loire salons 2015: la renaissance des appellations, les penitantes, la dive bouteille, demeter france

I found myself with a late afternoon to kill in Angers on the Friday before this years' tasting salons. With the aim of avoiding drinking at all costs, I nursed a café crème on the terrace of a no-name bar beside a parking lot, where I soon ran into Beaujolais vignerons Karim Vionnet and Jean-Claude Lapalu.

They were toting several magnums between them, headed elsewhere. I said I'd see them tomorrow at the tasting, whereupon Vionnet reminded me that they were presenting at La Dive Bouteille, which didn't start until Sunday in Saumur. For the winemakers, evidently, as much as for me and most other attendees I know, the weekend was mainly a social occasion.

I'm guilty of complaining about this dynamic from time to time. The truth is, though, that the pageantry and partying of the Loire salons are signs of a vibrant community, and ought to be encouraged as such, or at very least, gracefully tolerated.  Take, for a counter-example, the Demeter France tasting at Angers' Palais de Congrès, where my friends and I tasted the following morning. Most of the winemakers looked embarrassed to be there, like they hadn't even been introduced to one another. It seemed illustrative of the limitations of merely-biodynamic collective marketing, at a time when even the natural wine off-salons, Vin Anonymes and Les Pénitantes, are metastasizing each year. I missed out on Anonymes this year, in favor of arriving earlier at La Dive Bouteille - a somewhat unnecessary precaution, it turned out, since this years' edition was notably better organised, and seemingly less overrun by local daysippers.  After the jump, some scattered takeaways. Slightly more in-depth posts on a few topics to follow in days to come.

loire road trip, pt. IV: la renaissance des appellations, angers

I was remarkably intact the day after Catherine and Pierre Breton's off-the-chain bacchanalia in Bougeuil. Not bushy-tailed, by any means, but relatively steady on my feet, considering how little we had eaten - just fugitive handfuls of pommes frites, tartes flambées, and pork ribs all night - and what lakefuls of random wine we'd consumed. My friends J, C, and I sat through a pleasant pokey breakfast in our chambre d'hôte, attacking the weak coffee and yogurts while the proprietress, apparently unfamiliar with hangover etiquette, regaled us with an unrelenting news-anchor-like monologue concerning minute local regulatory controversies, unusually high rainfall, broken fence-posts, etc.

C, a born chatterer and native French speaker, is a tremendous asset in these scenarios. J and I mostly kept our heads down with ours mouths full and spent time petting the menagerie of cute characterful dogs our loud expository hostess had collected. At some point our gallantry failed us and we just wandered off, leaving C to extricate herself from a lengthy explanation of local flora.

We had a wine tasting to get to. The annual Renaissance des Appellations in Angers is the biodynamics-focused satellite tasting to the bigger and less explicitly bio Salon des Vins de Loire. Unlike La Dive Bouteille, a tasting held in the catacombs beneath the Château de Brézé, to which we were headed the following day, Le Renaissance des Appellations is not a public tasting. With 100+ vignerons packed into the Grenier St. Jean that day, presenting mostly biodynamic wines, there was far too much to taste in one day, let alone write up in one fell swoop. But we started with the tasting's lone Austrian stand, the renowned biodynamic Nikolaihof estate.