Nouveau Bottling & Tasting

L'Anglore's Eric Pfifferling bottling his Nouveau in ParisNovember 19th, Caves Augé, Paris
This november Nouveau tasting at Caves Augé in Paris was like the vintage 2009 : exceptionnal, with a perfect weather, unusually mild for this time of the year (november has been thoroughly mild until now, a welcome change when I think to the previous years where we had bursts of very cold temperatures at this season). It was cool but not cold, sunny enough to make the public cheer if the wines weren't already good enough for that. When I'm around, I rarely miss a tasting at Augé. This old wine shop (created in 1850) organizes some of the most entertaining wine tastings in town : small enough to let you taste all the wines and spend time with the winemakers and also it's a lot of fun because the artisan vignerons who come here are more real people who like to share a glass with visitors than efficient salesmen (or women) with a ready-made marketing discourse. This is Caves Augé, so of course all these vintners make their wines without lab yeasts or industrial additives, sometimes these wines don't have even been in contact with sulphur.
This tasting of Nouveau wines was also an artisanal bottling and corking line exercise : the vignerons had brought a full cask each and when they weren't pouring generously for the visitors, they filled bottles and corked them manually (several of them actually bottle their wines this way at their winery, I'm thinking to Philippe Pacalet for example who wasn't there today but who participates sometimes). The passerbys and Caves Augé's regulars could fill their glasses (clean glasses were at the disposal and easy reach on a cask on the sidewalk) at will. These 5 casks lined along the shop on the sidewalk with people working around gave people a bit of a feel of being in the chai and watching these vignerons doing these simple and ancient tasks help understands that these wines are indeed real wines, and not lab-tech designed.
The guy bottling the wine with a red label [pic on left] is Jean-François Nick (Les Foulards Rouges).

Akiyo Hori (center-left) with a friendI value the human experience of these Caves-Augé tastings at least as much as the wine-tasting part itself : as said above, it is fun here, no self-conscious snobbery or ostentatious professionnalism like when a tasting event is frequented exclusively by hurried restaurateurs, sommeliers and professional buyers. These short-cut sommeliers make you feel more like in a military corps than in a festive event (several people of the milieu agree with me on the fact that the cuisine world has something close to the military culture).
As soon as I arrived, I recognized our friend 堀 晶代 (Akiyo Hori), a Japanese wine writer who shares her time between Japan and France. She is the author of a book on Burgundy wines and she is also the author of La Mer du Vin, a website with lots of info about Burgundy vintners and estates. This tasting was a very Japanese one, by the way, as you will see later.
Eric Pfifferling's Nouveau (picture on top] was particularly pleasant, with aromas of acidulous candy, but also of rose with a bit of pepper as someone remarked. A bit perly in the mouth, this wine is unctuous and has a nice substance, that was goood.... The blend here is actually Grenache, Carignan and Clairette. The wine is in casks for a month (he made 22 hectoliters of this wine) and it will stay in there until march. It will be unfiltered at bottling and will not receive any additionnal SO2 (the only SO2 that went into this wine was a 1,5 gram dosage for the first racking). The bottle price for individual customers will be something between 10 and 12 Euro. Eric Pfifferling's L'anglore is a southern Rhone estate located in Tavel.
Fred Cossard with Japanese admirersWe have a lot of expectations regarding the 2009 wines, we had all the ideal conditions for another historic vintage, the grape conditions were perfect, maturity was optimum and acidity is said to be there too thanks to cool nights. there's a bit less volume in general but that's not the worst of what could happen.
The guests were not from Beaujolais alone, the theme chosen by Caves Augé's Marc Sibard [on the left on this pic on left] was Nouveau, not Beaujolais Nouveau, but when I read the list on Caves Augé's newsletter, I thought I'd better not miss that :
__ Eric Pfifferling (Mas de l'Anglore) Grenache 10,30 Euro
__Fred Cossard (Domaine de Chassorney) 15,40 Euro
__ Jean-François Nick (les Foulards Rouges) Syrah 10,30 Euro
__ Jean Foillard Bojo Nouveau 9,25 Euro
__ Thierry Puzelat (Clos de tue Boeuf) Sauvignon 10,30 Euro
The prices weren't displayed in the newsletter but were clearly marked in white on the shopwindow so that the tasters could figure out (stating also that a 5% rebate was offered for a 6-bottle case). That's also an answer to the economic crisis : display the rates, especially when they are this reasonnable.
Speaking of Fred Cossard's Pinot Noir that I tasted in the second, the wine has still the austerity of a newborn wine, not really pleasant to drink at this stage, but let the right time pass and this wine will show so much. The wine, which is still turbid, will stay in casks for a year. The fruit is very forward and notwithstanding the arduous mouth today, this wine will turn to be a top-pleasure wine in a few months from now.
Liz with a glass of Chassorney Pinot NoirLiz joined me for this tasting; we've been together on rough waters professionnaly some time ago and this cemented our friendship. Wine tasting is new for Liz but she displays an amazing ability to name the aromas that I find confounding. She'll probably not agree with me here as she is very humble, still, she has an innate easiness with pointing and naming aromas and mouthfeels, speaking of either cooked fruit, cherry or oak, and also for example of a harsh end "after some time", and this with words that aren't the usual ones because she is not formatted by the milieu. I think that there are quite a few people like her around who are still unaware of their own palate abilities. Liz, who is a Parisian fresh from the university fits this pattern of hidden talent and I think that part of her energy could be channelled in that direction (people often discover wine when in their 30s' so she still has time)...
Puzelat's associate Pierre-Olivier BonhommeWe started our tasting with the lone white of the event : Puzelat's Sauvignon 2009. Taken from the vat (fibeglass vat). Very turbid, nice yellowish color. Ample nose with very nice aromas, citrus, pomelos. Thierry Puzelat [pictured on left] says that he has put one of his vats outside when the temperature was colder in early november and it helped the wine to settle and clarify. The wine is almost finished but not completely : the potential here is 13,5° and it reached already 13° with still 7 grams of residual sugar. Very nice Sauvignon already and we went back for more after tasting the others. A bottle costs 10,3 Euro at Caves Augé (with an additionnal 5% discount for 6-bottle cases orders). Thierry Puzelat said that the tastings he had in New York with Joe Dressner and at other places were great. There were a bunch of other natural-wine vintners taking part and they all had a great time. I think that in these recession and downturn times, such wines which are at the same time so good in a unique way and so affordable in regard to the authenticity, can't see a drop in sales. they will probably benefit on the contrary from the reversal of fortunes of overpriced wines, the consumer finding a good excuse now for trying these wines that cost much less than many wines which owed their success to the bubble economy and to sheer conformism. In France it's more an upstream battle in my opinion because the economy has been sluggish for such a long time and is set to stay that way unless deep reforms are implemented. The country looks to fare better through the financial crisis because it never really took off in the years before the crisis (when other economies were thriving), and because so many people are state employed and living off the taxpayer's money (the latter explaining the former, by the way). Many consumers have disminished disposable income and don't want to spend more than 5 Euro a bottle. Many of these natural wines are extremely good-valued but their price still begin at about 8 or 10 Euro which is way over what the middle class spends for wine in France.
Thierry Puzelat tells me that Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme who is a long-time worker at Puzelat is in the process of taking up the management of the Negoce part of the estate, the reason being that Thierry's brother Jean-Marie will retire in the next years and that Thierry needs to scale down his own part. Pierre-Olivier is bright and fits with their work philosophy, which makes him the ideal manager.
Catching the Nouveau's magic colorsI don't always pay too much attention to the color of a wine, but I must recognize that these Nouveau wines had such vivid and intense colors that it caught my eye this time. I can understand why these two Japanese women wanted to immortalize it, this red is so..., so..... I may be biased in my judgement but I think that the color of natural wine is also more appealing, is it because of the light turbidity or because the life that shines literally through the color, I don't know but there is something more in the color here, as if these almost-sulphur-free wines were enjoying their own life in front of our eyes.
Jean-François Nick's Les Foulards Rouge was a blend of 80% Syrah and 20% Grenache.Soon to be bottled. The nose has notes of cherries and red fruits. Strawberry too. Nice wine.
Caves-Augé-selection bottle in a wine mangaA short digressing on the Caves Augé wine shop and on the Japanese wine lovers : The Japanese wine-manga authors must be regular visitors of this Paris wine address because as you can see on the picture above they even occasionally display Caves-Augé special cuvées in their fantastically-popular (and well documented) mangas. This particular showing can be seen in Joh Araki's La Sommelière (ソムリエール, the subtitle La Sommelière is written in romanji and in French on the front page) on page 116. I bought this copy in the Mandarake Shibuya manga shop in Tokyo (I love bragging that way...) in 2008 and the manga is said to have a huge following among the Japanese female wine lovers. There's a dedicated website for this manga (in Japanese) and you can enjoy a short flash movie which is fun even if you don't read Japanese. It is the story and adventures of a young aspiring female sommelier who lost her parents when she was a child and discovers the wonders and mysteries of great wines. This mystery novel/manga tells of the wine education and of the coming of age of a young Japanese woman. This manga is a follow-up uf another huge success (also among Japanese women) : Sommelier (ソムリエ), a six-volume manga created by Kaitani Shinobu, Hori Kenichi and Joh Haraki and telling the story of a young male sommelier in search of a particular wine that he tasted when he was a child and which made him later become a sommelier.
Here this particular Caves-Augé bottle catches the attention of the young sommelière because the fine print on the label reads in French "bottled by DRC at F-21700" which for knowledgeable connoisseurs like her means that the wine isn't an ordinary Bourgogne Hautes-Côtes-de- Nuits but comes actually from the Domaine de la Romanée Conti. As she says thoughtfully [image on left], "it is not labelled under the DRC label, so, few people know"... Caves Augé has indeed some interesting cuvées or selections under its own name, think for example to this very nice Sibardise which was made by Fred Cossard in Burgundy (It was a cask selected by Marc Sibard at Domaine de Chassorney and bottled separately).
Agnès Foillard and Kuki moving the nearly-empty caskJean Foillard had already left for who-knows-where when we showed at Augé. Agnès, his wife was there, as well as Kuki who shared his time between filling the bottles under the cask and catering with the clean glasses brought to the arriving visitors and passerbys (he works for Caves Augé). Agnès Foillard says that Kuki (who is Japanese) has worked at their winery in the Beaujolais last year for three months. He was doing all the checks and measurements on the juices at harvest time and she adds that he could have worked 12 hours a day or even more if they didn't stop him. Back in Japan, he was working for a wine dealing company and they let him go to France to learn more on the trade from A to Z.
Foillard's Bojo Nouveau as it is named is of course a Gamay, bright red colored with aromas of small red fruits, Elisabeth adds that she feels strawberries and a hint of banana (this girl has a palate, I tell you...).
Pouring a Lapalu 2003To paraphrase this scene of Joh Araki's manga (La Sommelière), when the time of the Beaujolais Nouveau is passed, other things surface, because the Beaujolais is more than the Nouveau. The bottle displayed religiously here by the character is a Brouilly Cuvée des Fous 2003 by Jean-Claude Lapalu....

Comments

[hikalu]

I've enjoyed Nouveau. Everybody says 2009 is fantastic.
All Nouveau I've tasted were very nice, but Personally I liked Jean Foillard and Cyril Alonzo.
I'm looking forward to 2009 Beaujolais!!

[David]

In Boston, I have enjoyed the Chatelard Villages-Nouveau VV and the Moliere Villages Nouveau Sans Souffre. Both amazingly pure! 2009 looks to be a great year in Beaujolais!

[Paweł]

I have to agree with previous comments vintage 2009 was much better in Beaujolais , comparing to 2008 much more fruity and complex.