This is Les Caves de la Vallée du Cher, this professionnal tasting took place on march 26 & 27 in the Cher valley
(Loire) in 5 different cellars (there's one I didn't have
time to visit alas) distant from 2 to 4 kilometers from each other in Faverolles sur Cher and Thésée. More than 50 vignerons took place, from the Loire and beyond. The protocol was very informal even if you're supposed to be in the trade to take part (if you love natural wine I'm sure you'd pass through as well), the entry fee was 5 €, you're given a screen-printed wine glass which will be your pass to access the 4 other sites. Street food could be purchased at each location.
Video above : the site of the cellar of Les Maisons Brûlées.
Malakoff, Paris suburb along the 14th arrondissement
That's it, Raw Wine made its debut in Päris (march 12 & 13) after a long history (2012) of setting up tasting events along the past years in cities like London, Los Angeles, Berlin with the goal to present nature/biodynamic/organic producers to the growing crowd of winelovers focused on artisan wine. Raw Wine was created by Isabelle Legeron, a French expat who has been living in London for many years now, and given the UK culture of interest
for all wine regions across the world, you find this global touch in
the geographical diversity of the participating wineries. At Raw Wine Paris, some 150 wineries and vintners (see list here) were presenting their wines and the interesting thing compared with our usual natural wine fair in Paris is that it was very international oriented with some 15 countries involved, France and Italy holding the lion's share of course. The entry fee was quite high for the general public on sunday with 45 € if I'm right. The pro fee was more in line with what we usually pay (15 €) here (although it's even often free when it takes places in Restaurants). While questions arise if Raw Wine will find its niche in a city (Paris) already overflowing of vibrant natural-wine fairs and events, several outstanding nature vintners like Caleb Leisure of Stagiaire Wines (California) credit Raw Wine for having helped him early in his start (read this piece by Aaron Ayscough on Raw Wine Paris).
The nice thing also is that the event took place in a place with character, Espace Clacquesin, a 2000-square-meter ancient distillery reconverted into an event space for rent, for private or corporate use. It's in a suburb (very safe one, needs to be said nowadays) very close from Paris, you could almost go there by foot from the 14th arrondissement. They kept the 19th-century red brick chimney, and the cobblestone courtyard lovely ! And like it used to be in these late 19th-century industrial buildings, there's the administration/office building near the gate, nicely built in red bricks too... I Hope they'll keep this place for the following issues.
Overview of two of the tasting rooms (there were three)
Paris, 20th arrondissement
There are always some tastings restarting at that time of the year, generally on mondays like here for professional events, I was tipped about this one otherwise I'd have missed it, this was the second edition of
it, Le Paris des Sens being a Paris-based distributor of artisan,
biodynamic and natural
wines who set up now every year a tasting with their winegrowers so that their buyers can get a feel of the available (or soon-to-be) cuvées (their IG page here). There were a large number of vignerons (see the names below) in this tasting on january 16, many working on a small vineyard surface.
The other nice thing here was the location for the tasting : Caché (means hidden in French) is a restaurant which is indeed hidden in a remote corner of the 20th arrondissement, along a dead-end cobblestone street (Villa Riberolle, villa being another French word for impasse or dead-end street) lined with former workshops next to the Père Lachaise cemetery (but there's no entrance to the cemetary on this side). so unsuspecting visitors can't stumble upon this place by chance). Caché restaurant was founded by two Italians (Lorenza Lenzi and Gianpaolo Polverino) focused on delicate cuisine including seafood. Part of the tasting also took place at Amagat next door, a restaurant sharing the same philosophy but with Spanish (Catalogna) roots.
Pic on left : entering villa Riberolle from the rue de Bagnolet. The restaurant is toward the end on the left. The trees in the far are the Père Lachaise beyond a wall.
Paris, 12th arrondissement,
This was another beautiful edition of La Goulayance, and it took place again in the premises of Ground Countrol, this vibrant venue set in a former railway locomotive workshop, I can't but encourage you to visit the place, have a drink, read books, play games, whatever this place offers which is pretty diverse, and families are welcome. Entry fee was 10 €, you were given a glass which you could keep after tasting the exciting natural wines of many vintners, who were present of course to chat with visitors and buyers. You could buy cases of wines or individual bottles on the site, that was also the good thing, direct from the producers. The vintn,ers took also time to walk around and taste their colleagues/friends' wines of course and I'm sure that's also what brought many of them here. I didn't taste many of them alas, having to ride my bike back to the Aube in the afternoon, possibly before dark (and the tasting on both days was starting at 12, not the usual 10, that's the low point).
This is autumn and we're in the middle of troubled times with rising prices including for everything related to food, but there's still room for indulging in tasty meat dishes like the one I'm going to tell you about. Energy is also getting a subject we're getting told to worry, and good cooking often often needs to be long. You know I've been a longtime fan of everything off-the-grid and these days are the good time to experiment in this direction if you're still on the mainstream consumer side : all you need is a good old stove upon which you can sit a pan or a pot.
Cher valley, Loire
I managed to get in time in my Loire hideout just in time for the last days of harvest and toured a few producers, some by myself and some with Lexie Jordan who was at the time picking with Julien Prevel. Lexie is living in Paris mostly and she imports wine for her San Francisco-based company Funk De Funk (actually in Mill Valley, Marin county). Several producers had in fact already just finished picking, some still had a couple parcels yet to be picked, for which they were waiting for a bit more maturity. This story will be most a picture story, first because I/we visited unannounced (in some instances there was no body near the chai/cellar and we'd just move and try our luck elsewhere) and our hosts were busy or enjoying quietness at last after several weeks of stress, and also because the end of harvest is just, like, relax, take your time and pause...
This took place around the 3rd week of september, I know, this is late to post that (even with backdating it) but I keep being busy these days.
Gyöngyöspata, Mátra (Hungary)
This was really a quick visit here, we're here at Hoop Wines which is run by two childhood friends, Zoltán Németi and Zoltán Kerekes who make wine from a small overall surface 1,5 hectare, plus from the equivalent of 0,5 hectare of purchased grapes, for a total yearly production of 5 to 6000 bottles. We're here in a family house in the village that was refurbished as a small winery facility by Zoltán Kerekes who had himself a 10-year experience working in a local winery. Zoltán Németi is himself an IT specialist in Budapest and spends his weekends here for this venture.
This small facility has all the hygiene requirements needed for a safe winemaking, mostly there's the main room which we could call the chai (they press inside), and a barrel room on the side which does the job of a cellar. Asked if they got European funding for these investments, they say no, the conditions for these subsidies are difficult to gather and unfortunately they are designed mostly for big wineries, so they funded this by themselves. They're happy to have this facility which is now easy to clean and keep clean, something essential for thoughtful winemaking. Their first commercial vintage was in 2019 (before it was more like experimental and for themselves and friends).
Gyöngyöspata, Mátra (Hungary) Here we are again in the village of Gyöngyöspata in the Mátra wine region, and it was a short stroll from one cellar street to another and we reached this haven of
quietness where Mátyás Páger, his wife Judit and
his brother's family were finishing their picnic outside one of his cellars (this is the one where he readies and labels his bottles). I had met Mátyás a couple months ago in Budapest at Vinopiano, an excellent wine bar with rebel wines. His day job is working in real estate in the big city but his passion is to make wine here in Matra from a small surface mostly located in the prized terroir of Gereg. His farming is fully organic and in the cellar he doesn't use additives, doesn't filter his reds and uses minimum so2 if any.
Mátyás Páger's yearly production is around 6000 bottles, mostly Kékfrankos (Blaufränkisch) but also Grüner Veltliner, Pinot Gris, Rajnai rizling (Rhein Riesling). Mátyás also uses this tunnel cellar (which has the typical size of old artisan facilities in this country) to age the wine in bottle before shipping. Even for his small production it's a pretty small storage place (happily, part of the bottles were already shipped and we could walk through the place) and he'll use an additional cellar nearby to complement room. the cellar front shack seems to be standing alone on this picture on left but in fact this cellar street overgrown with trees and greenery is also lined with cellars (some like this one having a small building in front, some not), most of these cellars being unused by villagers.
Szűcsi, Mátra (Hungary)
We're here in a village named Szűcsi (pronounce sweetchie or something like that) which sits along a gentle slope surrounded by vineyards (see the pic on the left, best viewpoint on the village for Balázs who stops there when he has something to do in his
parcels). The village is located probably
much less than 3 kilometers as the crow flies from Gyöngyöspata and that's where Balázs Palya (who has a day job as electrical engineer) and his girlfriend Julianna (or Julcsi) Mészáros (who works in the logistics sector) started a small wine farm in 2019 with little grapes to work with, part from their garden, part given to them by Julianna's family. This is a passion thing for them and their prime intent when they started this was to remain sustainable both in the vineyard and the cellar, just let the wine express itself by its own. They do everything by hand they have no machine whatsoever in the cellar, no pump and they don't add anything in the wine, not even sulfites, and no fining, no filtration. Balázs understands that to make wine, 70 % of the job is in the vineyard and 30 % in the cellar, and if you have a great soil, you'll get a great vine which will yield great grapes, and almost without doing anything after that the wine should be great.
Their production is about only 1500 or 2000 bottles a year from 1,2 hectare of productive grapes, so it's really a very artisanal thing powered by passion and not a business mindset. The yield is like one or 1,5 kilogram of grapes per vine maximum. The vines are 20 years old on average, let aside the older parcel which is 50. For example the Chardonnay was planted in 2002 and the Kékfrankos was planted the year he was born, in 1997.
Gyöngyöspata, Mátra (Hungary)
The wine region of Mátra sits on the Mátra hills which, on the way from Budapest when you drive north east to Eger and Tokaj and it grows a majority of white varieties. Mátra is sitting on volcanic slopes as many of these hills were volcanoes I guess (see pic on left, sorry for the pylons in the foreground), and while the wine region keeps a low profile on the international scene (compared to Tokaj and Eger)
I was myself suprised to learn that it is the 2nd largest among the 22 wine regions of Hungary (#19 patch on the linked map). The deep history roots of this region shows up in the many cellars found in every village there, it's pretty easy to spot them because in Hungary cellars are often built just outside the villages and away from the farms (closer to the parcels I guess), with a tiny house sitting in front of the opening, this house being used a a chai, to store cellar tools & basket press, and of course gather with friends and family and drink wine....
Like I've seen in the Loire for example, there's a new generation of winemakers in Mátra bringing in their will to make wine for the love of wine and on small surfaces, they're often outsiders as opposed with the mainstream established who try to keep making commercial wine that kind of lost its connection to truth and terroir. People like András Kovács and his wife Kinga Tóth bring indeed a new life in here beginning with demanding requirements in the vineyard management that like elsewhere you don't often find on commercial wineries. András works in IT in Budapest (he's been also one of the wine writers at A Borrajongó, a rich resource on wine including of course Hungarian wine) and Kinga in urban engineering and they spend many weekends here in Mátra.
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