a few beaujolais debuts

Tasting new releases with my favorite Beaujolais producers is often kind of embarrassing. After saying hello and getting the usual optimistic, yet gnomic replies about the character of the vintage, I run out of material. With people like Georges Descombes, Jean Foillard, Jean-Claude Chanudet, Matthieu Lapierre, etc., just about every wine is so reliably, resoundingly delicious that it's hard to think of anything interesting to say about them. More bloody wonderful life-quenching Gamay, eh? Shocker.

I adore the wines of Beaujolais more than almost any others. But finding reasons to write about them is damnably rare. At La Dive Bouteille this year there were at least three: an old-vine Morgon from Descombes' son Kevin, an extremely-limited production Chénas by Karim Vionnet, and the promising Morgons of Anthony Thevenet.

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 salons 2014: la dive bouteille, les penitantes, la renaissance des appellations, les vins anonymes

If ever you wish to experience an almost out-of-body sense of superfluousness, visit the January Loire salons and tell the natural winemakers you meet that you are a journalist. Of hundreds of winemakers present, only a vanishingly small percentage are subject to the conditions that would warrant paying you any attention whatsoever, i.e. they use the Internet, have wine to sell, and are aware of the commercial value of positive press. I've illustrated the scarcity of this demographic in a handy bubble graphic after the jump.

I never take it personally. Since at present I have the luxury (or misfortune, depending on when you ask me) of not buying and selling wine for a living, I kind of just moon around the various tastings and do my best to make the sort of fleeting interpersonal connections that become useful at later dates, such as when I'm trying to secure interviews, or volunteer for harvest work, or plan bike trips around tasting appointments. "I'm the guy who stared at you and waved from across the restaurant in Angers! Who said hello with from behind the restaurateur accompanying your Canadian importer!" etc. (These are fictitious examples, but not far from reality.)

I leave it to readers to judge whether this constitutes a useful perspective on the Loire salons. This year I accompanied my friend J to La Renaissance des Appellations, Salon Les Penitantes, Les Vins Anonymes, and La Dive Bouteille. What follows are some scattered takeaways.

n.d.p. in the loire: 2012 - la renaissance des AOCs, la dive bouteille, le salon les pénitantes

While they're fresh in mind, I thought I might as well post some impressions of three natural wine tastings I attended in the Loire the weekend before last. This is to break from my habit of posting things six months after they occur, when everyone has forgotten each others names and it becomes curious to see pictures of friends sporting t-shirts and tans, as though it were still summertime. 

Like last year, I traveled with my friend J and his wife C. This year we were accompanied by our good friend D, another non-wine-professional who, in addition to being a capable photographer and worthy iPad Scrabble opponent, also provided a sunny foil for C's patient boredom during the Renaissance des Appellations (Angers), La Dive Bouteille (Brézé), and, new this year, Le Salon Les Pénitantes (Angers).

My main takeaways: an interview with Catherine Breton (to be published elsewhere), a reaffirmed obsession with Chinon Blanc (another post), and a perceived uptick in the quantity and quality of Jura-style oxidative cuvées, from the likes of Ludovic Bonnelle, Michel Augé, Julien Courtois, and Dominique Derain. 

   

blogger beaujolais: isabelle perraud at the "buvez, bloguez" tasting: l'hedoniste, 75002

Soon after I began this blog, I posted an admiring, slightly eccentric review of a bottle of St. Véran I'd purchased at 11ème caviste Au Nouveau Nez. In researching the bottle's background I discovered that the vigneron who made the wine, Isabelle Perraud of Domaine des Côtes de la Molière, maintained a very engaging blog of her own, about her experiences winemaking in the Mâcon and northern Beaujolais. So it was that in the course of the same day I became online acquaintances with Isabelle, and also her friend / fellow blogger Iris Rutz-Rudel, of Domaine Lisson in the Languedoc.

In my market-minded American naivété, I initially assumed there must be loads of readable French winemaker blogs, since it's a low-cost / high-impact way to build an audience and attract attention to one's product. Later, in the course of my other job, I came to realise that a significant proportion of Parisians over 30 possess no familiarity with computers whatsoever - and this is to say nothing of provincial winemakers in remote regions, or the challenges posed by html and the various blog platforms, which, as this site's layout will attest, I myself have yet to master.*

Also, to blog well requires that one be relatively articulate and expressive to begin with, regardless of the subject matter. That these qualities might be found in a wine is no indicator of whether the wine's maker has anything more to say about its production than, 'C'était dur, mais c'est bon.'

With these points in mind, it was just amusing, and not especially surprising, to see that a recent tasting themed around the wines of vigneron-bloggers at 2ème natural wine bistro l'Hedoniste was slated to include the wines of both Isabelle and Iris. It's still a very small world out there on the world wide web.

la renaissance des aoc's: domaine de l'ecu

Just a petit mot about Domaine de l'Ecu's rocking 2010 Muscadets, which I tasted while waiting in line to taste Nicolas Joly's Savennieres at the Renaissance des Appellations this year. As I mentioned in a previous post, the latter wines were all showing fairly hot and flabby, which let-down made the Domaine de l'Ecu wines shine even brighter, in retrospect. Winemaker Guy Bossard makes what to many drinkers are oxymoronic wines: a range of complex, elegant Muscadets, gem-like in their precision, each named for its soil type:  Gneiss, Granite, and Orthogneiss.

Now, it's not news to me that Muscadet can be profound. I seem to encounter a version meant to knock my socks off at least once every six months: often it's a screaming bargain, by a top producer of Muscadet, with seven to ten years' age on it. As much as I enjoy the experience, this genre of profound Muscadet seems to me to be of chiefly archival interest: somms gather round and nod with surprise and delight that after so many years such simple wines are showing strange inanimate-sweet flavors, none of which are, upon further reflection, very pleasurable. Creamed corn, seaweed, dirty mineral, etc.

What sets the Bossard wines apart is they are not merely good-for-Muscadet. With the exception of the basic "Cuvée Boss'Art," which seems to be a 'what-do-we-do-with-the-leftovers' kind of wine, they all possess a chiseled grace that places them among the most enjoyable whites I tasted at the Renaissance this year.

la renaissance des aoc's: elisabetta foradori's new amphora crus

At the Renaissance des AOCs tasting I was surprised and delighted to meet Elisabetta Foradori, a trailblazing biodynamic winemaker from Trentino, and one of the most prominent ambassadors of Italian wine in general. Some measure of how pleased I was might be found in my willingness to post the above photo, despite the poor lighting, which causes me to look like a drunken koala.

Foradori's reds, made from the rich, raspy, autochthonous Campo Rotaliano grape Teroldego,* are fixtures on just about every great Italian wine list in the states, including the few that I've worked on myself. Partly this is due to how few Teroldego producers there are - it is not grown in any real quantities outside the tiny Teroldego Rotaliano DOC, of which Foradori is by far the dominant figure. But Teroldego the grape, which has been genetically linked to Syrah, always presents a fine opportunity for sommeliers to surprise their guests with a weird unknown wine - Italy! what diversity! - that nevertheless hits many familiar pleasure centers: rich fruit, tannic grip, relatively tame acid, etc. There are built-in narrative selling points, too: how Elisabetta Foradori lost her father to cancer at a young age, and thereupon took charge of her struggling family estate, and through hard work and clever promotion turned a backwards, hard-to-pronounce local grape into one of Italy's most famous and written-about reds.

You could say its almost a fond tradition for Italian restaurants at a certain level to stock Foradori. I admittedly never gave it a lot of thought, because I found her basic Teroldego engaging, but not lifechanging, and her continually Tre-Bicchieri-netting "Granato" more impressive at the expense of typicity - whatever it is that makes Teroldego Teroldego.** The wines made people happy more than they made me happy. At the Renaissance des AOCs this year, however, Foradori was debuting two new cru magnum bottlings of Teroldego, "Sgarzon" and "Morei," both fermented and aged in clay amphorae. I tasted the latter, and to say it floored me would be an understatement. It actually retroactively justified all the hyperbole ever written about the grape, "Granato," the whole operation.

with a little help from derain: julien altaber at la dive bouteille

In any given packed, cavernous, pitch dark wine tasting, it's often difficult to differentiate vignerons whose wines are creating a real buzzworthy stir from those who simply have a ton of friends and admirers. Acclaimed biodynamic Burgundy vignerons Catherine et Dominique Derain certainly fall into the latter camp, probably the former also. I unfortunately missed the opportunity to taste through their current vintages this year at the Renaissance des AOCs in Angers and La Dive Bouteille, because at both tastings there was such a surging throng around their stand that to wait it out for the sake of a few sips of St. Aubin would have meant about forty minutes of waiting shoulder-to-shoulder for pours, during which time I could have tasted, and did instead taste, a bajillion other interesting wines.*

For instance: the surprisingly masterful Bourgogne AOC wines of Julien Altaber, a protogé of the Derains, who after working for them for years has recently begun making his own wines, using their facilities in St. Aubin. When J and I approached, he was standing looking kind of marooned near an entrance to the catacombs, by a barrel upon which stood the three wines he's bottled to date: a 2009 Bourgogne Blanc, and two Bourgogne Rouges, from 2008 and 2007 respectively.

All three were superb, which, of course, accounts for the buzz that had led us to taste his otherwise completely unassuming wines in the first place. (An importer friend from New York had tipped us off.)

loire road trip, pt. VI: la dive bouteille

My friend and traveling companion J had told me serious horror stories about the darkness and freezing temperatures at last year's Dive Bouteille, the sprawling natural-focused public wine tasting that, for the second year in a row, was held in the catacombs below the Château de Brézé in Saumur. The wines were overchilled, you couldn't see, winemakers turned into ice sculptures and then you walked into them in the dark, etc.

Most of his descriptions were still pertinent this year, despite the organizers' best efforts. (They had even gone so far as to include images of toasters and heat lamps on the posters for this year's event.) La Dive this year remained drafty, antarctic, pitch-dark in places - echoes even made it difficult to hear - which numbing conditions all amount to a miserable environment in which to taste wines professionally, and a great deal of unserious fun.

This was the one tasting on our Loire itinerary where I said to hell with note-taking. Nevertheless I managed to retain very positive impressions of a few wines I tasted that day, beginning with the powerhouse Côtes du Marmandais wines of Elian de Ros.

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.

still relevant: didier gimmonet at caves augé, 75008

In the run-up to Christmas last year, as cavistes all over Paris were engaged in the annual delirious Champagne salesmanship, my patient friend S and I crossed town in the snow to attend a grower-Champagne tasting at Caves Augé, in the hopes of tasting the acclaimed, near-mythical wines of Anselme Selosse, a famous natural vigneron who was, in the end, not present at said grower-Champagne tasting.

It was a let-down. Most of the other barrels outside Caves Augé were manned by vignerons whose wines were already pretty familiar to me. And it was face-crackingly cold and our toes were little ice marbles. But, you know, we'd come all that way, and we had a few hours to kill before dinner, it seemed a shame to just wander off, defeated...

Anyway, these vaguely alcoholic rationalizations yielded the day's most enjoyable discovery: the consumately well-crafted, Chardonnay-driven Champagnes of Didier Gimmonet. 

aligoté perversity: drinking de moor at christmastime

In retrospect, it probably wasn't the most inspired decision to open the Aligoté first, among all the wines I'd brought to share with my friends' families in London. It was an academic decision, one that made sense internally - the next white was an ethereal dew-sweet cru Savennieres by Claude Papin, after all - but was in fact kind of a blunder in the exterior world of social propriety, where the occasion dictated that I open something rather more enjoyable first.

Even setting aside, for the moment, the difficulties of presenting any kind of wine to your average bunch of Brits, who as a people seem to submit to the habit of wine much as one submits to, say, yearly prostate examinations: Aligoté is, furthermore, a resoundingly dislikable grape. So much so that when several of those gathered professed to actually like Olivier et Alice de Moor's 2009 Bourgogne Aligoté, which I'd only brought out of perversity and haste, I was pleasantly stunned.

I chalked (ahem) it up to the peculiarities of the British palate,* and to the near-magical expertise of the de Moors, who I'm convinced are to Aligoté what Jenny Holzer is to LED lighting.

sacred monsters of champagne: julhès paris, 75010

G quizzing the Krug rep, who sported a leather biker jacket under his blazer. He said it was due to the cold. 

Some disconnected observations from the "Montres Sacrès du Champagne"* tasting Nicolas Julhès hosted the other weekend at Julhès Paris, his wine-and-foodstuffs wonderland near Strasbourg St. Denis:

1. Krug tastes quite a bit like fish roe.

I mean this in a beamingly positive sense; this is a wine that's pretty universally impossible to hate on. But it's fishy, with a dewy light corporeality to it, something translucent and ever-so-slightly saline. I say "fish roe" and not "caviar" first because the flavor itself is definitely closer to something from Yo! Sushi, and second because it's just too boorishly facile to come out with a line like "Champagne tastes like caviar." It's like saying "Wow, this alligator skin feels like cashmere."

free-run from the former press: gregory leclerc

At the recent "Buvons Nature" tasting organized by Catherine Vergé in Paris, my friends F, Z, and I had the pleasure of meeting the Loire vigneron Gregory Leclerc, whose Vin de Table Gamay "La Mule" is by now probably recognizable to most of my friends as "the wine Aaron always seems to have in his bag."

(Not, like, on street corners. I mean when people invite me over.)

I continually turn to "La Mule" partly because it is reliably in stock at the two or three cavistes within walking distances from my apartment, and while being light enough not to shut off my palate for the night, it's weighty and red enough to please most casual hosts. It's organic carbonic-maceration Gamay from 25-30 year old vines, brightly acidic, but surprisingly black and structured, which latter qualities I imagine account for the wine's name, although it didn't occur to me to ask. In other words, it bears more than a passing resemblance to solid cru Beaujolais, at about half the price (around 10€).

M. Leclerc holds a different magnum of wine, however, in the photo above: it is the free-run* juice of "La Mule," a pretty astounding variation on the original that we first tasted that evening. Out of some blend of perversity and economy Leclerc bottles it with the same label.**

domaine du pech: buvons nature tasting, espace beaujon, 75008

I don't know what I had in mind. When Mâcon vigneron Catherine Vergé told me at the AVN tasting that she was hosting her "Buvons Nature" tasting on rue Faubourg Saint Honoré I guessed I assumed it would be a kind of glitzy affair. I frequently have to visit said rue for work and I'm always tripping over small manicured dogs and choking on the perfume of passers-by.

Turns out the tasting was held in what looked like a converted pre-school rec room of the Espace Beaujon. When I passed through on the first night with my friends F and Z, there were small children shrieking and running around the courtyard and Mme Vergé herself was nowhere to be seen. Happily, glamorlessness aside, the event was pretty much what she'd promised it would be: 15 pretty terrific natural vignerons pouring, chatting, and selling* in a pleasant, relatively intimate environment.

I tasted something fairly memorable at at least half the tables, so rather than write it all up in one grand deluge I figured I'd space it out a bit, and begin by discussing the wines of Ludovic Bonnelle at Domaine du Pech, a biodynamic Buzet (southern France, southeast of Bordeaux) estate whose wines, for me, really encapsulate the excitement and the occasional frustrations of deeply natural wines.

joyous naked pagans: natural wine tasting at autour d'un verre, 75009

After making the rounds at Spring's "Une Promesse du Vin" tasting recently, I popped over to meet my friends D and C at Autour d'Un Verre's significantly more informal natural wine tasting in the 9ème.

The differences in atmosphere and philosophy between the two restaurants and their tastings could not be more pronounced. Both places prize fine winemaking and both are very enjoyable. But where Spring very astutely emphasizes the fineness - as in comprehensive luxury, right down to the Aesop soap in the toilets - the scene at Autour d'Un Verre seemed to celebrate rather the winemaking, the physical act itself, with all the attendant sweatshirts, red stains, and mud-encrusted boots.

It's also just the difference between very established vignerons - those at Spring that day, accustomed to high profile wine events in NYC, London, San Francisco, and so on - and the up-and-coming ones, like the ragtag gang of bearded farmer-savants who manned the tables at the Autour d'Un Verre tasting, many of whose delicate unsulfured wines see limited distribution even in France. Some of the wines of this latter category of vignerons are true mystical natural wonders, with a joyous naked pagan quality to them. Others just taste amateurish and unhygienic - 'look what I found in this barrel' wines.

I tasted both that day at Autour d'Un Verre, but for the sake of diplomacy I'll focus on the naked pagans.

revelations: une promesse du vin tasting at spring restaurant, 75001

Wherein this author reveals he is not hardcore enough about this whole wine schtick to wait around for Anselme Selosse to show up. Yes, the Selosse, he of the otherworldly Champagnes from Avize. He arrived late to the tasting my friend Josh at Spring organized in honor of wine writer George Bardawil's book "Une Promesse du Vin," and I'd already moseyed on to the day's next tasting.

I'd like to say I left because after tasting through the stellar line-up Josh had assembled that day - the wines of vignerons who were on time, including masters like Claude Papin, André Ostertag, and Christine Campadieu of Domaine La Tour Vieille - I'd had my fill of heavenly wines for the day.

But really it was just me being in a hurry. To hell with it, I thought, I'll just have to get rich and purchase some Selosse for my own private consumption one day. I was planning to do that anyway.

champagne 101: salon du champagne @ julhès paris, 75010

It figures that what was, objectively speaking, the least interesting tasting on my calendar this month proved to be probably the most satisfyingly educational. My landlady and her husband had invited me to a Champagne tasting at their strangely-named cave of choice in the 10ème, and since I'd flaked on similar invites in the past, I joined them this time, even though it was a rainy Saturday morning, and no vignerons were slated to attend, and after getting a late start I still had a sack of sopping groceries in my wobbly bicycle-basket.

The cave, it turns out, is named after its propietor, Nicolas Julhès, a charming, energetic, slightly elfin gentleman with very much the right ideas about wine. And the tasting was so edifying precisely because it was so simple: 8 large-to-enormous Champagne houses pouring two wines each, their basic and a selection cuvée, which presentation caused me to realise that despite having tasted all these wines before on various occasions, I'd never actually had the opportunity taste them side by side in quick succession.*

viré-clessé anarchy: catherine vergé @ avn dégustation, 75019

The Association des Vins Naturels held its Grand Dégustation on Monday at the Pavillion in the Parc du Buttes Chaumont. I'd actually never been to a more anarchic tasting. Tables were seemingly themed according to general aura ("vin sérieux," etc.) rather than by region or vigneron, and everywhere you looked there was a crushed melee of raincoats, umbrellas, and wet scarves, on account of a vicious unrelenting rainshower outside. By noon when I arrived with my friend D, all bottles had traveled very far from their vignerons, and whatever information you wanted on the wines, you had to kind of fight for.

Nevertheless, a highlight for me was meeting Catherine Vergé, the vigneron behind a bizarre oxidative Vin de Table I raved about recently, best known for her and her husband's acclaimed range of Viré-Clessés. When I spotted her she was sporting her AVN tag on her forehead, looking pretty bemused by the whole situation. (I wish I'd taken a picture then.)

rhymes with "pants"

I realized belatedly that it was a three day weekend. Like, Friday night I realized this. Since it was far too last-minute to book any really ambitious trips, the Native Companion and I took a jaunt to Reims.

Despite having lived in Paris her whole life, she'd never been, either. When I asked her why, she gave me a look of indulgent incomprehension, from which I gathered that the only reason she was even accompanying me now was she assumed Reims had some kind of significance for wine geeks.

Lunch at Bistro Henri IV, enjoyable enough.