Wine and Foie Gras
When I praised the wine and asked him what it was,
he said simply, “C’est du vin de ma mère [my mother’s wine]!”
—Henry James, A Little Tour in France, 1884
A huge picture of two smiling, middle-aged women greeted me at the Bordeaux airport. They stood in a vineyard holding wine bottles, next to a slogan proclaiming:
SO ORGANIC
SO HAPPY
I’d expected wine PR, but not that message. The women, surrounded by leafy greenery and blue skies, were dressed for fieldwork. The vineyard’s name was in English, French, and Chinese. Someone was attempting a Bordeaux makeover, which made me question how many people in a city known as the Wall Street of the wine business really supported organic farming. Perhaps that’s why I felt subversive. Bordeaux wasn’t my primary destination, nor were Burgundy, Loire, or Champagne. No, I was in France to see the lesser-known regions, almost like a French tourist visiting New York City to see Staten Island and Queens. But not quite.
Archaeological and DNA evidence show that French winemaking started along the Mediterranean coast, from Marseille to Spain, not in the now-famous inland wine meccas. Until about 1000 BC the Gauls managed with beer and mead-like beverages. But the seafaring Phoenicians, who took winemaking from the coasts of Lebanon to Greece, probably spread the knowledge to Italy next, then France and North Africa. By 500 BC the Gauls had realized making wine themselves was more profitable than importing boatloads of amphoras.
In my travels I’d seen winemakers who were embracing local grapes and shunning famous ones, but what about France itself? Just as in other countries, many old, native grape varieties were dug up and discarded in favor of popular ones. But it turned out some French winemakers suffered from Chardonnay and Merlot fatigue, too.
A whole region in southwest France has successfully returned to making wine with their native grapes. I was headed to the Plaimont wine cooperative in Gascony, near the border with Spain—the French side of the Pyrenees Mountains—to hear their story. Plaimont markets the grapes of the region on a far larger scale than any of the wineries I’d visited so far. Could an heirloom wine for the masses exist without squelching distinctive tastes? I was a little apprehensive. What if Plaimont didn’t measure up? What if the classic grapes really are superior?
I left Bordeaux early the next morning, thinking the GPS directions looked easy. After driving south for about an hour and a half on a highway with almost no traffic, the Pyrenees rose up on the horizon like dark clouds. I took the suggested exit, and soon the zig-zaggy roads were impossibly narrow, with room for just one car. Was I lost? The rolling land alternated between corn, livestock, vineyards, and little valleys of forest. Most of the neat one-story stone farmhouses appeared to be lived-in homes, unlike some touristy areas down on the coast around Marseille.
Suddenly I arrived at the tiny village of Saint-Mont. It was 8:40 a.m., seemingly the perfect time to get coffee before my meetings. Wrong. There is no coffee shop in Saint-Mont, just a municipal building and a children’s school. So instead I took a deep breath of the fresh country air, filled with a myriad of scents, and contemplated the former Benedictine monastery, dating to 1050, that dominated a nearby hill. A big farm combine rumbled by, and I saw how different Gascony is from the more populous and urbane Bordeaux.
I met my tour guide Diane Caillard at Plaimont, which is just a minute from the town center. She grew up in southeastern France but fell in love with this area. “It’s very hidden and people are really fighting to stay together, to stay here and make the region more successful,” she said.
Plaimont was founded in the early 1970s by local winemaker André Dubosc, who sensed trouble. Gascony was famous for producing Armagnac, France’s oldest named brandy. A 1310 manuscript by the Franciscan Vital du Four claimed Armagnac had forty medical and spiritual virtues, including stopping tears, helping memory, inspiring joy, and promoting witty conversation. But after World War II Armagnac had trouble competing with the better-known Cognac. Many vineyards were ruined or neglected during the war, along with the caves traditionally used for aging brandy. Money was tough to come by in the post-war years and farmers made deals with big producers to rip up the Armagnac grapes and replace them with high-yield varieties.
Some consultants told Gascony farmers to join the Merlot–Cabernet stampede, but Dubosc worried about that, too. How could they compete with Bordeaux and Burgundy? Dubosc urged local vineyards to replant the old varieties. At first many resisted, because they were paid by the kilo. Dubosc told them Plaimont would pay for quality, not quantity. He worked to create new markets, and Plaimont now represents two hundred vineyards and their families. It has grown into a multimillion-dollar business. Dubosc retired in 2006, and the respected wine journalist Tim Atkin later said Dubosc should have run the entire French wine industry, given his visionary work.
My first stop with Caillard was a 190-year-old vineyard that’s part of Plaimont. It received French monument historique status in 2012—an honor usually given only to buildings. A balding, middle-aged man in coveralls emerged from a barn, wiped his hands, and smiled a shy greeting.
Eight generations ago Jean-Pascal Pédebernade’s ancestors planted this small vineyard, leaving room for oxen to move between the rows. In France, vineyards are taxed differently than other land, and old local records show that the first recorded harvest took place here in 1827. The vines themselves could even date to around 1810, when Napoleon ruled Europe. Jean-Pascal’s eighty-nine-year-old father still works on the farm, and he tells a story of how his great-great-grandmother listened to one of her ancestors describe seeing the vineyard in the mid-1800s.
We walked up a path. The vineyard looked like a grove of tall bonsai. The vines were about five feet high, but with huge, twisted trunks propped up by pieces of wood, like old people using canes. The leaves were a vibrant, healthy green, and the bunches of grapes looked glorious in the September sun. Yet for decades neighbors thought the old, marginally productive vineyard was odd, if they thought of it at all. For a long time the wine industry either didn’t know or didn’t care.
In the 1970s and ’80s agricultural experts suggested that the Pédebernade family tear up the old vines in exchange for a one-time cash payment—the grubbing up schemes I had learned about from José Vouillamoz. The European Union has spent billions of dollars on similar programs, as part of an effort to stem an embarrassing glut of wine: Each year millions of gallons end up as industrial alcohol, in a highly subsidized and vastly expensive price support program. In 2007 the EU estimated that it spent around half a billion euros every year just getting rid of surplus wine. Between 1988 and 1993 growers, mainly in southern France and southern Italy, were paid to destroy almost eight hundred thousand acres of vineyards—an area roughly equivalent to all the vineyards in America.
The Pédebernade family refused the grubbing-up money. The little vineyard survived.
When scientists analyzed DNA from the six hundred Pédebernade vines, they found more than twenty varieties—seven previously unknown. Those are called Pédebernade Nos. 1 to 7, and the vineyard also includes samples of Claverie, Miousat, Fer, and Canari grapes. Historians are heralding the vineyard as a remarkable example of biodiversity, genetic heritage, and ancestral cultivation methods.
The little plot survived the phylloxera plague of the mid-to-late nineteenth century because of the unusual, sandy soil. Phylloxera are aphid-like creatures that build tiny underground tunnels as part of their reproductive cycle, but those collapsed in the sand, creating a small island of immunity. Old vineyards have faced other challenges, too.
Caillard then took me to meet Plaimont’s current director over at another vineyard of Tannat grapes that dates back to 1871. Olivier Bourdet-Pees was casually yet fashionably dressed in a beret. He’s still worried about overall vineyard trends in France. In 1950 about 53 percent of all vineyard acreage used just twenty grape varieties. Today, 92 percent is planted with those twenty varieties. “Everyone is producing the same wine with the same tools. I believe that if we get bored with wine, we will stop drinking wine,” he said of the threat posed by too much conformity.
Bourdet-Pees said Dubosc did “an amazing job” of persuading local growers to trust the local grapes. “To say to the winegrower, please don’t plant this Chardonnay. We will die with that kind of grape. Please, you have to be a little bit patient.” No other project of this size makes wine from regional grapes in France, Bourdet-Pees informed me.
Bourdet-Pees stopped near a fig tree at the edge of the vineyard and became animated. He said not so long ago local people thought the Plaimont owners were “Silly men. Madmen. Old-fashioned men. Because it was time to produce a lot with new vineyards. New plantations, new projects, more productive.” Bourdet-Pees mimicked some of the comments French agricultural experts made in the 1970s. Look at this plant. It’s completely broken, nearly dead. Why do you want to keep this? If you want to keep this, that means you have a problem. You’re not a modern-style winegrower. You have to think another way. This was the vineyard of your grandparent. You have to change it.
Bourdet-Pees said the family kept the 1871 vineyard for sentimental reasons, because their grandfather and prior generations had made wine from it. For about twenty years Plaimont gave the owners a little bit of money to preserve it, but at first it was more of a museum. “When we started to understand the quality of the terroir, the quality of the soil . . . it [became] quite interesting. We started to think about producing wine,” Bourdet-Pees said. It took about four years to bring the vines back to healthy production, and the first vintage was 2011.
“What did you think when you first tried the wine?” I asked.
“The freshness, the roundness of the wine is amazing. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s ungrafted or because the vineyard is really old. The roots are five meters under the soil. I do think it’s really different. We’ll try it later and you can see,” Bourdet-Pees replied.
I couldn’t wait to sample the wines, though the vineyard was glorious. Moss covered parts of the old vines and wasps diligently crawled over ripe figs. I could see the Saint-Mont monastery in the distance. A field of cornstalks was drying just past the vines. The tile roof on a nearby farmhouse was covered in bursts of ochre lichen, its walls framed by plots of flowers and herbs.
Bourdet-Pees reflected on the growing enthusiasm for locally oriented, sustainable agriculture. “It was difficult to believe in this twenty years ago. It was really difficult,” he said of Plaimont’s idea. “But now many people do want to rediscover old varieties of apples, or tomatoes. I’m pretty sure it is the right moment for us to be discovered again.”
There are still challenges. Some agricultural universities in France use technology to make popular grape varieties fit the land, even when they aren’t suitable. Bourdet-Pees said they tell winemakers it is possible to produce wine everywhere, even in the worst conditions, even with the wrong grape, even with the wrong terroir.
The push to plant such grapes is happening everywhere. “If I want to drink a wine from Romania, I don’t want to drink Merlot. It’s mad,” Bourdet-Pees said. “The climate [there] is not so good for Merlot.” Over the years Plaimont has found many customers who order well-known wines simply because they know what to expect. They become almost afraid to discover something they have never heard about. I asked what happens when they actually try the Plaimont wines. “They say, can I have another bottle for my friend?”
After a short drive we arrived at Plaimont’s beautiful tasting room. It’s on the second floor, over a large shop featuring all of their wines. We sat at a circular tasting bar and Bourdet-Pees first poured whites, starting with Plaimont’s 2014 Côtes de Gascogne, their affordable table wine. It’s made with the Colombard grape, which has a bad reputation in some places, so I didn’t know what to expect. The wine was smooth, drinkable, and had an almost startling grapefruit aroma.
“That’s very nice,” I said. “It still has personality.” I’d visited many small, beautiful vineyards, but to be able to make millions of bottles of a distinctive wine is a new challenge. “This aroma, this freshness, makes a difference in the market,” Bourdet-Pees said. “Many people can discover it. Not so expensive.” Plaimont sells about five million bottles a year of Côtes de Gascogne at about five dollars retail, and I could see the appeal. It was an easy to drink table wine but more interesting than bargain Chardonnays.
We tasted a 2014 Domaine de Cassaigne, made with 70 percent Gros Manseng grapes and 30 percent Colombard. It was a full, long wine that begins with pineapple aromas and progresses to a light hint of oak. “Still exotic, but more maturity,” Bourdet-Pees said. It’s aged in oak for about six months to give more roundness, and the wine could easily pair with main courses. Many large wineries press grapes and quickly discard the remaining pulp and skin. It can make the whole process, and the wine, somewhat more predictable. This wine was different. “With both Colombard and Gros Manseng the aromatic power is really in the skin. With Colombard it’s very long skin contact. About twenty-four to thirty hours before pressing. With Gros Manseng it’s six to twelve hours of skin contact.”
The next white, Plaimont’s 2013 Les Vignes Retrouvées Saint-Mont, was a beguiling blend of grapes. “Gros Manseng is the main part, about 75 percent. The Petit Courbu gives the roundness. And then a wonderful grape, which is Arrufiac. It’s spicier, a lot of bitterness. If you are thinking about Arrufiac for 100 percent wine, it’s awful. Awful, really,” Bourdet-Pees said of the appellation. Plaimont uses four or five percent Arrufiac—like a touch of salt while cooking—in Les Vignes Retrouvées Saint-Mont. The wine had a distinctive, stony profile with aromas of white pepper and a touch of smokiness. Bourdet-Pees said the smokiness emerges only from Gros Manseng grapes that are grown closer to the Pyrenees. It was a remarkable wine, and a triumph of terroir.
The first red wine was a 2011 Monastère de Saint-Mont. It is all Tannat, grown on about five hectares of chalky, clayey monastery land. The first sip was almost like rolling a piece of chalk around in my mouth, but soon clay flavors emerged. “It feels like the taste is stages of terroir. The clay is second,” I said, puzzled.
“You can feel it. It’s strong,” Bourdet-Pees said. “It’s OK for me when people say, OK that one I don’t like at all. We want to be as close as possible with the quality of the soil. It’s fresh, powerful—but it’s not so easy.”
After a few minutes I took another sip and it was a different wine. The chalk and clay tastes had receded and a lovely cherry aftertaste emerged. “I like this very much, but it still tastes young,” I said. Bourdet-Pees told me the wine was aged in oak for fifteen months, and had tremendous aging potential. It was a great example of how important breathing is for complex red wines. Right out of the bottle the Monastère de Saint-Mont was tough, but in just fifteen minutes it blossomed with new flavors. I thought back to the chemistry lesson Marcos Zambartas had given me in Cyprus and now understood it in on a gut level. The molecular bonds in the wine had changed almost before my eyes, revealing new tastes.
The next red, a 2012 Le Faîte Rouge (“The Red Fairy”), was a witty twist on typical blends. It contained 85 percent Tannat, 10 percent Pinec, and 5 percent Cabernet Sauvignon—putting the most famous grapes in a minor, supporting role. It still had a touch of chalky aroma, but earthier, and with more fruit. I asked Bourdet-Pees how long of a decant he recommended. “If you want two hours, three hours, even the next day. If you come back the next day it’s even better,” he said.
The last wine was a first for me. The 2013 Vignes Préphylloxériques was made from the vines at the 1871 vineyard, the one I’d visited with the fig tree. “I’ve never had a pre-phylloxera wine,” I said. Wine lovers endlessly debate whether the old French vines made better wine, and a few small plots throughout Europe still produce enough grapes to make a vintage. Plaimont made just 1,150 bottles of this one, and few ever go outside of France. I felt very lucky.
Bourdet-Pees poured, and told me it was 100 percent Tannat. I took a sip, getting waves of plum aroma right off the bat, a bit of licorice, and finally green, spicy tobacco. “Wow. It goes on and on and on,” I said after tasting dried cherry, as if fruits had actually been aged in the bottle.
Bourdet-Pees smiled like a proud parent. “Some of the grapes are not so mature [when we harvest]. So this profile of tobacco, is from there. But very subtle.” It was a magnificent wine, and the taste kept evolving, with apricots and a steely edge showing up after about ten minutes.
“Yeah! A lot of iron. A lot! Very poor soil, very, very poor,” Bourdet-Pees said, and we both marveled that the vines can produce a remarkably smooth wine that is full of flavor. By chance I’d experienced one of the mysteries of terroir. Before tasting the Vignes Préphylloxériques all I knew about the land was that it had sandy soil, thus protecting the vines from phylloxera insects. Yet I tasted iron in the wine, and Bourdet-Pees confirmed the soil in that particular vineyard is full of iron. Here’s the conundrum: Scientists tell us that minerals in soils don’t directly impart flavors to wine grapes, despite myths claiming they do. How, then, did the metallic flavor get in the wine?
The very concept of terroir opens up a scientific and psychological quagmire. Consider: while regions all over the world have distinctive soil types, in most cases those minerally flavors never show up in the wines, even in areas that are rich in iron, clay, granite, or whatever. Yet those very flavors do show up in particular vineyards, even though wines made just a mile apart can differ—some show terroir and some don’t, even with the same grape. That’s why wine lovers fall so hard for wines with that ephemeral trait. The industry also generally knows how to make wines sweeter, drier, fruitier, and more or less alcoholic. Short of chucking rocks or rock dust into the vats (which is actually done), no one knows how to make a grape, a vineyard, or a wine naturally express a mineral terroir.
How, then, did the metallic iron flavor get in the last Plaimont wine I tasted? Bourdet-Pees had not alerted me to that detail beforehand. I’d never read a review of the particular wine and had no way of knowing the soil type. Yet I tasted something iron-y that Bourdet-Pees immediately recognized. If wines everywhere exhibited terroir, or if no wines did, scientists and wine lovers wouldn’t fight so much over what it means.
In any case, Bourdet-Pees was right to be proud. “If you put it in a carafe for three to four hours, it’s amazing,” he said of how the wine opens up. “You can drink and drink and drink and it’s still smooth.”
After six very distinct wines we headed to lunch with a few more bottles. The restaurant and inn Auberge de la Bidouze was like stepping into the past, too. It’s a simple house with woods shutters that offers a big patio surrounded by flowers or a cozy dining room for meals, set among cornfields just a few minutes from Plaimont.
We had pork chops, pâté, and foie gras, charcuterie, and salad with fresh tomatoes and herbs. I usually don’t like pork chops much, but these were succulent and flavorful, made from the farm’s own breed of pig. Everything was local, unpretentious, and absolutely sumptuous. André Brulé, the chef, is a large, shy and generous man who also waits the table, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing for a chef to do.
After lunch Bourdet-Pees told me that he believed things were changing. “I’m really fond of the new generation. I do think that mine, and maybe a little bit older, was wrong [about wine]. The young ones, not all of them, but the really good young ones, want to see wine differently.”
On the way back to Bordeaux from Plaimont I was happy, filled with marvelous wine and food and talk. Still, I didn’t want to completely ignore the classic wines. That would be foolish. So the next day I booked a seat on one of the many wine tours in the region. The minivan headed off to Château Smith Haut Lafitte. Its vineyards supposedly date to the 1300s, and the stone manor house to the 1700s. In 1990 Daniel and Florence Cathiard, former members of the French Olympic ski team, bought the chateau. They soon added sustainable and high-tech methods to the traditional parts of the business.
We toured the barrel-making room, which starts with slabs of raw oak and ends with magnificent barrels, their insides toasted to precise levels to impart the proper flavor. The main winemaking area was huge, spotless, and computerized. Smith Haut Lafitte uses a program called Oenoview to analyze the perfect harvest time. Data provided by satellite measures plant emissions related to ripeness, providing a digital map of every few square feet of the vineyard.
Tour guide Alix Ounis told us that twenty years ago Bordeaux chateaus—winemaking estates—were not organic or biodynamic at all. Now more and more are, including Smith Haut Lafitte. They farm organically, use oxen instead of tractors in the vineyards to avoid compacting the soil, and capture some of the winery’s CO2 emissions to reduce their global warming footprint. The CO2 is turned into bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda, which is used in toothpaste and other products. The Cathiards also sell grape seeds to their daughter’s company, which uses them in natural skin care products.
Smith Haut Lafitte has a restaurant and a seventy-two-room five-star hotel, but I settled for a basic tasting. Before the Cathiards took over, the chateau wines had a middling reputation. Critics now rate them very highly. I tried one of their best, a 2012 blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris, and Sémillon grapes. It was heavenly. Tremendously full, but smooth and fragrant. Then we tried their 2011 Le Petit Haut Lafitte, a second-tier red. It was nice, but obviously not the best vintage.
The first white was an outstanding example of why so many people lust after Bordeaux wines. I contacted Florence Cathiard to learn more after I returned home. “We know in every single row of the vineyard how ripe the grapes are. We then taste the grapes in each plot and mark the vines which will be harvested the following day,” she replied in an email. Then an optical scanning machine in the winery looks for imperfect grapes and culls them out. Visitors like the combined focus on sustainability and wine quality, Chathiard wrote, and I wondered if such technology would become the norm throughout France.
I headed back to my (slightly less posh) lodgings, gratified to have tasted both the Smith Haut Lafitte wines and Plaimont’s. Curious whether tourists and locals were much interested in rare varieties, I stopped at Le Wine Bar, which had been recommended to me by some friends. It was on the corner of a quiet street, with high ceilings and elegant curved iron window gates. The afternoon was quiet, so co-owner Delphine Cadei had time to talk. Her family is from Bordeaux, but for many years she lived in other cities and didn’t particularly long for home. Cadei said that for a long time Bordeaux was dark, grimy, and not a nice place to live. Parking lots covered the wide stone quays, obscuring the river. Bordeaux had been known as a wine town for centuries, but it had a crass business side, too.
That brought to mind Henry James’s reaction to Bordeaux in the 1880s. James reported that he couldn’t advise readers where to find fine wine, because “I certainly didn’t find it at Bordeaux, where I drank a most vulgar fluid.” To be fair James visited not long after phylloxera had ravaged French vineyards, so the wine he drank then might have been made elsewhere, and just rebottled in Bordeaux. Such practices have led to a seemingly endless stream of scandal and legislation. For decades in the early twentieth century, the French colony of Algeria was one of the biggest wine exporters in the world. But much of the product was blended with—and sold as—French wine.
A century after Henry James’s observation, Kermit Lynch, in his 1988 travelogue Adventures on the Wine Route, poked fun at the mind-boggling number of chateaux in Bordeaux. “The landscape is bestrewn and plumed with them. [. . .] But even the name château is a facade, because many châteaux are nothing but dilapidated sheds in which wine is produced.”
Cadei said a civic makeover had changed Bordeaux’s old city, transforming it into another popular tourist destination, after Paris. The parking lots vanished and the river quays are now full of artists, visitors, and locals. I told Cadei about my wine travels and asked if her customers were interested in unusual grape varieties or regions, or just the classics. She said tourists ask for Bordeaux wines, but many times local people want to taste wines from other places. That sounded a lot like what Bourdet-Pees from Plaimont had noticed. Some of Cadei’s regulars try a different wine on each visit, seeking out unknown countries and vintages.
I ordered a half-glass each of three Bordeaux wines and a charcuterie plate—foie gras, country pâté, and luxuriously fatty speck, or cured ham. The food arrived and everything had a creamy, elegant richness. The whole experience, mixed with the narrow cobblestone streets and old buildings, briefly inspired dreams of moving to France.
I learned of another chapter in wine grape history while in Bordeaux. A new generation of worldly, successful Chinese are embracing Western wine. There were several Chinese couples on my Bordeaux tour, and the Western wine industry has taken note: the wine and drinks magazine Decanter launched DecanterChina.com in 2012, and Robert Parker’s the Wine Advocate hired a Shanghai-based critic in 2015. In a sense the passion for Western wine isn’t new; there are historical reports of Chinese emperors importing wine via the Silk Road, starting at least two thousand years ago. This modern frenzy has occasionally tragic results. A billionaire and his son died when their helicopter crashed during a tour of their newly purchased Bordeaux estate. As of 2016 there were more than two hundred thousand acres of vineyards in China, planted mostly with—you guessed it—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Chardonnay, even though agricultural experts warn that some of China’s regions really aren’t suited to the European grapes.
Though ancient Chinese beverages were more of a rice-based brew than wine, archaeologists are finding parallels to Western rituals. Chinese nobility were buried with provisions of wine for the afterlife, too. One story goes something like this:
About three thousand years ago, along the banks of an ochre-colored Chinese river, slaves toiled to finish a tomb. It was loaded with food, honey, jade, weapons, and even a chariot and horses. Elaborate bronze vessels filled with chrysanthemum-infused wine lined one wall, meant for a future feast that never came to be—at least in the way people of the time intended.
Over time dynasties withered and fell. The tomb was forgotten. Insects, worms, and microbes feasted on the underground banquet, with one exception: the metal tops of the jars corroded and formed an airtight seal. The beverage went through some chemical changes and finally stabilized, waiting for the unexpected chapter in its own afterlife.
Recently archaeologists discovered the tomb and found what some had dreamed of but never really expected to find: liquid inside the bronze containers, the vintage of all vintages. Patrick McGovern got to sniff those curious remains, but professional standards and common sense barred him from taking a sip.
I left France and took some time to reflect during the trip home. I’d visited seven countries and the Palestinian Territories. In each place winemakers and wine lovers had grown weary of Chardonnay, Merlot, and the like, and had independently, without knowing one another, started exploring native grapes. Israeli, Palestinian, Armenian, Georgian, Cypriot, Greek, Italian, Swiss, and French wine lovers all described the same urge to rediscover the grapes and wines of the past. A sociologist could have a field day analyzing how that feeling manifested itself in so many different cultures at the same time. This new movement doesn’t mean you have to give up famous wines and their grapes, any more than going out for Vietnamese precludes steak, vegan, or Italian meals. It just shows that there are many more wine flavors—and stories—to explore.
Tastings
France is full of distinctive regional winemakers beyond Burgundy and Bordeaux, if you just look a bit. The Plaimont wines are a terrific bargain but hard to find in the United States. I’ve listed several here, as well as some wines made from lesser-known grapes suggested by Kermit Lynch, the importer and writer. His store in Berkeley, California, or his online site are great places to look for and learn about French and Italian wine producers: www.kermitlynch.com.
Domaine de l’Alliance, south Bordeaux
Dry whites using Sémillon grapes
Clos Canarelli, Corsica
Amphora-aged red or white using grapes such as Genovese, Carcaghjolu, Paga Debiti
Domaine Comte Abbatucci, Corsica
Reds using Sciaccarellu and Carcajolo Nera grapes
Jean-François Ganevat, Jura, Switzerland, near the French border
Many white and red selections using Savagnin, Trousseau, Gamay, and other grapes
Domaine Les Mille Vignes, southwest France, near the Spanish border
Le Pied des Nymphette (white, from Carignan Blanc and other grapes)
Domaine Hauvette, near Marseille, France
Reds, whites, and rosé using Cinsault, Roussanne, and Clairette grapes, among others
Clos Sainte Magdeleine, Provence
Cassis Bel-Arme (white, from 65% Marsanne, 15% Clairette, 15% Ugni Blanc, and 5% Bourboulenc grapes)
Plaimont, Gascony
Côtes de Gascogn (white, from Colombelle grapes)
Les Vignes Retrouvées Saint-Mont (white, from blend of Gros Manseng, Arrufiac, and Petit Courbugrapes grapes)
Les Vignes Retrouvées (white, from Gros Manseng and Petit Courbu grapes)
Domaine de Cassaigne (white, from 70% Gros Manseng and 30% Colombard grapes)
Monastère de Saint-Mont (red, from Tannat grapes)