Farewell to French Wine

We had had such a good previous day, should we visit more vineyards, or leave it at that?. Another country was looming on the horizon, Spain.

Their was the last day of ‘Graves ouvertes porte’ left. Now, it wasn’t that we were bored of visiting them, just that our final visit the day before had been so good, would other visits tarnish that experience?.

Still, we were in the region, the doors were open, maybe just a couple more. The vineyards we had seen so far had been in the north of the region, last night we had headed south to Preignac. A small village, with very few facilities, except the aire. It was closed for the season, bollards blocking Dora’s entry and the water was turned off . However, the aire was adjacent to the town square and free parking was available here, this would do fine. We explored the village and found an information board which described a short walk. We haven’t been doing much walking lately, so it would be nice to do one in the morning.

Another beautiful day as we headed off for our walk. We were walking blind, just by memory, why hadn’t we taken a photo of the information board? it would have helped!

We headed in the general direction, looking for a river, eventually finding it amongst a picnic area. A woody walk, light filtering through the trees on an island created by the river splitting and coming back together again. The island was two and and half kilometres long, so the walk would take just over an hour. Hunters were out on this Sunday morning, together with dog walkers. One of them, the dogs, not the humans, leapt excited towards Susana. She seems to attract them. Maybe they sense her unease. Two big paw prints were left on her t-shirt. She was quite shocked and upset. Just as in Britain the owners do not react, if anything they seem upset that someone cannot love their little pooch as much as they do, they do nothing to control it, and no apology.

We had a bit of lunch after finishing our walk and headed off to do more wine tasting. The first vineyard of the day, and we were introduced to a young lady biker. She helped translate for us. She had ridden down from Bordeaux, to pick up a bottle or two. Liking the age oaked white, she was going to store it for a few years. It would never last that long in our house, a couple of weeks at the most. Actually, that is not true of Guisando, “Casa Dos”, our home in Spain, where we have quite a cellar and just don’t get the time to drink any of it (maybe this trip). Susana preferred the white not stored in the oak barrels, it was cleaner, fresher. I quite liked the creamier flavour. We didn’t but anything.

The next, and last vineyard, Chateau Magence, was now owned by a young couple. You got the feeling this was more like a hobby, but it had been in the family for a long time, so an important hobby. They both lived in Bordeaux, one hour away. It was run by the husband who commuted down 3-4 times a week and maybe the wife at weekends, who had a different career. I also felt that this was probably a well established label.

Their English was good, and spurred on by the answered we had gleaned from yesterday we began to ask more questions. What orientation are the vines planted in? The rows are perpendicular to the sun path, to ensure they get the most benefit from the western, afternoon sun.

Do they have different root stocks? A lovely answer here; Yes. in the 1920’s a major catastrophe among French vineyards. An imported vine from the USA brought with it a particular insect that feeds off of the roots and eventually kills the plant. This spread rapidly and could have destroyed the industry. Luckily, those kind yanks, always the entrepreneurs, were able to provide the solution and sold us the new root stock that wasn’t affected by the bug. The whole of Europe now has this root stock apparently and you are not allowed to grow vines without it. The bug still infests European soils!

The wax covers the graft between the root stock and the upper plant. It acts like a bandage. This one was dead though, so the bandage couldn’t have been that good.

We also got some instruction on pruning. Maybe this will be helpful on the vine in Guisando, which I am trying to train in a very architectural way, you would expect nothing less. Hopefully his instruction may mean I can persuade the plant to make a shoot in a particular place next year!

Now in France you are  not allowed to artificially water the plants. Too hot and too dry, well tough on the plant. He said you had to treat them a bit mean, not spoil them too much. This encourages the deep roots, where all the good flavours were. Shallow roots were very bad. We are quite mean to our vine in Guisando so according to this theory, it should be growing healthily, but it isn’t, what is going wrong??

The grass between the vines has several purposes, not only does it hold the soil together, preventing it from being eroded and blown away by the wind, but the grass also uses up all that surface water, meaning the vines have to look deeper.

They also store the wine in Oak barrels, they are kept in a cellar. Well not really a cellar because it is not underground. The climate of the cellar is controlled. They have air conditioning, but they have never used it, instead they open doors, one at each end to control the air flow. The humidity is controlled via an irrigation system below the barrels. All brilliant and very low tech.

Some of the other vineyards we had visited change the mix of grape that they use each year, to get the best flavour. This is the job of the wine maker, the real artist in the whole process. The alchemist. But this is not the case in this vineyard. Here the proportions never change, the grapes never change. What does change is the climate.

One year, the grapes were no good, they didn’t sell the wine, they didn’t want to tarnish the brand.

Now they have some other weird ideas around economics, but these ended up benefitting us. They don’t sell all of their stock, especially when it is a good year that is likely to store well and improve. But now this is the weird bit, they never change the price of that wine. It is sold for the same price of when it was first made. Very strange.

More beautiful stainless steel conditioning tanks.

So, to the tasting. This was also a little bit different.

We started with the oldest, 2001, and worked our way through five bottles up to 2010.

Nothing had changed except the climate, and what had happened to the wine in the bottle.

The differences were remarkable. But it was the 2001 which we really enjoyed, it had become really mellow and rounded with age, a very nice bottle which we will share with Julian, my father-in-law, when we get to Guisando. And because of their weird economic system it was still at the original price of €10.50. They thought it would be good to store for another three years, it won’t be around that long though.

On the way out the wife asked us if we had been to Sauternes. No we had not. “Well you must it is really wonderful, you will really love it”.

We left Graves, via Sauternes, which was lovely, although we never got to try the wine, but I understand it is that sickly sweet stuff.

The village was set in the middle of these extensive beautiful vineyards as far as the eye could see. We headed south for our last night in France.

GDR