Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Jérôme Lambert (Loire)

Jérôme Lambert in this chai

Champs-sur-Layon, Anjou (Loire)
We're here in Anjou south of Angers, another hot area for natural wine. Jérome Lambert was a salesman in his former life and he began spending time in the vineyards and make wine when his father fell ill in 2003. When he was a kid in Rablay-sur-Layon (where he's born) he used to go pick some grapes, stomp them and wait a few days to have them ferment. In 2003 he worked at Philippe Cesbron (now the mayor of Rablay) where he leaned how to prune. On this first yeat he toured around the growers of Rablay, asking if he could pick the leftover grapes in order to try himself at making a bit of wine. At the time he didn't grasp the issue of chemicals and didn't know the soil was mistreated in many domaines, so he made his small trial with whatever leftover bunches he could pick. the interesting thing with Jérôme is the fact that he basically began to vinify naturally by himself, without the formal guiding of the other pioneers in this field.

Les Jardins de Theseiis (Loire)

Anouk and Paul-André

Thésée, Touraine (Loire)
Here we are again along the Cher river, in an area of the Loir-et-Cher département with a vibrant (and growing) community of artisan growers and winemakers, and in 2018 this was the debut for a newcomer couple who moved here from Canada, Anouk Lavoie-Lamoureux and her husband Paul-André Risse who named their domaine Les Jardins de Theseiis. The name refers to the very ancient history of the village of Thésée, a populated area with a 2000-year history dating back from the Romans (see here the impressive wall still standing just outside the village) which formerly beared the name of Theseiis in the 1500s'.

Anouk and Paul-André are making the first vintage of their own here, not exactly their first wines as last year they made wine with Bruno Allion. You may remember that Bruno was considering to retire and here it is, Anouk and Paul-André are taking over half of his vineyards after working with him a ferw months, both in the vineyards and in the cellar, to master the domaine's culture and build their experience in natural winemaking (you saw them at work last year when their were picking the Romorantin for Bruno).

Lisanne van Son & Benjamin Serer (Loire)

Lisanne Van Son and Benjamin Serer in Noizay

Noizay, Loire
On of the last times I met Lisanne was when she was working in Montlouis at the wine bar of Lise & Bertrand Jousset (scroll down to the 4th picture in the linked story), the young Dutch was obviously well versed into natural wines and aimed already at something else. Now that's it she starts her own domaine with associate Benjamin Serer whom she met last year while doing her one-year training at the wine school of Amboise. Both of them have extensive experience in the restaurant business, lisanne was a sommelier and Benjamin was a chef in Alain Ducasse restaurants. Both of them trained afterwards in different wine farms, Benjamin at Mathieu Cosme in Noizay, Vincent Carême in Vouvray, also at Philippe Foreau there. Lisanne worked more on the Montlouis side, the sister Appellation : she first actually came over here in the Loire with working with Noella Morantin in 2013 further south from here, helping a few days now and then to work in the vineyard including of course for the picking. Then she met other vignerons like Bertrand Jousset and also Toby Bainbridge in Anjou and that's when she began to want to do something of her own. She was still living in Holland and Belgium back then, commuting now and then to the region for vineyard stints and she ended up moving here in the Loire in march 2017 for that purpose.

I visited Lisanne and Benjamin early october, reaching their troglodytic chai in Noizay on my motorbike, this is just a short distance from the beautiful town of Amboise along the Loire river. This village has dozens of such cellars dug into the sandstone of the hill, these cellars were used for generations for winemaking and each of them is unique. Here there are even upper stories with rooms with fireplaces and chimney ducts so that people or workers could live there. Given that from up there you can see the river many of them have been turned into vacation residences or even outright primary residence.

Major Levente, Matra (Hungary)

Levente in his cellar

Abasár, Matra (Hungary)
Levente (given names follow the family names in Hungary) is part of a vibrant group of young winemakers who give a new impetus to the small wine region of Matra, a hilly area north of Budapest dotted with extinct volcanoes. Levente was a school teacher and director in his previous life, and he still is to this day. In this region everybody used to grow grapes and make wine for the family, as a kid he saw his father making wine for home consumption and he later went to the university (the wine school is at Corvinus University, Budapest) to learn the basics of winemaking. When he started hiw own production (Levente Pince) back to the wine school he still had many questions without answers, so he tried different things by himself, learning through trials along the years.

The village of Abasár east of Gyöngyös is a typical wine village sitting at the foot of the hills in view of the vineyards with lines of cellars here and there, dug into the slopes. The area had its vineyards destroyed by phylloxera in the late 19th century and the village was helped by a generous and entrepreneurial man, Hanak Kolos, who helped the growers of the region replant and learn a new grafting technique thereafter known as the Abasarian grafting (source).
Levente says that people here don't consider making wine as a future and dream of getting to Budapest for a better life. He considers it's one of his duties to make them love their heritage and consider they can both have a better life and live here making wine, there are still lots of vineyards to cultivate and slopes to replant with beautiful terroirs. He sometimes brings his students in the cellar to show them around and try awake vocations for this job. Levente, who years ago would teach in Budapest, communting back and forth here to make wine, came back in his home region and now heads the school around the corner, teaching there too.

Christian & Nadia Charmasson (Rhone)

Christian & Nadia Charmasson

Tavel, Rhone valley
Nadia and Christian Charmasson at Balazu des Vaussières are making wine in Tavel in the southern Rhône but don't look for the Tavel wines found in the supermarkets for analogy because they work on a very artisanal way and tend their parcel without harming both the soil and the vines (and they label their wines as Vin de France meaning table wine anyway, which doesn't suit well the AOC-loving supermarkets...). They have been farming along the procedures of biodynamy and also Maria Thun, starting in 2007 after a few years on this property and their cuvée range is very simple, they make a white, a rosé and a red, all blends. While we visited their farm we realized how different are the wines when all is done along these procedures, planet cycles calendar, herb tea spraying and letting literally the wine by its own in the cellar, it yields wines that feel so much better and alive. No surprise that with Pfifferling of L'Anglore they're considered the Natural Giants of Tavel...

The Charmasson farm is located just outside Tavel, it's a modest one-level house with a side building that was converted into a chai, the vines being just in the back with view over the first hills in the far. Like elsewhere in the region there's a push for more construction from both families and village administrations hungry for new payers of yearly local taxes, and on the other side of the small road there's already an encroachment of new houses, the village having allowed for more agricultural land to be turned constructible. Farmers usually don't resist especially when they sell their grapes to the local Coop, and they often end up dividing their parcels into as many individual lot for multiple residential units.

Ordinaire, Oakland (California)

Vibrant crowd in the afternoon

Oakland, California
Last but not the least of my U.S. stories - While located in Oakland on the other side of the Oakland-Bay Bridge, Ordinaire can be considered as one of the prominent wine bars/shops in San Francisco. Oakland is not that far from downtown San Francisco, even by car, that's where many people relocated along the years because the rents have become so expensive on the other side of the bridge in San Francisco proper.
The wine bar was created 5 years ago this month by Bradford Taylor while pursuing a Ph.D at the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the sense of taste in early 20th century modernist literature (I quote the Wikipedia page for the bar which is pretty exhaustive). I met Bradford in Paris about 5 years ago if I remember, when he had probably just opened the bar. In addition to the wine bar side, Ordinaire organizes on a yearly basis a natural-wine fair, the Brumaire Natural Wine Festival (just say Brumaire, it's on its way to become an established wine fair) where you can meet daring winemakers like Julie Balagny.

I drove there from downtown San Francisco before giving the rental back on Post street. Didn't see really what Oakland looks like, I just saw this amazing building a short distance from Ordinaire, the Grand Lake Theater which was opened in 1926 and remains managed by the descendants of the original founders.While we're at Oakland there's another wine bar dealing with natural wine there, it's Punchdown, and speaking of San Francisco proper there's of course Terroir which I visited a few years ago and also Ruby which I alas didn't have time to visit this time and about which I heard very appreciative comments from people in the know.

Absentee Winery, Point Reyes, CA

Avi Deixler with an intriguing bubbly

Point Reyes, California Avi Deixler who started Absentee in 2016 is a rising star in the world of artisan wines made without additives and intervention. After living in Marin County in his youth he moved to New York State, studied there and eventually discovered wine by working in a wine shop. Along his training and job experiences working in wineries in California, Oregon, Australia and France, he discovered natural wine and ended up starting his own production here in the very coastal region where he spent his childhood years.

Setting up a winery in this corner of Marin County north of San Francisco bay was a challenge, as this is not precisely a wine producing area. Of course Avi Deixler's project wasn't about the usual commercial winery, it was small scale and most important he wanted to make wines that were made only with grapes, that is no additives, no nutrients nothing, no SO2, but this wasn't enough to get the green light from the County Planning office. Avi wanted to sit his winery in the dairy building of an old ranch or farm outside Point Reyes, which is a beautiful, rugged coastline along the coast where preservation is important and where visitors come to see the hundred seals resting on the rocks. Avi pleaded his cause, he said his product will eschew the additives and preservatives that are commonplace in the industry.“True wine, with grapes as the only ingredient, does not give you a headache if you have a second glass. It’s a journey of flavor that you just fall into,” said Mr. Deixler, who named his winery “Absentee” to reflect his stripped-down approach. After a legal battle and some press coverage Avi won, thanks to the support of some commissioners who understood the artisan quality of his approach.

Martha Stoumen, California

Martha Stoumen at Venturi vineyards

Ukiah, California
Martha Stoumen started her winery relatively recently in 2014 after initially studying Geography and Environmental matters in UCLA with Professor Judith Carney and she pursued her Italian heritage by travelling there, doing apprenticeship in a farm in Tuscany working with endangered farm species and breeds. Over there each intern (there were 9) were put in a specific part of the farm and hers was the vineyard and the olive orchard. She hadn't made ever wine before, but happilly it was small scale, not commercial, just for friends and family. She loved it and after the few months spent there she felt she'd like to do this as a job when back home. She indeed found a job in California but the conditions were very different, it was very structured, she'd not go to the vineyard at all, it was great because she was learning a lot but she definitely wanted to be in a smaller winery. She then went to Australia to work in a small winery, then to Germany (Heymann-Lowenstein in Mosel) where she only worked in the vineyard and this was her initial exposure to totally native fermentation, nothing added. The vines were standing on a stick the old way the canes on the shape of a heart, the picking was old fashion, it took a whole day for the pickers to fill a one-ton bin, the grapes would begin to oxidize but still no sulfur on the grapes, and they would press them the following day. She stayed 6 months.

After this in 2010-2012 she went to UC Davis to learn the microbiology, picking what she wanted to learn also. With friends she was beginning to make wine in their backyard in Davis and she was beginning to drink a lot of natural wines as well. There were few people working with native yeast back then, she remembers Matthew Rorick at Forlorn Hope, also Broc Cellars which she visited back then in Berkeley, but they were mostly drinking European wine at the time. They were learning all the correction methods at UC Davis but there was also a teacher there, Junichi Fujita who was an early guy to bring all these European natural wines under the spotlight at UC Davis (he since has planted a vineyard of his own in Oregon near McMinnville). Enriched with these new discoveries she went to work at Cos in Italy, Giusto Occhipinti being an early player in well-farmed grapes & natural wine (his niece has also started her own winery). They were the ones that pushed her to start her own thing in California. And she did after a stay in a biodynamic winery in New Zealand, this was 2014, working with 3 friends on a cooperative mode (Living Wines Collective), then she started her independant winery in 2016. At the beginning she also worked on the side as assistant winemaker at Broc Cellars from 2014 to march 2017, Chris Brockway being very supportive all the time for her project. She now works from dryfarmed vineyards, most being trained on sticks the old way (pic on left) without trellising system.

Ceritas (California)

Phoebe Bass & John Raytek

Healdsburg, California
Ceritas is a Sonoma winery that is around since 2005, it is managed by John Raytek and his wife Phoebe Bass, both make wine in their facility in Healdsburg from contracted grapes, all in carefully selected terroirs and from growers who farm organic and without irrigation. Started small scale, the winery now makes 48 000 bottles and with its uncompromising no-intervention winemaking from dryfarmed organic parcels won a prominent place among the most sought-after new generation wines in the best restaurants of the country (at least the ones with the most demanding wine list).

John came from the sommelier scene and walked the line to the winemaking world, becoming at one point assistant winemaker at Copain and consultant from many wineries while Phoebe his wife comes from the farming side of the trade, her training is very interesting, like China Tresemer of Hiyu Wine Farm, she spent her youth in a biodynamic farm near Guerneville, 18 miles by road west of Healdsburg with woods all around, at Porter-Bass to be precise. Her parents who were from the East Coast had purchased this farm with a century-old vineyard in the early 1980s' and revived it with their organic, then biodynamic farming, growing three grape varieties including what is considered one of the best Chardonnays in California in this cool climate area between Healdsburg and the ocean. Phoebe and John are also close friends with the same-minded people at Arnot-Roberts, doing outdoors with their families.

Hiyu Wine Farm (Oregon)

China Tresemer & Nate Ready

Hood River, Oregon
Nate and China started Hiyu Wine Farm after buying a property, Pheasant Valley Winery near Hood River east of Portland and south of the Columbia river. There was a small vineyard surface in the estate and they expanded it later, replanting parcels on the slope. They now manage a whole and living farm complete with, in addition to vineyards, all kind of vegetables, hens, pigs, ducks and cows (I probably forget a few of them). Here is another living farm making real wines.

The name of this small estate comes from the indigenous Chinook tribe and means big party or abundance. And abundance there is, in this wine farm, beginning with the number of varieties Nate works with, about 80 of them according to Nate, often complanted and grafted on other varieties (most unrooted), Nate Ready is speaking with excitement about all those different varieties, some of them we French hardly recognize the name of, especially when he lists them quickly one after the other... Speaking of the cuvées made from all these grapes Nate and China are making about 30 of them right now and quietly head in the future to 50, from a total surface of 40 acres (16 hectares) including the 14 acres (6 hectares) of the estate vineyard, that's lots of different wines, most being complex blends, as Nate Ready is one of the rare growers and winemakers to reinvent the grape diversity of viticulture (and winemaking) like it was commonly found in Europe a few centuries ago, before wine became trendy.