Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Les Pénitentes (Angers)

Derain, Mosse & Co

Angers, Loire Valley
There are a few days at the turn of january and february when Angers is bustling with winemakers, wine geeks and professionnals from all over. Beyond the Salon d'Angers around which it all started, you have a few side wine fairs focused on natural, organic wine which have been a growing magnet for buyers and importers, including this one, Les Pénitentes where you could taste this year the wines from 26 vignerons. For the aforementioned reasons the accomodations in the area are fully booked and it's close to impossible to find a place in Angers to crash for the night, so I made it a day trip from Paris, returning home the same evening. Again, I used the car-sharing scheme Blablacar for that, much more fun and so much cheaper than the SNCF (prices vary, but I paid 23 € each way).

The wine event takes place in an architectural gem, the Hôtel des Pénitentes which had several uses from its construction in the 15th century, including housing a female monastic order (the Pénitentes) in 1640. Incidently, as I was taking a picture of a narrow side street with old cobble stones, I was talked to by an elderly woman named Madeleine Cesbron (I asked for her name) who guided me to the historic gems of the area, which sits along a Roman road. I was thinking in the side of my mind about the tasting having started and was a bit worried about delaying my arrival but she was so kind and knowledgeable and eager to tell that I stayed with her quite some time as she showed me around. I think she was a teacher in the past or something like that, she showed me this incredible house built in 1582 (year is engraved on the beam) where you can see sculptures representing American Indians, this was the time news from the discovery of America was reaching Europe with all its exciting imagery. She told me many details about several of these statues. I find it interesting that the place is now a wine shop (regular mainstream, if I can judge from a quick glance). She also showed me the church (Eglise de la Trinité) on the other side of the street which had a special door for the women convent Abbaye du Ronceray which was embedded in the side of the church, allowing the nons to enter the church without venturing outside...

Wine News (73)

Authentic farmouse brewery....

Got a backlog of "News" items that may not seem so new by now, but I'm an adept of slow things, no need to hurry, anything looked upon with fresh eyes can be news...
We had this beer a few months ago thanks to a special delivery by my friend Alex who has special conduit for small allotment deliveries from this very unique brewery located near Austin, Texas. Most Europeans have a distorded image of Texas and this could change overnight if (beyond going there and wandering around on the side roads like i did long time ago) they just had a sip of this beer. This Jester King Simple Means is certainly one of the best and most surprising American beers (made with native yeast !), just delicious and easy drinking with a moderate 5,5 % alcohol content. The Rate Beer page about this beer also sees some common ground with the Düsseldorf Alt beers, happy to hear that, i stayed a few times near Düsseldorf and the local Diebels Alt was my favorite beer then. Jester King beers are pretty confidential and hard to find, if you see one, whatever the type, grab it.

Backyard winemaking in Russia

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Плюс 25 литров яблочно виноградного вина. Предпоследний розлив этого сезона. 216 бутылок уже розлито. Вкусное домашнее ароматное молодое вино.Без химии консервантов красителей итд.#винишко#винодел#вино#виноделие#домашнеевино#ручнаяработа#розлив#winemaker#viniculture#wine#handcrafted#handmade#солнцево#солнцевскийвинодел#ягодноевино#выходной#хобби

Une publication partagée par Yakovenko EV (@iakovenko263) le 20 Oct. 2018 à 10 :43 PDT

25-liter home bottling just outside Moscow (by iakovenko263)

Little-known to us is the fact that Russians are fond of making wines for themselves, wether from a few vines grown in their garden or from fruit purchased around. This has been going on for ages and is not only rooted in the supply deficiencies of the socialist regime a few decades ago, deficiencies that pushed many Russians to rely in part on their home-made groceries. I wrote a story a few years ago about Russia being a forgotten giant in organic production, thanks largely to the fact that people learned to grow things without chemicals, and beyond the Soviet aspect of the cause, the other is that the people of this region have a deep, almost-religious love for Mother Nature and regularly go for walks in the wild foraging for food . You'll see people of all kinds of walks of life walking through the notoriously-endless forests to pick mushrooms and other berries.

But for wine Russians also often kept this do-it-yourself approach, as you can check on these few Instagram peeks into the private life of ordinary folks (some of these views include Russian-speaking neighboring countries), people just make a bit of wine for the fun of it, and most of the time very natural even if they may use some kind of hybrid varieties. Even during the boring years of the Soviet Union, people loved wine, not just vodka, and in cities where people hadn't their own couple of rows of vines, they'd rely on the wine shops, at least when these had goods. In this 1989 movie named Glass Labyrinth by director Mark Osepian which describes a story happening in 1980, you can see at one point a bunch of unruly teenagers joining a queue starting outside a wine shop (picture on left), the queue going all the way around the building to the courtyard behind, obviously because a sudden shipment of wine had people ready to spend whatever time needed to get a few good bottles (and in some cases sell them back on the black market). Watch the scene on Youtube (full movie) at min 23:10. This movie sheds light on the quiet despair of youths who were between staggering mainstream living and hooliganism, at a time no sign of change was really showing at the horizon. Later at min 31:40 they trick their entry into a fancy restaurant with live music. This was another era indeed, now in early-21st-century Russia sophistication setlles in gradually and божоле нуво (Beaujolais Nouveau) has become trendy.

Tea farm (Taiwan)

Gu Jing-Ran standing near his tea plants

Beipu, Taiwan
Sorry for this delay from my last story, this one will move away a bit from the central topic of wine, but you'll see that there are many issues in here which bring us back to a common core of truth and authenticity. I don't know anyway about locally-made wines in Taiwan although I'm aware there are a few indigenous spirits that I'll look into next time I travel there, but Taiwanese tea is definitely on the map for conoisseurs, the island having a relatively long uniterrupted history for cultivating the best of it. To tell it bluntly I'm not a tea person, but B. is, and her many years spent in Japan helped her develop an addiction to good tea, so it was very interesting to see her open up with what she tasted here, and also appreciating the intricacies of what we could call the Taiwanese tea-serving ceremony which is different from the handling of it in Japan, beginning with the size and shapes of the cups and tea pots.

Anyway thanks to Rebecca (wine importer @ C'est le Vin) we had the chance to visit this tea farm where the young grower works naturally. You may know that tea growing faces the same dilemmas as viticulture, with most commercial plantations spraying chemicals on the leaves and the soil for conveniency [not to speak of the many ways to interfere with the final product through aromatic enhancers like it's done for cheap tea]. Here this grower works without chemicals or additives, and we were thrilled to learn that René-Jean Dard as well as Dominique Derain among others were also priviledged to discover this real-tea farm at the foot of the mountains... To get there, we took the hi-speed train to Hsinchu just outside Taipei and met Rebecca there, driving then to the Beipu area. Taiwan is a very green country, seems like as soon as you leave Taipei you're surrounded with forested hills and mountains, with streams and rivers everywwhere, this asks for more inroad trips to discover the countryside.

Rebecca Yeh, wine importer (Taiwan)

Rebecca Yeh

Taipei, Taiwan
Wine exports to Asia have been growing these last years including for natural wine and Taiwan which is known for its great food also joined the fray for wines made without correction or additives. This story is about the first Taiwan-based importer exclusively centered on these wines, here is Rebecca Yeh, who set up her company C'est le Vin a few years ago in Taipei. Starting with a handful of French producers in the first year, Rebecca now imports a few dozens, and C'est le Vin has become the Taiwanese hub for natural wines.

Rebecca had worked for a wine distributor here and had come across organic wine but here experience with these wines was so-so [winemaking of mainstream "organic wines" is often conventional, making them pretty disappointing]. Rebecca discovered natural wines through Japanese importer Yoshio Ito (pictured on right in Taipei with Derain & Rebecca) who had her taste wines from Alexandre Bain, Clos Rougeard and Marc Pesnot as well as Dard & Ribo. After that she had the opportunity to travel in France and visit these producers as well as others and this trip really turned the tide, making her realize how these wines were really different, not only delicious to drink but with all the other aspects which she discovered while travelling there. She remember at the time asking all the winemakers what was natural wine and she was touched by the shared answer they had, relating to truthness, respect of the earth and harmonious relations with other people. She felt she had to bring this all to Taiwan and have the Taiwanese people and wine lovers enjoy a good selection themselves. Japan was for that a good inspiration and she learned from its importers how to best take care of these wines, as Taiwan also has a climate that can be harmful to wines if these aren't properly stored and shipped.

Paris wine bar : L'Amitié Rit (Montreuil)

The counter on a tasting day

Montreuil, just outside Paris
There is no shortage of bars and bistrots in Paris in the matter of natural wine but exploring the close suburbs on the other side of the périphérique (the hellish freeway circling Paris) is also rewarding, in spite of the fact that many people don't cross this divide outward easily. Montreuil was in the past a blue collar town and its demographics changed dramatically over the last decades, now the town is part inhabited by bobos and young families who moved there because Paris' apartments are way too expensive or because they liked the cooler vibe here, and part by non-European immigrants, especially Malians (Montreuil is sometimes called little Bamako). The two communities don't really mix together but still go along well, and because of the good taste of the alternative crowd there are plenty of nice things in Montreuil, a farmers' market, an American craft beer brewery, an organic wine fair, and a few cool places for natural wine like L'Amitié Rit (read Meg Zimbeck's page on Paris by Mouth for more on Montreuil, ilke pizza joint serving natural wines...).

The wine bar, caviste & bistrot was founded by Thierry Dubourg (the guy with the hat behind the counter on the picture), he worked initially in the movie distribution sector and one day he was out of work and after the shock encounter with the wines of Pfifferling and Gramenon, he decided to start this bar & wine shop. The venue has become a reference including in Paris for it's wide choice of cuvées and affordability.

Carole Kohler (Loire)

Carole Kohler with her young Chenin

Thouars, southern Loire
This story takes place just outside of Thouars, a small town located some 35 kilometers south of Saumur, and I visited Carole early november after having heard about her through family of mine who live 20 km from there. Carole and her husband are reviving the wine culture of their home town of Thouars. Like for many such towns across France, vineyards in the past were planted all around the city for centuries because basically each place in the country would produce its own wine. These vineyards had all but vanished especially around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century with the phylloxera and the easier transportation of southern wines. The wine made near Thouars was actually until then quite reknowned among the nobility of the region, and this is a city where the noble family Maison de la Tremoille reigned during 11 centuries on an area covering much of Anjou.

Carole Kohler and her husband Brice live in the hamlet of Fleury on the hill overlooking Thouars, that's precisely where the best terroirs of Thouars were located, and she decided very recently to replant vineyards and revive the wine culture of the small city which hadn't had a winery or a domaine for ages. The work wasn't smooth and easy, as she says in this interview in the regional newspaper, she lost 5 % of the young plantings in 2016 because of the drought and in 2017 70 % of the buds were burnt by the black frost that afflicted many of the wine regions. To this day she has replanted 1,2 hectare and targets in the future 3 to 3,5 hectares.

François Saint-Lô (Loire)

François Saint-Lô in his cellar

Berrie, Vienne (Loire)
I think that François Saint-Lô was discovered at the Dive in 2013 (see the list of vignerons here), from what I heard he just popped up out of nowhere and people were just stunned by his wines, there was some kind of word-of-mouth going on, go taste this guy's wines !. François is originally a Normandy native and he worked in restaurants in Paris, deciding one day to go work in artisan domaines. He ended up having his own production and since the first vintage people loved his easy-drinking wines like his 9 %-alcool Grolleau. He of course vinifies naturally and uses no sulfur on his wines. François works on 4,5 hectares (fermages, or rentals) and he buys grapes for the equilalent of one hectare. He looks for purchasing parcels of his own near the village, as he farms with a draft horse, it would be convenient.

Berrie is located in the southern flank of the Loire valley, this village is roughly 25 km south of Saumur by road, and while the surrounding landscape is mostly large fields, the village itself is a gem handcrafted by centuries of work by small farmers, with nice old houses, many troglodytic structures and an intricate maze of underground cellars and connected galleries that were a few centuries ago also used to resist through attrition the occasional invading armies. There's a certain disconnect by the way between the feel in this village and these large fields outside, obviously meant for industrial agriculture, but there were no open fields a century ago : the destruction of the traditionnal farming landscape (small fields surrounded by hedges) is a modern thing, mostly done in the 20th century even if it began in the 19th, This was considered very modern and progressive then to erase these hedges and regroup the parcels and fields, at stake was the rise in agricultural production volumes and the state pushed in this direction at the expense of the traditional way of life. Nothing much has changed since, we could say, the bright minds of the EU and the French administration subsidize the pulling-off of vineyards including some of the most qualitative, and this also for our own good, be sure of it...

Vin Primeur 2018 at Caves Augé

Alex Foillard filling bottles

Caves Augé, Paris
Another Primeur and Beaujolais-Nouveau day in Paris, this time I just had time to really go the the usual bottling-tasting of Nouveau at Caves Augé in Paris before going to work. The iconic wine shop has for years this event on the 3rd thursday of november with prominent natural-wine vintners bringing a barrel of Nouveau straight from their cellar and filling/corking bottles in front of you. That's something not to miss, it starts at 11 am and ends at 7 pm and the winemakers are there in person. And you can come back to a barrel you've already sampled and ask for another try, actually I've often spent hours at these sidewalk tastings, chatting along with the winemakers and acquaintances.

I shouldn't print that but I was often pretty high when I'd leave on my motorbike afterwards, good think that breath checks are mostly unheard of inside Paris, i'd be more cautious in the French provinces and villages...
Let's remind that this wine shop was founded in 1850 and is owned by Lavinia since 2006, this is both a tradionnal high-end wine shop and one that puts forward the best artisan domaines vinifying naturally. Jérôme Moreau (pictured on left-center) is the new director at Caves Augé, the young man has worked previously at Lucas Carton, Le Bristol and Le Crillon.

Anne Paillet (Pic-Saint-Loup/Loire)

Anne Paillet with Gregory Leclerc

Chargé, Indre-et-Loire (Loire)
There are winemakers who make a difference when there's a gathering of winemakers for a tasting event or a wine fair, the mood will be more eccentric and the vibe wilder if they take part, and Anne Paillet of Autour de l'Anne is one of them (like Pierre Breton, Thierry Puzelat or Brendan Tracey to name a few others). If they're on the list, take it like a further reason to come and be ready for a wild ride...And if you see from afar a vibrant and noisy crowd around a tasting stand in the wine fair there's a good chance Anne is the magnet, and her wines of course which are like her enjoyable and easy to drink.

In her former life Anne Paillet spent years on what many people would consider a good job for a large industrial group based just outside Paris and she decided one day in 2010 that it was not the life she wanted. Her now-husband Gregory (they didn't know each other at the time) samely had a job he didn't really like even if it was closer to wine, he was a reporter/writer for Gilbert & Gaillard, a mainstream publication for wines and Champagnes until he quit in 2005 to enroll in a wine school and subsequently set up his winery, Chahut et Prodige. Anne liked wine already at the time, and I mean real wine here, and they met in 2009 in a wine fair in Paris, she says she fell in love with his Coup de Canon 2008 (a 100 % Grolleau) and with the winemaker himself... She wanted to make wine herself already but not necessarilly in the Loire where Gregory had already his winery by then. She knew quite a few people in the Languedoc and her initial plans before she met Gregory was to go there and start something there.