Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

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.

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.