the angevin clan, pt. 3: bertin-delatte / l'echalier, rablay-sur-layon

In writing about the generation of young Anjou vignerons I've come to call the Angevin Clan, my chronology has inadvertently worked against central figures Nicolas Bertin and Geneviève Delatte of Domaine Bertin-Delatte.  They're the last of the clan to be discussed, when in fact it was Delatte who introduced my friends and me to Cédric Garreau, and it was at Bertin and Delatte's unfinished house that we all gathered for lunch after tasting with Garreau and Kenji and Mai Hodgson.

Having founded their 3ha estate in 2008, Bertin and Delatte have a few years more experience than the other vignerons at the lunch table that day. But Bertin only gave up his part-time job tending vines for nearby estate Domaine Pierre Chauvin the week before we visited. (Cedric Garreau, for his part, still does vineyard work for other estates to make ends meet.) Bertin may have encapsulated the challenges facing a young vigneron in the Coteaux de Layon when we asked him whether he'd ever tried his hand at making the region's eponymous sweet wine: No, he said, because he doesn't like drinking it, it's hard to make, and it's hard to sell.

Bertin and Delatte make just one wine in any appreciable quantity: L'Echalier, a mostly young-vine dry Chenin that, I was to realise over lunch that day, I had always been drinking too young. Can I be blamed ? It's what one usually does with young-vine Chenin in that price point. How was I to know, before meeting and tasting with the winemakers, that "L'Echalier" positively blooms in the bottle after two years?

the angevin clan, pt. 1: mai and kenji hodgson / vins hodgson, rablay-sur-layon

From L: Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau, M, Mai Sato, Nicolas Bertin, J. Taken in Bertin's vineyards.

After departing from La Dive Bouteille this past January, my friends J, M, and I went to visit a few newly-installed Angevin vignerons. We'd planned to make separate appointments with three domaines - Mai & Kenji Hodgson, Cedric Garreau / Gar'O'Vin, and Bertin-Delatte - but upon learning that their proprietors are all good friends and collaborators, it was decided we'd all taste together at each cellar and then have lunch. 

For J, M, and I, tasting at the three domaines that morning was revelatory. It might have just been an on-palate day.* But after just about every taste, we were having "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" moments, looking at each other, like Cortez's sailors, "with a wild surmise." 

All of these vignerons are onto something. All are members of a collective of organic Angevin vignerons who organise tastings together, loan each other equipment, and generally support one another in the daunting task of making and selling quality wine from Anjou, a famously schizophrenic region, nigh-on uncategorizeable, home to everything from industrial Cab Franc rosé to ageless Quarts de Chaume. The collective officially call themselves "The En Joue Connection," which has facetious gangster-ish implications that I will relegate to a footnote.* I can't speak for the entire collective, because I haven't tasted all the wines. But with regards to Bertin-Delatte, Vins Hodgson, and Gar'O'Vins, I thought it might be more helpful to think of what they're presently achieving in Anjou in terms of some other poets, namely the Wu-Tang Clan.  

for those who failed to reserve: les deux maisons, saumur

It's axiomatic that French wine towns contain great bistros. Less of a given, though, is how many great bistros. It often happens that a wine town receives major tourist traffic only at sporadic moments throughout the calendar, with the result that the local economy sustains just one great bistro, and that is precisely where every traveling importer, sommelier, caviste, etc. wants to be at those sporadic moments.

This is how our friend J2 managed to sort of shanghai us in Saumur* this past January during the period of Too Many Wine Fairs (La Dive Bouteille, La Renaissance des Appellations, Le Salon Les Pénitants, to name just the three I attended this year). He had assured the whole gang that, like the year before, he would call weeks in advance to reserve an enormous table at Bistrot de La Place. Then it must have slipped his mind.

So we wound up at what I imagine must fast be becoming a semi-renowned consolation restaurant for traveling wine geeks: Les Deux Maisons, a cartoonishly ugly place in the corporate-provincial style, inauspiciously situated in the parking lot of an E. Leclerc supermarket - in sum, a restaurant where one would certainly never dare to set foot, were one not aware beforehand that since 2005 its been owned by Daniel Haudebault, proprietor of Bistrot de la Place.

the forces of seitan: soya cantine bio, 75011

I like vegetarians fine. But I tend to avoid vegetarian restaurants,* because their common founding precept - that eating meat is unethical or unhealthy or unnatural - runs counter to my own reverence for preindustrial gastronomic and viticultural traditions. Every great western cuisine has contained meat since time immemorial, and most eastern cuisines as well. So part of me is inclined to believe that the late-20th-century rise in vegetarianism in the west is largely a result of a kind of anthropomorphic thinking that is itself only made possible by the modern industry of meat production, which ensures that consumers are never obliged to actually handle animals, except as pets. We now have the luxury of finding it abhorrent, rather than normal for millennia, to kill things for food.

That is the long version of my argument. The short version is: the wine lists a vegetarian restaurants invariably suck, and the food is usually a cultural mishmash of doctored dishes and pathetic meat substitutes. It's like vegetarian restauranteurs, having pre-identified their not-so-gastronomically-demanding market segment,** feel no need whatsoever to impress anyone else.

Let me now get around to saying that Soya Cantine Bio in the 11ème totally won me over, despite all the above skepticism. It would be a rarity in San Francisco or New York, even; in Paris it is downright astonishing: a vegetarian restaurant with an excellent, well-considered natural wine list.