LOIRE
CASTING A backward glance at my first trip to the Loire, I see a younger man who supported discomforts that sound torturous today. I flew from San Francisco to New York, changed planes, landed in Paris, rented a car, and drove to the Loire. Twenty-two hours all told, with a nine-hour time change. Those days the excitement, the novelty, and the thrill of the chase kept me going nonstop from one cellar to another. It was a period of discovery—discovering wines, winemakers, discovering France—and the adrenaline flow kept my blood as warm as the Loire cellars were cold.
It was late fall, the hunting season, and I settled into a little one-star hotel. I collapsed into bed for a late-afternoon nap and two hours later struggled to emerge from that deep black hole of sleep familiar to all who have suffered jet lag.
The hotel dining room was animated and colorful, filled with hunters dressed to kill in their shiny black-leather boots and bright red coats. I shared the spirit that filled the room. I had my own hunting to do.
The Burgundies on the restaurant’s wine list were négociant bottlings priced higher than I charged at my wineshop in California. The Bordeaux selections were too expensive and too young. However, there was an intriguing collection of little-known Loire Valley reds: Chinon, Bourgueil, Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, and Sancerre. Mixing research with supper, I asked the proprietor to bring up his best Loire red. He poured a Bourgueil. The price was painless, the color a promising bluish purple, the aroma loaded with berrylike fruit, the flavors original and delicious, so delicious that I asked him to prepare a few tenths to take along in the trunk of my car to share with friends and winemakers along the route. Thus began my love affair with the Cabernet Franc of Chinon and Bourgueil, wines which at their best have such a strong personality that novice tasters are often startled. After that initial taste, it will be love or hate. It is no different than one’s reaction to an individual with a strong personality.
The hotel proprietor, seeing my appreciation of his Bourgueil, next recommended a Sancerre rouge. I had thought all Sancerre white. No, he said, there is a small proportion of Pinot Noir planted there. The wine was brilliantly vinified. Anyone who could produce an impressive Pinot Noir in an unlikely place like Sancerre deserved investigation, so I jotted down the name of the domaine, which I must call Domaine X for reasons that will soon be obvious.
A duet of hunting dogs and church bells woke me up early the next morning. There was a bright glitter of sunshine that did nothing to thaw the brittle chill in the air.
I had two days for Sancerre. Domaine X was one of several producers I visited, including a large négociant who appeared to own most of downtown Sancerre, and whose name was sarcastically mispronounced by certain proprietors so that it came out meaning “half-water.” A disturbing number of wineries had decorative oak casks outside and stainless-steel tanks inside their cellars. But the visit to Domaine X deepened my understanding of wine and helped set me on a course which I follow to this day.
Truth be told, Monsieur X was a wry, crusty old fellow who wanted to talk about his absent son more than anything else, including wine. His son, who spoke several languages fluently, who had been around the world four times already, and who would one day take over the wine domaine—that is, if he was not elected president of the republic first. “He’s in Indonesia right now,” Monsieur X said, checking his wristwatch.
One after another, all day long, each Sancerre blanc I had tasted had been drawn from either glass-lined or stainless-steel tanks. There was a pleasant, easy sameness to them. Some growers were preparing to bottle their wine a mere six weeks after the harvest! It is simple. You heat your cellar to speed up the fermentation, then you run your wine through a sterile filter before bottling it. Your worries are over. The Sancerres of Monsieur X were still leisurely bubbling along, fermenting in ancient gray oak barrels that had nurtured many a vintage. I came from California, where new oak was a sign of seriousness and quality. Why did Monsieur X use old barrels?
“New oak masks everything,” he growled. “The virtues and the flaws. I have nothing to hide behind the taste of new oak. On the contrary.”
I was struck by the fact that fermentation in barrel produced a wine with more depth, more dimensions to it, than those from stainless-steel tanks where the wine is boxed in tight as a knot. In barrel there is an exchange between the wine and the air. The wine breathes through the pores of the wood. And the air it breathes has certain aromas, the cellar smells, which, however imperceptible, are soaked up by the wine. Perhaps that is why whites that see glass only, or stainless steel only, seem one-dimensional in comparison. Of course, if the winemaker is not fanatically attentive, the wine in barrel can breathe too much, and instead of a beneficial evolution, instead of this subtle seasoning, you will have an oxidized wine. It is work to keep an eye on each barrel, to keep all of them constantly filled up to the top to avoid oxidation. Thus, the predominance of stainless steel today. It is easier, safer, and the large tanks take up less space. Something is lost, however.
A second difference between X and the others: he had not one Sancerre blanc, but three. There are different terroirs or soils at Sancerre, he explained, and he had vines planted in three types of soil: limestone, flint, and clay. At the other domaines, it would have been a matter of selecting for purchase the cleanest, best-balanced Sauvignon Blanc, because the fruit dominated. At Domaine X, the Sauvignon character was evident, but only as one part of the taste impression. More important was the personality imparted by the soil in which the vine nourished itself, because the wine from each soil type was vinified and bottled separately with the specific vineyard name on the label. Here were wines from the same grape, the same cellar, vinification, and vintage, but tasting them side by side, one encountered three remarkably different personalities. And the wine from flinty soil, for example, consistently showed the same personality traits no matter which vintage we were tasting, being leaner, tighter, with a stronger mineral flavor than the other two. If only everyone could make such a comparative tasting, I thought, instead of those silly blind tastings that are such the rage. Here was a comparative tasting that deepened one’s awareness of the mystery of wine.
The third striking aspect was the old winery itself, which had been constructed on different levels of the hillside in order to permit racking and bottling by gravity flow. By avoiding mechanical pumping, Monsieur X produced bottled wines which retained all their nerve and vigor. Subsequently, I began to make inquiries about bottling methods a routine part of my visit to new wineries.
The point is, Monsieur X’s wines were not one-dimensional quaffers like so many Sancerres. They were more serious, more exciting to taste, because observing and defining their personalities engaged the intellect and the imagination. Rather than leaving the impression that wine is simply another beverage, they inspired the notion that wine can communicate something.
For several years I imported the Sancerres of Domaine X. In certain vintages I would buy the wine from all three terroirs. I cannot say that they had a fabulous commercial success; wine with a pronounced personality appeals to a small part of the public. But I took great pride in selling them because I believed I was importing the best. Imagine my emotions when I showed up one fine spring morning and was received by the son. He had thrown up a new barnlike winery building and filled it with stainless-steel vats. The reflections shimmering off the tanks gave the impression of a circus hall of mirrors. My face appeared two feet long. There was a new centrifuge. There was a special tank for refrigerating the wine down below zero to eliminate the possibility of tartrate crystal deposits. There were various pumps and filtering devices. The place looked like a winery-equipment showroom. Even worse, it smelled like a sulfur-dioxide factory. Where were those solid, proven old casks gently bubbling along? Where were the beautiful wooden tools like the hand-carved mallet Old Man X had used to knock the stoppers loose from the bungs of the barrels?
I could not restrain myself. I asked why he needed to centrifuge, cold-stabilize, filter, and dose his wines with massive quantities of sulfur dioxide (SO2). This fellow was taking no chances! He led me into his office, strutting like a rooster, a cigar poked into his bushy beard, his head blown up into a big balloon of self-congratulation. He pointed to a map of the world tacked on the wall behind his desk. I was represented by a colored pushpin stabbed into California. England had one too, and Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and so on. He stabbed a finger at a lone pushpin lost in the middle of the African continent. “I sell fifty cases a year here,” he said, “and there is no way to know what the shipping conditions will be. I have to protect my wine so it won’t spoil.” Here was a man willing to strip his wine of its character in order to protect fifty cases.
Copyright © 1988 by Kermit Lynch
Preface copyright © 1988 by Richard Olney
copyright © 2013 by Kermit Lynch
Photographs copyright © 1988, 2013 by Gail Skoff
