Category Archives: Wine

Australia, Wine

Frogs in the Wine Vat

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The one and only Magnetic Island

I don’t like frogs. In fact, I’m petrified of them. Strange that I should chosen to live in a country like France. But apart from the actual people, they don’t have frogs here. Not noticeable ones anyway. Not those great big slimy green ones they have under the toilet seats in Townsville. It took me years to stop lifting the lid to check for bad surprises after I left Australia. A few years ago, I was up in the North with Black Cat staying on my very favourite coral island when I discovered a frog in the toilet in the middle of the night. Well, that was the end of that night’s sleep. I had to steal out in the garden to answer the call of nature and then had to lock myself in the bedroom until morning soI could get a neighbour to come and get rid of it. Black Cat was of no help of course. She goes into hysterics if she sees a spider. When I came home late at night as a teenager, I’d have to wake up my father to come and shoo the frogs and cane toads off the steps so I could get in. He tried teaching me to stamp my feet to frighten them but it didn’t always work. And those cane toads are even worse.

Hunter Valley Vineyards

Now what has this got to do with wine vats, you may ask. Well, on the same trip, after Relationnel had joined me (I treated myself to a whole six weeks in Australia during Black Cat’s exchange year), we visited the Hunter Valley. Friends living there, who also have their own vines, took us along to the Capercaillie Vineyards where they had tracked down a French-speaking winemaker from the New Hebrides. Relationnel, whose English is not exactly fluent, was delighted and so was I as it gave me a rest from have to interpret all the time. Our young winemaker obviously loved to have an audience and regaled us with a wealth of harveting tales. According to him, he opened the vat one day to find a pair of eyes glinting back at him. A frog had been thrown in with the grapes.

Every time I drank that wine, I tried not to think of the frogs.

Capercaillie Vineyards, Hunter Valley

http://www.capercailliewine.com.au/
France, Wine

Le Nez du Vin

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One of my greatest frustrations during our 4-part introduction to wine-tasting many years ago was my inability to identify all the “noses” that the other participants seemed to have constantly … on the tip of their tongues. “Blackberry, most definitely”, they’d say, or “bilberry – reminds me of my grandmother’s tarts”, “morello cherry – just like home-made cherry brandy”, “wild violets – you can smell the undergrowth”, “hawthorn – shades of country lanes”. “Mmmm …”, I’d say, trying desperately to memorise the elusive scent.

Although I’ve now been living in France for over 30 years, my childhood in the Australian tropics did not prepare me in any way for the subtleties of berries and flowers from temperate climes. The next spring, during our long country walks, Relationnel would invite me to smell the blossoms along the way: hawthorn, wild cherry and apple blossoms. I gradually began to enrich my olfactory memory and was delighted when I, too, could identify what the French usually lump together as “fleurs blanches” or “white flowers”. When the summer came, I seized every opportunity to smell all the different berries available on the market. But having to wait until the season came around again made the learning process a little slow.

During the wine-tasting classes, our instructors used to pass around tiny numbered phials of “noses”, part of a collection of 54 different concentrated aromas called “Le Nez du Vin” with an explanatory card for each “nose”. Since the full collection was rather expensive, we started with a smaller set of the 12 most common aromas found in bordeaux wines: strawberry, raspberry, black currant, blackberry, cherry, violet, green pepper, truffle, liquorice, vanilla, pepper and smoke (!).

It didn’t take long for us to learn them off by heart and it became our best party trick. One day, we tried them out on my daughter’s friend who was born and bred in the country and I was most reassured to see that she had even more trouble than me putting a name to what she could smell.

Of course, when we started tasting white wines, I came into my own: citrus fruits, pineapple, banana and lychee were far more familiar to me than wild berries of course. I’ve become quite an expert at picking up the “banana” aroma intentionally cultivated in “beaujolais nouveau”. Contrary to popular belief, most French people probably know less about wine today than Australians do. When beaujolais nouveau hits the cafés and restaurants on the third Thursday of November the question is always “does it smell of banana or strawberry this year?” Since people expect one or the other and love being able to get it right, the winemakers often adapt the wine-making process to produce isomyle acetate which is the molecule that gives a banana its characteristic smell.

Then one November, at the wine producers’ fair at Porte de Versailles in Paris, we didn’t like any of the wine we tasted so decided to splurge and buy the whole set of “noses”. The box is divided into citrus fruit, exotic fruit, seeded fruit, red berries, black berries, pitted fruit, nuts, floral aromas, vegetables, mushrooms, wood, herbs, spices, animal aromas and roasted aromas. Of course, the concentrated phials are only a reminder of the real thing, and what you can smell in the wine is something else again. Fifty-four aromas, however, are taking much longer to get our noses around!

But I can now identify most of the berries and flowers with a reasonable success rate, often confirmed by the experts at our regular wine tastings. And I can tell you, having the whole set is a much better party trick!

Le Nez du Vin: http://www.lenez.com/en/index.htm

Paris, Wine

What I Bought at the Wine Fair in Paris

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Nearly forgot to go to the Independant Wine Growers Fair at Porte de Versailles this weekend and pick up some more Sancerre for our oysters on Sunday before we ran out which would have been a disaster! Most of the wine in our cellar was originally bought directly from the vineyard when we used to go on one-week wine-tasting holidays around France. We finally filled up the cellar and turned to cycling holidays instead with an occasional tasting of course. Now we just top up at Versailles in November and Mailly-en-Champagne during the Whitsunday weekend.

The Porte de Versailles fair is always very crowded so it’s best  to choose a weekday or morning. This time we got there about 11.30 on Sunday. We had sorted out our many free invitations beforehand so were able to make a beeline for the stands on our list. Each invitation entitles you to two standard INAO wine tasting glasses. As you can imagine we’ve collected a fair number over the years – great for parties. The Versailles ones are pretty mundane but those from Mailly-en-Champagne are much more original. Then you use this neat little gadget to hang them around your neck (2 euros for one, 3 euros for two) to keep your hands free. They usually last for a couple of years but they eventually break.

Our first stop was François Cherrier from Domaine de la Rossignol, a family-owned vineyard on the eastern end of the Loire Valley, founded in 1858 and steeped in tradition where they still hand pick their grapes. This year’s sancerre (sauvignon) has a completely different nose from last year’s – a very distinct pineapple. It’s a very « mineral » wine due to the nature of the soil with a powerful bouquet. When we first visited the vineyard about ten years ago, Mr Cherrier shared his passion for wine-growing and showed us samples of the different types of soil and rocks that make all the difference to the way the wine smells and tastes. We have a preference for his AOC sancerre at 8.90 euros a bottle.

Just next door was our favourite margaux – Château Haut Breton – which we discovered on our very first « wine week » back in 1999 in the Bordeaux area. That day, we tasted « merlot », « cabernet sauvignon »  and « cabernet franc » straight from the vat for the first time. Not very palatable, but a wonderful learning experience. Their 1996 margaux was superb. The last time we bought their wine was in 2005 – we’ve been disappointed ever since. This year, however, we tasted their 2009 and were delighted. It has its wonderful prune nose, full body and good persistence again. I see it won a Silver Medal at the fair this year. Excellent value at 28 euros a bottle. We’ll be able to dip into our 2004 and 2005 stock now knowing  we’ll have something to replace it in a few years’ time. What better accompaniment to a côte de boeuf roasted on an open fire enhanced with a copious serving of freshly-picked wild mushrooms?

Next on the list was Domaine Cauhapé from the south-west of France, in Béarn near the Pyrenees which makes an excellent jurançon. The grapes are mainly gros menseng, petit menseng and camaralet with a bit of lauret and corbu thrown in for good measure. We decided to take a mixed carton of Geyser 2010 with its powerful palate, at 13.50, Sève d’Autonne 2008 with its exuberant nose, at 14.50 and La Canopée, fresh and aromatic, at 22.50. Excellent with fish and seafood and even veal cutlets. I was amused when the wine grower, Mr Ramonteu said, with his strong Béarn accent, « You can drink this wine when you don’t have anything else! » I don’t suppose that’s what he really meant. We initially discovered Domaine Cauhapé at a food and wine tasting in Paris and were able to visit their vineyard when holidaying in the area last spring.

The trolley was starting to fill up by then and even though we’d been spitting out the wine, the alcoholic fumes were starting to take their toll so we bought a foie gras sandwich (what else?) before tasting another red, this time a vacqueyras (grenache, chiraz, cinsault and mourvèdre), oaked for about 12 months, from Domaine Le Pont du Rieu in the Vaucluse in the south-east of France along the Rhone Rivier. An excellent accompaniment to barbecued pork loin chops and spare ribs. We took the 2009 which despite its bargain price (8 euros) is well-structured with concentrated aromas. We’ve just finished off our last bottle of 2003 so it was time to restock. It will be perfect in 3 or 4 years time.

Last stop, Domaine Jacques Rouzé, whose quincy we find very pleasant. This is another sauvignon, from an area close to sancerre, with mainly silica soils. Jacques Rouzé is an advocate of sustainable and integrated vine growing methods and his wine reflects that choice. We took his 2010 Tradition at 7 euros to have with fish or as an aperitif. Watch out for quincy on restaurant menus. It’s not as well-known as sancerre but just as aromatic and definitely worth trying.

 

 

Domaine de la Rossignole, rue de la Croix Michaud, 18300 Verdigny, Tel 02 48 79 34 93 cherrier@easynet.fr 
 
Château Haut Breton Larigaudière, 3 rue des Anciens Combattants 33460 Soussans/Margaux Tel 05 57 88 94 17  contact@de-mour.com  www.de-mour.com 
 
Domaine CAUHAPE, 64360 Monein Tel +33 (0)5 59 21 33 02 Open house 2nd Sunday in December  contact@cauhape.com http://www.jurancon-cauhape.com/en/
 
Le Pont du Rieu, route de Montmirail, 84190 Vacqueyras faraud@le-pont-du-rieu.com  www.le-pont-du-rieu.com
 
Domain Jacques Rouzé, 18120 Quincy. Tel +33 248 513 561 rouze@terre-net.frhttp://www.jacques-rouze.com/english/swf/index.htm
 
Wine

Beaujolais Nouveau

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There are a lot of detractors of beaujolais nouveau, mainly because it’s not particularly good wine. After all, it is the first wine of the new harvest. They use this special process called carbonic maceration or whole berry fermentation so they can keep the fruity quality of the wine without extracting the bitter tanins from the grape skins. That means maximum colour and aroma without the usual atringency of red wine. You serve it slightly chilled, around 13°C (55° F).

It was the victim of its success for a long time and the wine growers started adding all sorts of chemicals to achieve the characteristic “banana” flavour. In the last few years however, there has been a distinct move to produce a better wine so it’s gradually gaining a better reputation. “Beaujolais nouveau” is celebrated on third Thursday in November. At lunchtime and after work, people go swarming into the local bars and brasseries to compare the different producers and decide whether or not it really does taste of banana! They often have a special “Beaujolais nouveau” menu on the blackboard outside as well, mainly cold cuts and traditional dishes such as boeuf bourguignon and pot au feu.

Some people even start at midnight Wednesday when it can be legally sold. When we lived near the Marne we used to go to the “Le Bel Air” in Le Perreux, which has a wooden terrace jutting out over the river (they heat it in winter!) but once we moved to Paris, we looked for something local. We discovered the area around the Saint Honoré Market, literally black with people, mostly with their own bottles of beaujolais and saucisson sandwiches. Then they brought in a law to say you couldn’t drink alcohol in the street and the beaujolais tradition took a steep plunge.

Biggest bottle of beaujolais in 2011!

Last year, Townsvillean and Annabelle Rouge were in Paris so we wanted to take them to one of our favourites on Rue des Petits Champs where they also had a brass band with a huge tuba. But it turned out there was nothing on so we went to a local brasserie instead – Le Musset – where they were serving platters of cold cuts and tried a couple of different types of beaujolais nouveau. We stayed on for dinner and Townsvillean had pot au feu which he is still reminiscing over.

I can remember being in Normandy once on 17th November and the local cheese cum wine shop offered us a tasting of beaujolais nouveau. We were delighted and tried out three different ones. When the shop keeper asked a regular if he wanted to taste as well, he turned up his nose and said, “I only drink bordeaux” (like a lot of people who know nothing about wine). I answered, “Ah but you have to drink beaujolais for the fun of it!” To my astonishment, he then picked up a bottle of Georges Le Boeuf, the most well-known and certainly not the best beaujolais nouveau, and added it to his bill. I guess he wanted some fun!!!

And there’s even an app for my iPhone this year to tell me where all the excitement’s happening!

Le Musset, 5 rue de l’Echelle, 75001 Paris
Food, Wine

French Oysters on Sunday

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They have a lot of rules about food in France.  One of the most intriguing is that you can only eat oysters during months with the letter “r”.  So that rules out “mai”, “juin”, “juillet” and “août” (note that circumflex indicating a lost “s” again – remember in Blèsoise? The word for oyster, “huîtres” also once had an “s”).  Now that just happens to coincide with summer when the cold chain is easily interrupted and you’re more likely to find oysters that haven’t survived the journey from the coast. Today, with modern refrigeration, there’s absolutely no reason not to eat them but you’ll find they disappear entirely from most fish mongers, markets and restaurants in Paris!

So we eat oysters every Sunday except during months with the letter “r”!

I had two contacts with oysters when I was growing up in Townsville. Mum used to buy them in bottles which I found very unappetizing and we used to scrape them off the rocks on Magnetic Island (or “the Island” as we called our little paradise) during the summer. Already a step in the right direction, although they were pretty salty. So nothing prepared me for oysters in France.

First, they are always alive, whether you buy them on the market or eat them in a restaurant.  That’s not necessarily true in Australia where I’ve eaten them dead in their shells on a bed of ice. Not exactly to my taste. Now, if you don’t like oysters, you should stop here as some people are a bit squeamish about the details. To check that an oyster is alive (you have to shuck it first), you take a sharp knife and tease the outer edge. You can use a squeeze of lemon too. If it retracts a lot, it’s probably lost a lot of water already and is getting old. If it doesn’t retract, it’s dead and you should throw it out.

Our favourites are the ones they call “spéciale”. They’re fattened in small numbers in deep oyster parks and have a sort of sweet salty lingering taste they call « noisette » (hazelnut) in French. The most exclusive is the “gillardeau” which is cultivated for four years and is grossly overpriced but there are plently of others from the Cotentin area of Normandy. We like the « spéciales » from Blainville that we buy from the oyster vendor at the bottom end of the Sainte Eustache market on a Sunday. For a little extra, you can have them shucked.

Oysters in France are numbered from 3 to 1, with 3 being the smallest, and the ones from Normandy are usually sold by weight.  The “spéciales” have this nice little pinkish plump bit while the regular “fines de claires”, so-called because they are fattened  in oyster beds called “claires”, have a greenish tint to them and are much saltier or “iodé” (full of iodine) as they say here. I’ve never been able to get anyone to really explain the difference between “iodé” and “salty”.

We had a disappointing experience in Australia with fresh oysters. We were at Tea Gardens on the northern coast of New South Wales and were told, to our great surprise, that we couldn’t buy live oysters ourselves and had to have them opened by a licensed oyster seller. We were directed to “The Oyster Hut” where we were able to buy some local oysters which we ate at a picnic table with a nice cold bottle of sauvignon. We didn’t have glasses but the girl in the bottle shop found us some long-stemmed plastic ones.  The oysters were disappointing though. Not very tasty and not particularly fresh. It was only 10.30 in the morning, I have to confess.

On Sundays, we eat a dozen “spéciales” each, with bread and butter, home made for me (the bread, I mean!) and baguette traditionnelle for Relationnel (see Beret and Baguette) and drink Sancerre, which is a delicious sauvignon from the east end of the Loire. Our favourites, both bought directly at the vineyards, are Domaine de la Rossignole and Paul Prieur.

On ne s’emmerde pas, as they say.

Patrick Liron oysters: 
17 rue des Petits Carreaux, Paris 2nd arrondissement, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 10 am to 10 pm
28 rue des Archives, Paris 4ème arrondissement, Saturday 9 am to 10 pm
54 rue Cler, Paris 7th arrondissement, Friday, Saturday, 9 am to 9 pm, Sunday, 9 am to 2 pm
65 rue de la Motte Picquet, 15th arrondissement, Friday 4.30 pm to 9 pm, Saturday 10 am to 9 pm, Sunday 9 am to 2 pm
Domaine de la Rossignole, rue de la Croix Michaud Chaudoux, 18300 Verdigny en Sancerre, 02 48 79 34 93, cherrier@easynet.fr
Paul Prieur et Fils, Route des Monts Damnés,18300  Verdigny, 02 48 79 35 86, paulprieurfils@wanadoo.fr 
Thalassa distribution: street markets 9 am to 1.30 pm
Sainte Eustache, rue Montmartre, Paris 1st arrondissement, Metro Les Halles, Sunday
Villette, Boulevard de la Villette, Paris 10th arrondissement, Metro Belleville, Wednesday and Saturday
Bastille, Boulevard Richard Lenoir, 11th arrondissement, Metro Bastille, Thursday and Sunday
Vincent Auriol, Boulevard Vincent Auriol, 13th arrondissement, Metro Nationnale, Saturday 
Maisons Blanches, (75013) Avenue D’Italie, 13th arrondissement, Metro Tolbiac, Sunday
Mouton Duvernet, Rue Mouton Duvernet, 14th arrondissement, Metro Mouton Duvernet, Friday
Villemain,  Rue D’Alésia, 14th arrondissement, Metro Plaisance, Sunday
Saint Charles, Rue St Charles, 15th arrondissement, Metro Boucicaut, Friday
Belgrand, Rue de la Chine, 20th arrondissement, Metro Gambetta, Wednesday and Saturday
 
Food, Wine

Alsatian vin nouveau

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It’s vin nouveau time in Alsace, the white wine lovers’ mecca. We first tried it a few years ago. We were in Colmar and went into a bakery recommended in our guide book for its antique oven. They had a sign up for pain de vendange (grape-harvest bread) so we bought some of course. It turned out to be made of unbleached flour, walnuts, bacon pieces and raisins. Not bad. The lady in the bakery said we should have it with vin nouveau, the first wine of the season.

She sent us to a winery about ten minutes’ walk away – practically in the town centre! We followed the vigneronne into the cellar which was full of these huge oblong-shaped oak barrels called foudres. She turned on the tap and poured us a couple of small glasses. It was slightly sparkling, a little opaque, the colour of pale apple juice and slightly sweet. We were surprised to see her put the wine straight from the barrel into one of those large bottles you get mineral water in. She then pierced a hole in the lid so the gas could seep out because it was still fermenting. The price was an astonishing two euros a bottle.

We learnt later that you need a special licence to sell it and very few of the wineries bother. It’s always made from the pinot blanc grape, which is the first of the 8 Alsatian grape varieties to be ready for harvest.

Alsatian wine glasses

We took it home to drink with our pain de vendange in our new long-stemmed, green Alsatian wine glasses, sitting in front of the open-fire in our little Alsatian chalet. Jealous? We didn’t have too much wine though because it seems that large doses usually play havoc with your insides.

The wine and bread soon ran out of course so we had to replenish our stocks. We came across this deserted-looking winery on one side of the village square in Molsheim. There weren’t any signs saying vin nouveau but a man in overalls eventually appeared, looking a little worse for wear. He took our plastic bottle with a grunt and disappeared. This time we only paid €1.50 and there were no holes in the top. It seemed much thicker than the first time and we wondered whether it was the real thing. We couldn’t find any more pain de vendange so we decided to make do with pain de campagne and buy walnuts and raisins to go with it.

When we got home, we put the wine in a jug in the fridge. It was much more opaque than the first lot and sickly sweet. Jean Michel was convinced it was home-made apple-juice and that the man in the overalls was just getting his back on the American tourists because of my accent! So we put it back in the bottle and left it in a crate in the corner of the kitchen to take home to the kids.

A few days later, I went to get some potatoes out of the crate. My god, you should have seen the bottle – it was fat and roly-poly. I started to unscrew the lid very slowly and out came a great whiz of gas. It was now the same pale gold as the vin nouveau from Colmar with the same slightly opaque appearance. We must have been given much “newer” wine the second time. Putting it in the fridge had stopped the fermentation process but putting it back in the bottle in the heated kitchen had got it going again.

I hate to think what could have happened if we’d waited another day. A great explosion in the middle of the night with sticky liquid in every corner of the rented kitchen!

So after that, whenever we bought some wine, we discreetly produced our water bottle and asked if we could have some vin nouveau. One vigneron got us to taste wine from 4 different vats, each harvested a couple of days apart. We thought we were really clever when we managed to rate them from youngest to oldest.

Have you ever tried vin nouveau? Beaujolais nouveau which is a red wine comes out on the third Thursday of November. I’ll give a full report!

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