivier
Sèze, is a down-to-earth professional whose wines we had all long enjoyed from Jérôme's boutique. Olivier poured his wines for us himself before taking us on a tour of his chailles and the vines. He grows mostly merlot, which is earlier to leaf out and earlier to mature than cabernet sauvignon or cabernet franc. New, pink-flushed leaves were already peeping from his well-kept vines.















The next day, we headed to the rive droite of the Garonne River. I immediately felt better as we wound our way through a gently rolling landscape, where vineyards were tucked among patches of forest and farms. This was a landscape reflecting the sort of balanced agricultural ecology I was used to seeing in the French countryside. Our first stop was a small winery in the Fronsac appellation, the Moulin Pey-Labrie (Château Haut Lariveau).
We were warmly welcomed by co-owner Bénédicte Hubau, co-owner with her husband Grégoire. They grow 100% Merlot grapes, which are hand-picked and destemmed before vinification. To give you an idea of how little land is required to make a good living from making wine in the region, they grow on only 20 acres of land. (Many vignobles are even smaller.)

These wines were highly structured and I found them perhaps a bit less accessible than some others we'd tasted. The room where we tasted was quite dark, dimly lit by torches against the wall. The twilight allowed me to discreetly practice the wine tasting technique I saw being executed by a young local nearby. It consists of slurping air in through your mouthful of wine with the tip of your tongue against the inside of your teeth. The idea is to aerate the wine in your mouth to better appreciate its aromas by burbling neatly while neither spewing it all over your chest or nor inhaling it and choking.

We had a splendid lunch at l'Envers du Décors, a charming restaurant in the hilltop village of St-Emilion (another famous appellation). Afterwards, we spent an hour rambling the precipitous streets, often clinging to handrails to keep from slipping when descending or to haul ourselves up when ascending! I did suffer one terrible frustration: St-Emilion is home to a renowned museum of traditional utilitarian pottery. I was unable to visit it as I was the only person in the group interested in it.

In the St-Emilion region, we visited what was for me the most interesting vignoble of our trip: the Château de Lescours. The owner, Pierre Chariol, was bursting with enthusiasm as he took us around his property--a property which was stunningly beautiful simply because it was so ancient, parts of it dating from the 13th century. 

The house was surrounded by a moat and the most beautiful part for me was behind it, where deeply worn stone steps bordered with balustrades led down to the vineyards.  And just beyond the vineyards was forest, through which we could glimpse the Garonne.  Waterfowl wheeled in the sky.  "I keep more land in forest than in vines," said Pierre, an avid nature lover and hunter. 








My heart warmed to him when he said this.  Here was a man who cared about more than money.  His vines were spectacular, stout and gnarled like thousand-year-old bonsais.  In fact, many of Pierre's vines are over 135 years old, meaning they date from before the phylloxera outbreak that decimated most of France's vineyards at the end of the 19th century.  (The main photo at the head of the article is of one of these venerable vines.)  Pierre cultivates them nearly organically.  He leaped from vine to vine,
explaining how the morphology of each individual dictates just how to prune.  I found the depth of his knowledge absolutely fascinating.  Here was a hands-on château owner, a real gardener of wine grapes!  Bordering the moat were a number of heavily pollarded willows of incredible girth.  Pierre demonstrated their raison d'être:  traditionally, flexible willow twigs were the material used to attach the vines to the trellis.  Pierre promptly demonstrated this technique, to my extreme delight.  He used exactly the same technique that is still used today in the rose garden in the Bois de Boulogne to attach climbers.  (I wrote about this in my article on that garden.)




I also appreciated how Pierre's vineyards had some wildflowers and, well, weeds growing in them.  To me, they signified a more moderate and balanced--a more natural--approach than the scorched earth sterility of the prestige châteaux such as LaTour.  Pierre remarked more than once that he wasn't in this for money, but for the joy of perpetuating his way of living.  Seeing him among his vines, I could tell he was sincere.




Pierre took us on a tour of his chailles, which were very old and perfectly to my liking.  In one corner, above an ancient stone sink where a wine glass hung ready, an array of old tools was hung on the wall, testimony to tradition. 







Pierre poured his wines for us to taste, after first having rinsed each glass with wine.  His wines were incredibly good--and almost unbelievably inexpensive.  At the one-bottle rate, you could have a 1993 Saint-Emilion Grand Cru for €19.50!  Forget that Château LaTour primeur at 10 times that price...I'd take the wines of Pierre Chariol any day.  His wines are excellent, and they are made by a man who is passionate about his work.  A man whose hands are calloused and who understands his vines because he works in them everyday, and who strives for a balance with nature.  These are wines with heart...and soul!

(American wine drinkers take note:  Pierre Chariol's Château de Lescours wines are available in the United States, and at very reasonable prices!)