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n.d.p. in beaujolais: sebastien congretel, régnié-durette

August 9, 2017, 5:29 am
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The Beaujolais is barren for good restaurants, and the village of Régnié-Durette is no exception. Any business in Régnié-Durette has the added disadvantage of being secluded: the village proper, unlike nearby towns of Cercié and Villié-Morgon, is set back from the departmental roads. To explore Régnié-Durette usually means going out of one's way.

On drive from his newly restored home in the village to the cuvage he borrows from his father-in-law in Lantignié, I ask newly-installed vigneron Sebastien Congretel how the local Régnié restaurant is. He laughs. "They serve food," he says, in the manner of one awarding the highest possible praise.

Clean-cut, bespectacled, lightly jock-ish, Congretel wouldn't be picked out of a line-up as a vigneron. He formerly lived in the 11ème arrondissement of Paris, and had begun a career working on oil rigs before deciding, in 2015, to become a vigneron in the Beaujolais, where his wife Charlotte's family maintain a handsome estate in Lantignié. Her father lent him the use of a cuvage and equipment, and he was able to acquired parcels in Morgon and Régnié. In another stroke of luck, he fell in with two more senior Beaujolais immigrants, the brothers Julien and Antoine Sunier, who make formidable natural wine in Avenas and Régnié, respectively. This year sees the release of what Congretel considers his proper debut vintage - and the Morgon, in particular, implies he's a very quick study.


The fruit derives from a 75-are parcel under organic conversion in Saint-Joseph, adjacent to the old vines of Villié-Morgon grand-master Guy Breton. Fermentation was at ambient temperature, on natural yeasts, for twelve days in cement tank. The wine was aged in old oak barrel and bottled without filtration. Congretel wisely decided against degassing, which seem to have helped the wine avoid the glycerolic character that marked some strict-carbo fermented wines in 2016.

The result is ferrous, racy, raspberry-toned and pale - everything I tend to seek for in altitudinous Morgon.

"Until the last three days of fermentation, the colour was even lighter than that, in fact," Congretel recounts. "[My father-in-law told me if you want to snag a bit of colour, do one or two pump-overs or pigeages. So I did."


Congretel gives credit also to Julien Sunier, citing him as his "Master Yoda." Indeed, the Morgon is, stylistically, a dead-ringer for Sunier's massively-improved 2016 wines. "How he handles he tanks, what he does, his method of thinking - all that really inspired me," Congretel affirms.

Congretel is in the habit of offering tastes of his Régnié after his Morgon, because he is aware there is more long-term commercial opportunity in valorizing his work in Régnié. (Any newcomer to Morgon is necessarily competing with the work of legends like Jean Foillard, Jean-Claude Chanudet, Georges Descombes, Marcel Lapierre, Guy Breton, Jean-Paul Thévenet, etc.) But he admits the wine is still in a transitional stage.


The wine was vinified precisely the way the Morgon was, but wound up with much lower CO2. Aging was in a mix of barrel and foudre. The wine, not bad by any measure, lacks the swing of the Morgon. Its fruit is more diffuse, tending red-licorice. It derives from the sandier, Cercié end of Régnié, in the lieux-dit of Les Bulliats and Les Perras.

"Does it come from the soil, from that fact that it’s flatter, the parcel?" he muses. "It could come with time, from reworking the vines in the old ways, to search for a bit of depth."


The otherwise radiant promise of Congretel's first wines is somewhat undercut by their whimsical labels. The flaw lies not in their design, which remains relatively sober and informative, but in the excess of overconceived names and titles they bear. The Morgon is entitled "Vin de Zelebrité," while the Régnié is "Vin de Cha-Cha." Each also bears a logo of spectacles and the phrase "L'Epicurieux," which, I learned upon questioning, is the name of Congretel's domaine. Here is Congretel's explanation of the "Vin de Zelebrité": 

"When I lived in the 11ème, I was always partying there with friends. My nickname was 'the Zebra.' The Zebra is someone who amuses himself and goes a bit crazy. Then there’s the side of 'zeal.' Then there’s the side of 'celebrity.'"*


Congretel's introduction to the life of a vigneron hasn't been entirely without more practical hurdles. The cuvage his father lent needed some significant refurbishment, including leveling the floor and replacing the doors. He's replanting a significant chunk of his Morgon parcel, having concluded the roots are simply too close to the soil, thanks to its previous regime of chemical agriculture. In 2017 he's expanded his holdings in Régnié, and plans to take on another small parcel adjacent to his Morgon soon, though that, too, will have to be replanted.

"If I stopped my old work and went to the vines, it wasn’t to not work," he says. "It was really to work and do good things."

Lantignié vines recently restructured to wide spacing by Congretel's father-in-law, Gilles Perroud. 

* Two rules of thumb regarding puns on wine labels: 

1. No more than one pun per label. 
2. If the pun requires a lengthy explanation, it is not a good pun. 

Sebastien Congretel
178 rue du Bourg
69430 REGNIE-DURETTE

Related Links:

Beaujolais 2017: 

Gilles Paris, Chiroubles

Beaujolais 2016:

Château des Rontets, Fuissé
Nicolas Dubost, Saint-Germain-sur-l'ArbresleRomain des Grottes, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Yann Bertrand's First Primeur
Beaujolais Harvests 2016
Christophe Pacalet, Cercié
Sylvère Trichard & Elodie Bouvard (Séléné), Blacé
Jérome Balmet, Vaux-en-Beaujolais
L'Auberge du Moulin, Saint-Didier-sur-Chalaronne
Jean-François Promonet, Leynes
Hervé Ravera, Marchampt
Justin Dutraive, Fleurie
Julien Merle & Nathalie Banes, Legny
La Fête des Conscrits, Villié-Morgon
Domaine Leonis (Raphael Champier & Christelle Lucca), Villié-Morgon

Beaujolais, Autumn 2015:

Xavier Benier, Saint-Julien
Jean-Gilles Chasselay, Châtillon d'Azergues
Marcel Joubert, Quincié
Nicolas Chemarin, Marchampt
Anthony Thévenet, Villié-Morgon
Romain Zordan, Fleurie
Yann Bertrand, Fleurie
Domaine Thillardon, Chénas
Sylvain Chanudet, Fleurie
Patrick "Jo" Cotton, Saint-Lager
Pierre Cotton, Odenas
L'Auberge du Col du Truges, Le Truges
Julie Balagny, Moulin-à-Vent
La Cuvée des Copines 2015
Beaujolais Harvests 2015

Beaujolais Bike Trip, Summer 2015:

Georges Descombes, Vermont
Jean-Paul Thévenet, Pizay
Jules Métras, Fleurie
Rémi et Laurence Dufaitre, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux
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n.d.p. in marseille: les buvards, 13002

August 17, 2017, 1:03 pm
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For a number of reasons, only one of which was my lack of money, the Native Companion and I wound up in Marseille for a micro-vacation earlier this month.

My ulterior motive for visiting Marseille was to visit a few winemakers in Bandol, a 40 minute drive east. Her ulterior motive for visiting Marseille was it would permit her to bring her small dog. We spent one day in Bandol visiting winemakers in the company of a small dog. The rest of the time was spent failing to turn up good restaurants in sweltering late-summer Marseille.*

The one outstanding exception was Les Buvards, a ramshackle natural cave-à-manger two blocks north of Le Vieux Port. When I asked how long they've been open, raven-haired co-proprietor Laetitia Pantalacci replied, "It'll be a decade come Beaujolais Nouveau," which is about the best answer I could hope to receive. As we sat down on one of the street-facing tables, the NC remarked that she'd never heard anyone mark time in terms of Beaujolais Nouveau before. I assured her it wasn't that unusual, for a pioneering natural wine establishment.


Owned and operated by Pantallaci and her partner Fred Coachon, Les Buvards comprises part of a tight-knit circuit of influential caves-à-manger - including Le Verre Volé in Paris, Aux Crieurs de Vin in Troyes, L'Arsouille in Rennes, and La Part des Anges in Nice, to name the more prominent - who were instrumental in popularizing natural wine in France throughout the 2000's. Long and narrow, Les Buvards consists of a kitchen opening onto a tiny bar in the restaurant's rear, a middle dining room lined with wine shelving, and a quasi-terrace section opening onto a quiet stretch of Grand Rue.

The walls of the quasi-terrace are stacked historical empties from Domaine du Mazel, Marcel Lapierre, Pierre Overnoy, Château Sainte Anne, and so on - a visual history of the French natural wine movement.

The selection of full, available-for-purchase bottles at Les Buvards is slimmer than many of its aforementioned peers, though I may have simply arrived during a seasonal diminution of stock. I didn't mind at all, so happy was I to find a good wine selection in Marseille, which otherwise remains a land of pastis and cheap beer. Moreover, Les Buvards offers the occasional modest back vintage, like a 2013 Bandol blanc from Château Sainte Anne.


It proved to be in glorious, saline form, its tension and finesse giving the lie to the sad majority of winemakers who insist one must block malolactic to make refreshing whites in Provence. (I wish I'd brought bottles back to Paris. The day following our meal at Les Buvards we tasted a range of vintages with the Dutheuil family at Château Sainte Anne, and this 2013 still sticks in mind as a highlight.) Château Sainte Anne's whites and rosés all undergo malo, and are a zillion times more satisfying for it.


The Native Companion, as one might guess from her epithet, is French, and accordingly finds burrata more novel than I do. Her craving paid off at Les Buvards, however. It was among the freshest and most flavoursome I've tasted in France.


Freshness, simplicity, and quality of product typified the entire meal, from a light minestrone bedecked in pesto, to a seared aged steak whose Japanese seasoning was so nuanced as to transcend its cliché.



Restaurants can to some extent be judged by their clientele, and Les Buvards, in the dog days of August, drew a tasteful and serene mélange of locals and informed visitors, who all chatted amiably across tables. The bar serves until the impressive hour of 1AM, which, in addition to making most Paris natural wine bars look like curfewed pre-teens, renders a meal at Les Buvards particularly leisurely and pressure-free. On a similarly slow summer evening at comparable restaurants in Paris, one would visibly perceive, like a gasoline vapor in the air, the kitchen's desire to close, the staff's keening ache to refuse new tables. I suppose that is why people go south.

* I've spent years enjoying Alec Lobrano's many articles on the dining scene in Marseille, only to discover, upon visiting Marseille, that the majority of restaurants he has endorsed in the Guardian, Saveur, etc. have closed. Not just for summer - for good.



Les Buvards
34, Grand Rue
13002 MARSEILLE
Tel : 04 91 90 69 98

Related Links

A 2010 Télérama piece on Les Buvards, noteworthy for extraordinarily bad photography.

A 2011 Gilles Pudlowski piece on Les Buvards, noteworthy for not containing the phrase "natural wine."

A 2011 piece on Les Buvards at Love Spots, which despite the name is a blog about things to do in Marseille, not brothels, although presumably those also exist in Marseille.

A justifiably adoring 2015 piece on Les Buvards at So Food So Good.

Bert Celce's excellent 2011 report of a visit to Château Sainte Anne at Wine Terroirs. 
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at home chez la vieille

November 29, 2017, 5:46 am
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Early the other evening a client came into the restaurant and ordered a glass of Beaujolais primeur. There were few other clients at the bar at that hour and I decided to fill the air by delivering a short aria about Guy Breton's quixotic dedication to creating the greatest vin de primeur each year - his painstaking quest to perfect a wine type that almost nobody is willing to respect, let alone pay real money for. To create a perfect primeur is like solving a Rubix cube blind-folded in under 90 seconds, only less profitable.

To my surprise, the client was actually listening, and asked follow-up questions. When I mentioned that I wrote a wine blog, and its name, he was astonished, because he had been reading it for the last seven years. Before he left, he quite reasonably suggested I write something to inform readers what it is I am doing these days.

So here we are. Since end-August I have been managing a restaurant in the 1st arrondissement of Paris called Chez La Vieille. It's owned by the American chef Daniel Rose, who I first met years ago, back when my friend Josh Adler of Paris Wine Company worked for him at Restaurant Spring. The short version of how I returned to the hospitality industry is I found myself at loose ends last summer, having utterly failed to make sufficient money writing about food and wine for the previous year. When in mid-summer Daniel sent a message asking if I knew anyone who'd be a good fit to manage Chez La Vieille, I volunteered. Of course, I knew it would mean I'd have to cease penning fanged critiques of other Paris restaurants. That came as a relief at this point. I have spent so long explaining what goes wrong with restaurants and wine lists. Now my job is to demonstrate what can go right, or, more precisely, to draw clients' attention to the few aspects that do go right, to distract them from the train-wrecks, wild-fires, and five-car pile-ups that are part of the nightly routine at even the most successful restaurants.

Max Breton at the Beaujolais Nouveau soirée we threw at the restaurant earlier this month.

I'm still at work on my book about the wines of Beaujolais - the pitch just got sent to publishers, as far as I know. And I'll still continue this blog in some form or other. I'll write less about restaurants in Paris, and more about restaurants outside of Paris, and, of course, about winemakers. Sooner or later I'll probably debut a spiffier, more concise version of this blog. I'm awaiting the time to do that, and the money to pay a web designer.

In the meantime, I invite everyone to come say hi at Chez La Vieille. I'm there almost every waking second between Tuesday and Saturday. The restaurant comprises a no-reservation wine bar space downstairs, where the full menu is served, and a slightly over-designed upstairs dining room which tends to book up about a day in advance. Unless you have trouble sitting on bar-stools, the best way to experience Chez La Vieille is to have a full meal at the wine bar. There's rarely a wait for seats, and the ambience is airier and more spontaneous than upstairs.

Thomas Deck, of Deck & Donohue beers, and Beaujolais winemaker Kéké Descombes. 

I have overstuffed the wine list with geeky small-production unfiltered French natural wines, and chef de cuisine Oleg Olexin's poker-faced French cooking is pure class. (I have only worked with him three months, and already I think I could write a book about Oleg, whose sense of humour attains the cosmic-nihilistic register of Franz Kafka.) Daniel Rose tornadoes through about once a month, being otherwise occupied with conquering New York at Le Coucou. It's been nothing but a pleasure working for him so far - we share a vision of Chez La Vieille as being a nightly party, where the traditionalist avant-garde of French winemaking meets joyously backwards-looking heritage cuisine.


To be fair, before the advent of herbicides in the early 70's and the generalisation of commercial yeasts, filtration, and other winemaking shortcuts throughout the 1980's, most quality French wine was as natural as the wines we serve at Chez La Vieille. And sometime back in mid-century, before the Green Revolution, before the fragmentation of the national food consciousness, before Paris began to resemble London in the 2000's, most Parisian bistrots served the sort of homey, unshowy, pre-industrial recipes we serve at Chez La Vieille. But today - at the close of 2017 - what we do is a bit unusual.

I find it inspiring enough, anyway. I hope you will too!


Related Links

Bert Celce wrote a nice piece about the Beaujolais Nouveau soirée we threw at Chez La Vieille

A piece I wrote about Chez La Vieille early this past year, before I ever suspected I'd begin working there. Not everything I wrote still applies, a lot has changed, I hope.
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a divorce with la vieille

April 24, 2018, 9:58 am
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Well, that was quick. As of earlier this month, I've left the manager and wine director position I held for the past eight months at the 1èr arrondissement restaurant Chez La Vieille.

In writing about the restaurant, before and after beginning to work there, I used to emphasise the involvement of American chef Daniel Rose, to differentiate this iteration of Chez La Vieille from the mediocre ones that preceded it at the historic Les Halles bistrot site. Alas, not even the involvement of Rose, who I've been tempted to consider a friend at times, was enough to save my job from his Parisian business partners. Many restaurants have investors who display zero familiarity with restaurant culture or the quotidian rhythms of a food service establishment, people whose actual involvement extends no further than dining as VIP clients from time to time and volunteering hilariously uninformed commentary on the cuisine and wine. Investors of this sort are no more than a benign nuisance when a more informed stakeholder is working on-site. At Chez La Vieille, I realised soon enough, the only informed stakeholder lives in New York.

As it happened, the task Rose had hired me to perform at Chez La Vieille - to turn the restaurant into a fun, raucous natural wine destination - ran counter to the wishes of his Parisian partners, who, like many of their generation and socioeconomic bracket, remain mystified by natural wine and find informal service slightly unsettling. The end result is, I'm back on the job market. Chez La Vieille will chug along, just with less natural wine, and bereft of the talents of the ace chef de cuisine Oleg Olexin, who left shortly after I did (for different reasons). I am poorer than when I began, having made less money working maniac 90-hour weeks than I used to make from stray gigs and writing assignments. Am I richer for the experience of having managed a restaurant on this side of the Atlantic? It has certainly left me cagier about the prospect of ever opening one of my own. Perhaps that is a form of wisdom.

Twelve years ago, when I used to wait tables in Los Angeles, I came to learn that the best technique for ensuring a good evening's service was to treat the restaurant manager - my boss - like another table. I'd intermittently check-in to see if anything more could be done to make his or her evening more pleasant. It meant a bit of side-work here and there, more napkin-folding, the occasional random cleaning chore. But as long as the boss was happy, my fellow servers were happy, and so were the clients.

In France, this dynamic is reversed. The manager - who, remember, is also waiting tables, there being no actual distinction in terms of service responsibilities in a small restaurant between management and server in France - must treat his or her own servers as if they were another tableful of guests. One must constantly check-in and see if there are ways to make the servers lives easier. Otherwise, they begin feeling aggrieved for the mere fact of having to work for a living. They begin feigning illnesses, or simply not showing up, or complaining to the ownership about how insensitive you are. Savvy employees in France have almost complete freedom in this regard, because they can't be fired without incurring great cost to the restaurant. (Moreover, while continuing nominally to work at a restaurant, French employees can also cause cataclysmic aggravation and service disruption merely by going on sick leave, or by doggedly attempting to prove that the hours are too long.)

It took months for this cultural insight to sink in for me. In France, a manager's primary responsibility is to ensure that the staff stays happy, and only secondarily to ensure that clients are happy. In practice, this meant I spent a galling amount of time at Chez La Vieille covering for the servers' increasingly frequent cigarette breaks.* I pretty much couldn't say no. It was my job.

Anyway. Now I get to look for a new one. In the meantime, I hope to get a bit more writing done.

* To be fair, Rose had a more disciplined team in place before he closed the much larger Restaurant Spring last July. That caused a staff exodus from which the restaurant group has yet to entirely recover, despite my best efforts. I twice found myself in the unenviable position of trying to train two new servers at once - on a team of just three, including me.
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as var as I know: 25 years of the côteaux varois en provence AOC

June 19, 2018, 10:22 am
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My first move, upon being freed from my recent restaurant work somewhat sooner than anticipated, was to belatedly accept a lot of press junket invitations. This is how at the end of May I found myself spending two days shuttling around the Var with a gaggle of other journalists and bloggers, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Côteaux Varois en Provence AOC. 

The Côteaux Varois en Provence, a predominantly red wine appellation at its ascension to AOC in 1993, now devotes a whopping 91% of its production to rosé. I had mentally prepared myself for two days of industry doublespeak intended to pass off the effects of highly invasive vinification as the result of unique terroir and know-how. Perversely, this the reason rosé production holds such fascination for me: in no other wine category is there such a vast, irreconcilable gulf between what the mass wine market wants and what can feasibly be produced via natural vinification methods.

Natural rosé is one thing. The Provençal rosé currently soaring in popularity - salmon-coloured, dewdrop-clear, fruit-basket-flavored - is a different product entirely. In a surprisingly double-edged speech he gave at the AOC’s anniversary party in Saint-Julien, Gilles Masson, director of the Center of Research and Experimentation on Rosé Wine, called the “Provençal rosé idéotype” - a wine that is “transparent, fruity, round” - “almost an invention.” He went further than his prepared slides, saying it was “a type of wine that never existed in history.”


ROSE BEYOND THE PALE 

Masson presented this idea as miraculous and accompanied it with bullish sales figures, receiving applause from the gathered winegrowers, winemakers, and estate owners. Yet it wasn’t the only moment in Masson’s presentation when he described the present commercial situation of mass-market rosé so accurately as to effectively condemn it. 

Most striking was a slide showing how the average colour intensity of rosé has plummeted in the years between 2004 and 2017. 


Masson cited this as the result of “improvement” and a gain in “expertise” in vinification, echoing most of the other conventional winemakers and oenologists I met on the trip, many of whom insisted that the colour of their rosé derived from terroir and temperature control, rather than intense filtration and clarification. Whenever I insisted that the colour doesn't come from temperature control alone, they responded with deflections, my favourite being, ‘It comes from fermentation temperature. We harvest at night.’ 

This is a laughable explanation on several levels. Firstly, in Provence in almost invariably constitutes an admission that the domaine is machine-harvesting, a practice utterly adverse to quality winemaking. Secondly, the definition of 'night' is rather loose here; all they mean is they are not harvesting in the midday heat, a practice that has been adopted in numerous regions by this point. Thirdly, the explanation elides the plethora of clarifiers and fining agents often used to attain the salmon-sunset colour of supermarket rosés: bentonite, casein, charcoal, and a host of other additives. A cellar-hand at the cooperative Cellier de la Sainte-Baume confirmed as much during the trip, explaining that for fining they typically used isinglass (a fish gelatin), or less frequently, charcoal, known for stripping flavour as much as colour.

Lower vinification temperatures will indeed produce less colour extraction, and refrigerating the must at various stages will indeed give greater clarity. But not to the extent that oenologists imply when speaking to the press. 


A STORM BREWING

Upon arrival in the region, we visited the pristine new winemaking facility of Bastide de Blacailloux, before repairing to the rooftop of another nearby winery recently acquired by that domaine's owner, the amiable insurance tycoon Bruno Chamoin. Storms threatened overhead throughout the tasting, without ever quite breaking; it seemed an apt metaphor for the future of the wine style we were tasting.

Almost unanimously, the wines struck me as over-sulphured, malo-blocked, colour-corrected, filtered to death, and probably perfectly unobjectionable with a fistful of ice cubes on a beach. 

There are antecedents in the wine world for wine styles whose massive popularity gave rise to a cynical uniformity and subsequent critical abandonment: Beaujolais Nouveau, Lambrusco, Soave, etc. Due to their popularity with minimally-informed drinkers, these wine styles became radioactive to more-informed drinkers. The same phenomenon is occurring today with Prosecco. It seems primed to strike Provençal rosé any day now. 


I managed to find one potable rosé among the twenty-five - the "Rosé d'Une Nuit" from the organic Domaine du Deffends. It wasn't a natural wine by a long shot, but the fruit was bright, the finish soft and elegant, the overall profile admirably pure. Weeks later, back in Paris, I was amused and astonished to see the same wine being poured by-the-glass at 5ème arrondissement natural wine hub Café de la Nouvelle Mairie, where one of the owners had also appreciated the wine on its merits.


ORGANICS VERSUS NATURAL

Contrary to the greater region’s mediterranean reputation, the Côteaux Varois en Provence AOC enjoys a partly continental climate, thanks to its high average altitude (350m) and the massifs separating it from the Provençal coast. In morning in late May, I felt a pleasant chill in the air from time to time as our shuttle wound through the picturesque towns of Tavernes and Barjols. While high-altitude, the majority of the appellations vines are planted on flat and relatively deep clay-limestone soil; along with the ventilating effects of the mistral, this makes the AOC particularly amenable to organic viticulture. Almost all the domaines we visited on the press trip were certified organic; many were rather large (30ha or more). None produced natural wine.  


At 12ha organic domaine Château La Calisse, owner Patricia Ortelli distinguishes herself with ambitious prices, laudable hand-harvesting, and an outright hostility to natural winemaking. "I defend the AOCs of France," she declared fallaciously and without prompting on the morning we visited, "because there are others, notably natural wines, that have no character at all." 

When another member of the press trip, the Master Sommelière Annie Crouzet, asked whether the domaine used native yeast, Ortelli replied with a certain doth-protest-too-much animus: "It doesn't mean anything. I say my wine is natural to me. No one can tell me otherwise since there are no rules to natural winemaking." 

I piped in with a functional idiomatic definition - native yeast fermentation, minimal sulphur use, non-filtration - but Ortelli simply reiterated that there are no rules. It feels impolite to argue in such situations, since I wasn't paying for anything, merely freeloading on a PR performance aimed at others in the group, so I let the matter drop. 


At the cooperative the Cellier de la Saint-Baume, I learned that cooperatives do specific "organic days," when only organic grapes are processed, as opposed to normal days, when conventionally-farmed harvests are processed. 


At the 30ha organic domaine Château Lafoux practices hand-harvesting and five years ago began experimenting with biodynamic agriculture on certain parcels. The limited and very expensive "Vinicius" bottlings of white, rosé, and red are vinified with greater care and released later than the rest of the range, but even here, the domaine's oenologist Pierre Guerin dubiously insisted that malolactic fermentation simply "didn't happen" for the white or the rosé. (The language of contemporary oenology is structured to promote an understanding of malolactic fermentation as a stylistic choice, whereas in fact it is something that usually happens naturally unless one intervenes to prevent it, via some combination of sulphur addition, filtration, or enzyme addition.) 


The 60ha organic Domaine du Loou is run by the founding president of the Côteaux Varois en Provence appellation, Daniel di Placido. I enjoyed conversing with him as much for his long perspective on the evolution of local winemaking as for his gravelly, cinematic voice, a kind of aural regional treasure. 


While here too everything was too sulphured, yeasted, and filtered for my tastes, the wines benefitted texturally from the domaine's use of cement vats, rather than the steel that has otherwise become ubiquitous in the region. 


WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

Gilles Masson's speech was one of a sequence given to open the festivities at a celebration in honour of the 25th anniversary of the Côteaux de Varois en Provence AOC. From where I sat in the audience, I scanned the room for the one natural winemaker I knew from the appellation, Jean-Christophe Comor of Domaine Les Terres Promises. To my relief I soon spotted him, leaning near the exit wearing lime-green pants.


His response, when I caught up with him near the shellfish concession kiosk and reminded him that I wrote about natural wine, was telling: "What are you doing here?"

"I was hoping to discover more people who work like you," I joked, and we laughed and shook our heads.

If Comor's unfiltered, low-sulphur Côteaux Varois wines are of uncommon quality in Paris, where I usually drink them, they're practically unique in the Var, where they're made. Instead the viticultural Var is fast becoming a realm of vanity domaines owned by successful businesspeople whose pragmatism seems to exclude any appreciation for the value of traditional modes of wine production. 

I suppose things could change if and when the Provençal rosé ideotype - a false, confected, invented wine - goes the way of White Zin? 


RELATED LINKS

Last year I took a really enjoyable press trip to the Île des Porquerolles with the kind folks from Agence Claire de Lune. I discovered a really excellent rosé from Domaine de l'Îles.

An article on the 25th anniversary of the Côteaux Varois en Provence AOC at Terre des Vins, whose author was present on the same press trip.

I was amused to see that my friend Bert Celce once visited Domaine du Loou back in 2006. They weren't making natural wine then, either.

An interesting 2007 article explaining certain properties of contemporary fining agents in Winemaker Mag. 
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jean-christophe comor on natural rosé vinification

August 1, 2018, 4:14 am
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In early July I decided on the spur of the moment to join the Native Companion for an evening in the Provençal seaside town of Hyères, where she'd gone for work. The sojourn presented a fine occasion to follow up on my recent chat with Var natural winemaker Jean-Christophe Comor, who I'd run into at the Côteaux Varois AOC 25th Anniversary party back in late May. His 15-hectare domaine in La Roquebrussanne is just a 45 minute drive north from Hyères.

I've bought Comor's wines for several restaurant wine lists in Paris over the years, having initially made his acquaintance at various tasting salons. As a vigneron, he cuts a peculiar figure: owl-eyed, eloquent, slightly hunched, he's a former souverainiste politician and law professor who renounced politics in 2002 to make natural wine in the Côteaux Varois.

Today his idiosyncratic range of wines - 11 cuvées in all - includes highlights like the lightly-macerated, foudre-aged carignan blanc "Analepse" and a suavely powerful Bandol bearing the silly pun "L'Amourvèdre." But I have a special fascination with Comor's two natural rosés, simply because the category itself has grown so scarce in the present era of ultramodern colour-corrected Provençal Stepford-Wife rosé. In the cellar of his beautiful newly-constructed cuverie - built from local stone along the same foundations as an ancient sheepfold - we discussed what it means to produce natural rosé in Provence today.


The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

NDP: Tell us about your Bandol Rosé, "La Chance." 

JCC: This is grenache-cinsault-mourvèdre. I vinify in [the cellars of Château] Pibarnon, because in Bandol you have to vinify within the appellation. I don’t have a cellar there yet. It’s from a parcel called “La Chance,” which is above Domaine Ott [Château Romassan], when you go up to Le Castellet. It’s a rosé that does the malolactic. It isn’t yeasted. It's got 2g of added sulfur. It's plate-filtered.

I do rosés in a way that is a little particular. I’m one of the only ones, we can say, in Provence who really doesn’t yeast. I say really because there are some who don’t yeast one tank but yeast all the rest, which serves no purpose.


How do you make a natural rosé? 

In rosés, you have to take a lot of care with the débourbage. If you débourbe too much, you lose the fermentable material, so there needs to be a big coherence from the start.

From the moment we harvest, we’re not going to débourbe violently, we’re not going to stabilize violently, we’re not going to fine at the moment of débourbage, like most do in the more technological methods. Which is understandable because they’re going to yeast instead, so they clean the milieu to create another one. Globally the idea of the oenologue is to pull at the grapes as soon as it’s in the harvest case, to try to eliminate it. Because everything that’s alive is quite anguishing to the oenologist. I understand! The alive is the unknown.

Young mourvèdre vines near the winery.

We harvest during the day, in the morning. I cannot harvest at night. The people who say they harvest at night by hand, it’s foolishness. I tried. It doesn’t work. People cut their hands, etc. So it’s day. It’s hot. I don’t need to macerate, I figure. Already it's too hot. I press with the stems. To have a more delicate press. It works like a filter.

Then I débourbe. We put it in a tank and I descend to 14° or 13°. I try to settle everything dirty, the earth and all. But I'm not obsessive about it because I don’t want to kill the yeasts. When you make a wine with fining agents and yeast, you have to débourbe very violently. And clarify violently, so you truly ruin the wine. There’s nothing left but sugar and water. That's not my idea at all.

The problem is that it becomes complicated. When it doesn’t rain, like last year, there’s not a lot of assimilable nitrogen. The yeasts work less quickly. You have to pray. And my fermentation isn’t at 15° like most do. I leave it between 18° and 22°. I'm not afraid. You can’t be afraid with rosé.

Why the decision to filter? 

I’m obliged to, if you like. The wines does 90 days of fermentation. It’s very, very long. The malolactic is done before the [alcoholic fermentation]. Honestly, it’s very complicated. For me, to make natural rosé, it's truly the hardest thing to do. That's why no one does it. It’s not by chance. It’s infernal.

And I work with the awareness that we have certain market imperatives. For rosé, there’s still a market that makes it need to leave for the USA or Canada in January. It must be ready. We can’t permit ourselves to have wines that referment in May, etc.

The only concession that I make is the filtration. Because it's a young wine, it hasn’t deposed well. Sometimes I bottle magnums without filtration for myself, just to see. It’s interesting. But sometimes we have reduction that comes the year after. Because there are still yeasts remaining.

Your other rosé, the Côteaux Varois en Provence "L'Apostrophe" - it's made the same way? 

In life, [winemakers] will tell you everything and the opposite to explain why they can’t do something. People will say, "Well, you know, for the rosé, I’m not in organic." Or, "I overproduce for the rosé," or "I don't."

Very honestly, to not get twisted in the head, it’s better to do everything the same way. I apply a principle, and I do it everywhere. I harvest by hand everywhere. I don’t do things by half. Everything is in organics. Everything is hoed. That way I don’t wear myself out with making distinctions.


What's wrong with the market of Provençal rosé today?

They’re making a beverage, you know. It’s dangerous in the end. The rosé has become, for the winemakers of Provence, a technique. This technique starts to take precedence over the vigneron, over the terroir. Since rosé has become a technique, they’re going to make rosé anywhere in the world and it’ll be the same. Grenache, cinsault, the same technique. We don't realise it yet.

We should let the winemakers try to develop rosés of terroir . I see that even in Bandol there are some winemakers who start to pose questions. [Château] Pibarnon now makes a rosé de garde that is released in September. [Château] Pradeaux, the same. That’s rather a good sign, because people are saying to themselves, "We make a good living, but is it interesting? And eventually will we lose it?"


Domaine Les Terres Promises
83136 La Roquebrussanne
Tel: 09 64 45 12 72

RELATED LINKS

An excellent 2009 summary of Jean-Christophe Comor's former political career and his transition into winemaking in Le Monde.

Bertrand Celce's characteristically detailed account of two 2012 visits to Jean-Christophe Comor at Wine Terroirs.

An account of a brief 2013 visit to Jean-Christophe Comor by Jean-Hughes Bretin at On Boit Quoi Ce Soir.

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the tavel rosé of today: couleur tavel 2018

August 16, 2018, 4:04 am
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"Couleur Tavel" is an annual tasting festival held in the Gard village of Tavel to celebrate its eponymous rosé appellation. I had the pleasure of attending this July on the invitation of the Lyonnais press agency Clair de Lune. The public tasting itself, held in the warren of ancient gardens in Tavel's town center, was a labyrinthine clusterfuck, choked with giddy wandering families; it was followed by dinner at a wagon circle of food trucks surrounding a sort of dance-free dance-party, resembling a nocturnal exercise video, held in the Place du Président Leroy.

Given that the appellation comprises just 930ha, and is devoted exclusively to rosé wine, the "Couleur Tavel" event is not particularly diverse, nor does it appear to be aimed at a professional market. I was still delighted to attend, because it offered an occasion to familiarize myself with the prevailing norms of the Tavel appellation. The only Tavels I ever seem to drink are the wines of the appellation's black sheep, Eric Pfifferling, and as magnificent as his deep red rosés are, they are unrepresentative of the appellation at large.

Perhaps it is better to say Pfifferling's wines are unrepresentative of the Tavel appellation as it exists today. As I've come to understand it, a rosé wine, at the time the Tavel appellation was decreed in 1936, resembled more a light red wine than the transparent pink wine present-day drinkers have come to know as rosé. The overwhelming majority of the vignerons of Tavel, meanwhile, are producing something in-between, but closer to the latter, a watermelon-coloured rosé neither quite of the present era, nor of tradition.


That's certainly not to say the Tavel of Today is any worse than other rosés. Indeed, given the harsh clarifications most conventional rosé producers will enact in search of a pale colour, it is surely a positive thing that the vignerons of Tavel have made a darker-than-average colour central to the appellation's identity.

Yet while the intention to make a darker-than-average rosé has remained in Tavel, what has changed is the manner in which this is generally achieved.

While the appellation presently permits eleven grape varieties, two of these - syrah and mourvèdre - have been permitted only since 1969. Not coincidentally, these are, along with carignan, the most dark-colouring grapes in the blend, with the others being either white - clairette, grenache blanc, picpoul, bourbelenc - pink (clairette rose) or lightly-colouring red, in the case of grenache, cinsault, and calitor.

Carignan never having been a dominant variety in the blend, the circumstances would indicate that a short, light maceration - rather than direct press or bleeding - was probably at the origin of Tavel's famously dark rosé. Supporting this idea is the fact that the appellation's historic terroirs are the sand and clay soils close to the village and its water sources; it was only in the 1960's that plantation began on the drier terrains that have since become the appellation's most iconic, picturesque terroirs: galets roulés, or rolled stones, and lauzes, brittle slabs of inactive limestone. The latter two soils yield slightly more concentrated, richer wines.

Galets roulés terrain.

Lauzes terrain.
New plantings on sand soils. 

Terres blanches terrain.

These developments - the addition of dark red grape varieties, along with the expansion of the appellation to allow plantation of drier sites - effectively encouraged a prioritization of red wine over rosé. (The expansion of the AOC was also presumably a response to the suburbanization of the actual village of Tavel, a continuing effect of its proximity to nearby Avignon. Today the village's best terroirs are still being developed apace.) With a darker, more concentrated must, a dark-enough Tavel can be produced by the saignée method, without necessarilyreassembling the lesser free-run juice with the more choice press juice. Most Tavel domaines nowadays simply bleed off a bit of rosé and macerate the rest longer for sale as red Côtes-du-Rhône.


It's a shame. The overall category of rosé - leaving aside the individual merits of most of the wines it contains - is more popular than ever right now. The time would seem to be ripe for complex rosés from Tavel. Instead most winemakers are bleeding off free-run juice, clarifying it, yeasting it, blocking malolactic fermentation, filtering it, and packaging it in clear bottles for supermarket shelves.

Positive signs persist, however. Organics and in certain cases biodynamics are well represented at estates like Domaine Lafond Roc-Epine, Domaine du Joncier, Château de Manissy, and Domaine des Carabiniers. The latter two domaines were responsible for two Tavel rosés I found quite agreeable at the small preliminary tasting held at the Auberge de Tavel.


The 78-hectare organic estate Château de Manissy's top Tavel cuvée - their "Tête de Cuvée," for which malolactic fermentation is not blocked - was unfortunately not presented at Couleur Tavel. (I'll have to visit sometime soon.) But their mid-range Tavel rosé, entitled "100%," was vinous and rich, the weight of an Alsatian pinot. It was good enough to overlook its hilarious packaging, which resembled a bad Lambrusco.


Domaine des Carabiniers are a 50-hectare estate farming biodynamically. Their Tavel was on the lighter side, and filtered, but thankfully fermented on native yeasts; it distinguished itself in the tasting with refreshingly genuine springtime aromas. Encountering it in the circumstances was like walking into a crowded room in which one person is smiling and not wearing a scary mask.


The tasting was catered by four chefs representing fine restaurants from around the Gard. It was a splendid way to highlight under-acknowledged regional chefs, undercut only by the task they'd been given, which was to present their cuisine in verrines. 



At catered events - where one usually encounters them - verrines are not glass jars, but wasteful plastic cups, invariably filled with a laborious, faux-sophisticated amuse-bouche involving a mousse of something. Somehow, perhaps due to their omnipresence at "chic" catered events, verrines seem to retain some appeal to French diners even in restaurants, where the jars (sometimes a repurposed water glass) typically contain a miserly portion of shellfish and / or tomato or avocado, with one or another element often having been rendered into a flan-type consistency as a means of further stretching the cost of ingredients. In such a way, a little transparent plastic cup has become a kind of Chinese finger-trap for both chefs and diners in France, enlacing them in an unamusing bond of parsimony and unsophistication. For the good of France, Macron should ban the things.


The actual content of the verrines was perfectly tasty, I should hasten to say. And the village of Tavel, while not bursting with amenities, is fascinating.


The town center's sublime Vieux Lavoir - the old communal washing area - springs from a source that also irrigates the adjacent patchwork of small enclosed gardens, which belong to the town's residents. The sections not playing host to "Couleur Tavel" that day were those being exploited as private vegetable gardens.


Half of one garden belongs to the Pfifferling family, and furnishes vegetables to the splendid restaurant where I dined that evening: La Courtille, a seasonal project launched by Thibault Pfifferling's girlfriend Natalia Cruz and her former colleague from Paris' Le Baratin, Marie Lézouret.


For anyone wondering, yes, I dined thrice that evening, first verrines, then La Courtille, then the food trucks. You only live once.


RELATED LINKS

My recent interview with Jean-Christophe Comor of Domaine des Terres Promises on natural rosé vinification.

A 2018 visit to the Côteaux Varois with Agence Clair de Lune.
A 2017 visit to the Île de Porquerolles with Agence Clair de Lune.

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restaurant éphémère, vauxrenard

August 22, 2018, 11:52 am
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This coming Saturday will be the last service of the season at Restaurant Éphémère, a lovely and unexpected pop-up lunch restaurant tucked in the Beaujolais-Villages hamlet of Vauxrenard.

Run by the Dutch duo of legal recruiter-turned-restauratrice Gusta van Walsem and chef Jessie Ydo, Éphémère is housed in the backyard of Gusta's boyfriend, the acclaimed natural Fleurie vigneron Yvon Métras. Opening his farmhouse home to a stream of friends, neighbors, and tourist clientele all summer was perhaps the last thing I would have expected Métras to do, short of perform in a ballet. But by all accounts the restaurant has been a success. When this past weekend I asked Métras' son Jules how it was going, he replied, "It's full every day, and there's even people we don't know coming!" 

His mild surprise is a testament more to the isolation of Vauxrenard (population: 318) and the near-total absence of promotion behind the project than the quality of the wine and cuisine, which are both splendid. I visited in early July, shortly after Restaurant Éphémère opened, and found the Métras backyard transformed into a dining terrace, where sat, at tables shielded from the sun by a stark yellow tarp, a small cavalcade of natural winemaking peers: van Walsem's friend and fellow Dutch émigrée Florien Kleine Snuverink, a partner at Domaine Les Bottes Rouges in the Jura, Villié-Morgon's Georges Descombes, David and Michele Chapel of Domaine Chapel, along with Métras himself, bemused as ever.



La Bise, where Métras lives - a high-sited lieu-dit, named for the north wind - is not obvious to access. I've been there a dozen times and I still get momentarily lost whenever I return. Restaurant Éphémère closes at 5PM, well before sundown, probably as much to avoid lingering diners as to prevent them from driving off the hill on the way home.

Van Walsem's wine list is selected from natural winemaker friends in the Beaujolais, the Mâconnais, and the Jura. The menu is a three-course affair for 25€. The restaurant accepts no credit cards, which I can imagine leading to some awkward end-of-meal negotiations. The nearest ATM is a twelve minute drive away in Fleurie.



Jessie Ydo's menu is fresh and unpretentious, evincing a pleasantly hands-off approach to many excellent local ingredients, including vegetables from the Métras garden, and cheeses from nearby Ouroux. It is a truism that all one needs for great country cuisine is good ingredients; but good ingredients are precisely what is lacking in most restaurants in the Beaujolais, a fairly benighted place for dining out, all told. 

Hence the instant appeal of Restaurant Éphémère, even to locals. A fulsome parfait of chicken liver was savory and smooth, enlivened with a sparkle of fleur de sel.


A splatter of long-cooked beef with red cabbage was far tastier than it looked; it comprised a satisfying balance between the refinement of flavor one demands of restaurant cuisine, and the hearty, instant-gratification one demands of meals during harvest or other periods of physical labor.

I suspect I enjoyed it all the more because I had spent the morning on the bottling line with friends in Fleurie, wrestling with the lever of an antique hand-corking machine.



It takes immense pluck to open a pop-up restaurant in a non-traditional restaurant space. Nothing confirms this like a trip to Restaurant Éphémère's improvised toilet, a hand-dug outhouse discreetly situated a short walk around the corner and through the garden. Consideration of public toilets is where many great ideas end. It's probably the reason nomadic tribes stay nomadic. "Ehh," they say, when the situation becomes impossible to ignore. "Let's just move on."

But it would be folly to expect such challenges to make van Walsem blink. Métras calls her "La Grande," a reference to her height, and, one suspects, her forceful personality. I first met her in 2015, when I worked harvest with the Métras'. Only several years prior, she and Florien Klein Snuverink had courageously decided to ditch comfortable lives in Amsterdam for the deep French countryside. As a fellow non-French person who has spent most of the last decade in the same apartment on a squalid street in Paris, unable to take the decision to leave, I find both women very inspiring.

Gusta van Walsem, right.


Restaurant Éphémère
La Bise
69820 VAUXRENARD

RELATED LINKS

Beaujolais 2017:

Sebastien Congretel, Régnié
Gilles Paris, Chiroubles

Beaujolais 2016:

Château des Rontets, Fuissé
Nicolas Dubost, Saint-Germain-sur-l'ArbresleRomain des Grottes, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Yann Bertrand's First Primeur
Beaujolais Harvests 2016
Christophe Pacalet, Cercié
Sylvère Trichard & Elodie Bouvard (Séléné), Blacé
Jérome Balmet, Vaux-en-Beaujolais
L'Auberge du Moulin, Saint-Didier-sur-Chalaronne
Jean-François Promonet, Leynes
Hervé Ravera, Marchampt
Justin Dutraive, Fleurie
Julien Merle & Nathalie Banes, Legny
La Fête des Conscrits, Villié-Morgon
Domaine Leonis (Raphael Champier & Christelle Lucca), Villié-Morgon

Beaujolais, Autumn 2015:

Xavier Benier, Saint-Julien
Jean-Gilles Chasselay, Châtillon d'Azergues
Marcel Joubert, Quincié
Nicolas Chemarin, Marchampt
Anthony Thévenet, Villié-Morgon
Romain Zordan, Fleurie
Yann Bertrand, Fleurie
Domaine Thillardon, Chénas
Sylvain Chanudet, Fleurie
Patrick "Jo" Cotton, Saint-Lager
Pierre Cotton, Odenas
L'Auberge du Col du Truges, Le Truges
Julie Balagny, Moulin-à-Vent
La Cuvée des Copines 2015
Beaujolais Harvests 2015

Beaujolais Bike Trip, Summer 2015:

Georges Descombes, Vermont
Jean-Paul Thévenet, Pizay
Jules Métras, Fleurie
Rémi et Laurence Dufaitre, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux
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la courtille, tavel

August 30, 2018, 9:13 am
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The renown of Paris 20ème-arrondissement bistrot Le Baratin has a firm basis in the indisputable finesse of chef Raquel Carena's cuisine and the marksman-like natural wine instincts of her partner Philippe Pinoteau. Oft-overlooked amid the accolades surrounding the restaurateur couple is their savvy in human resources. Decades of hiring staff dedicated to natural wine - if not deriving directly from winemaking families, as in the case of front-of-house alums Inès Métras and Thibault Pfifferling - has helped the restaurant's influence expand far beyond Paris.

This summer, the southern Rhône village of Tavel saw the opening of La Courtille, a seasonal restaurant by two other talented Le Baratin alumnae, server-chef Natalia Crozon, and chef Marie Lézouret. Housed in the courtyard of an historic building formerly dedicated to silkworm production, La Courtille offers a menu that, in Crozon's own telling, is kind of another Le Baratin.

Bravo to that, my friends and I responded, over lunch back in July. Who wouldn't be overjoyed to find an homage to Carena's rustic preparations of veal kidney and beef cheeks transposed to a spacious sunlit courtyard provisioned with an unending supply of natural and organic Tavel rosé ?


Crozon and Lézouret met at Le Baratin; it's also where Crozon met her boyfriend, Domaine de l'Anglore's Thibault Pfifferling, whose family have helped support the new restaurant. Lézouret is thus able to avail herself of vegetables from the Pfifferlings' garden plot in the town center.



For now the wine list is composed of Domaine de l'Anglore's sought-after wines, amply supplemented by neighboring organic estates like Domaine Lafond-Roc Epine and the Château de Manissy. But Crozon hopes eventually to fill the restaurant's immense cellar with vintages from natural winemaker friends throughout France and beyond.


The restaurant's interior, little-used in summertime.

The menu, naturally, evokes the pair's former workplace, which is to say that Lézouret, like her mentor, wisely avoids culinary fads and fussy preparations, instead highlighting fresh, summery country-cooking. A mild mediterranean accent arrives in the form of tarama with red cabbage, or a salad of octopus and chickpeas.




Balancing the lightly exotic appetizers was a humble main course of veal kidney, bulbous and savory.


Over lunch with Thibault Pfifferling that day we enjoyed two of his family's new négoçiant cuvées, deriving from opposite ends of the Gard. I'm particularly fond of "Les Salines," a direct-press carignan from the Costières de Nimes, about which, perhaps, more later in a separate post about the visit chez Pfifferling. For now it suffices to say that "Les Salines" slakes a thirst for Pfifferling-style vinification of direct-press rosé that has remained unquenched since the family discontinued their glowy direct-press rosé "Chemin de la Brune" a few years back.



La Courtille's courtyard is far larger than I had expected. The isolation of each table permits a pleasant sensation of semi-private dining. Serving plates is practically a long-distance sport. Crozon, meanwhile, evinces the same radiant charm familiar to anyone who encountered her at Le Baratin, having seemingly adapted effortlessly to the mixed clientele of a tiny village in the south of France. Her hospitality, like Lézouret's menu, is refined without being imposingly so.


It can't be stressed enough how refreshing this style of restaurant is, in the context of Tavel. Like almost everywhere in the French countryside, restaurant options around Tavel are otherwise divided between proletarian, bottom-line bistrots, bereft of fresh produce; flailing pseudo-gastronomic restaurants, heavy on balsamic squiggles; and pizza. Almost every town in France could profit its own La Courtille, if only to demonstrate to a rural clientele that culinary refinement has nothing to do with expense or "inventive" cuisine.


In the wake of the 2016 US election, along with, probably, much of my generation, I began to reflect upon the grave cultural divergence between that nation's comparatively educated coastal capitals and the rest of fly-over America, where conditions of raging incoherent tribal idiocy apparently prevail. The causes are, of course, innumerable, but if there is a prominent symptom to be cured, it is perhaps a lack of cultural exchange. Progressive people my age seem to cluster in New York for a while before eventually moving to LA or San Francisco, in a migratory pattern as predictable as it is enclosed. I am tempted to think that for progressive, thoughtful people, the most patriotic act possible would be to relocate to the many marginal towns and cities not already overrun with co-working spaces, art galleries, "third wave" coffee shops, natural wine bars, cold-pressed juice bars, vegan locavore restaurants, and so on, in the hope of effecting some overdue cultural exchange.

The same dynamic applies, somewhat less urgently, to restaurants in France. My neighborhood in Paris has like nineteen natural wine bars and four specialty organic greengrocers. In Tavel, just twenty minutes' drive from the urban center of Avignon, there was until this summer no place to go for well-sourced, well-executed cuisine and natural wine. Crozon and Lézouret intend to keep the restaurant open throughout the harvest and fermentation period, closing in October until next season. I daresay they'll be missed all winter long. 


La Courtille
208 Chemin des Cravailleux
30126 TAVEL
Tel: 04 66 82 37 19

Open for lunch Monday - Friday; open for dinner Monday - Saturday. 
Closed Sundays. 

Related Links

My recent account of the 2018 edition of Couleur Tavel, the village's annual wine festival
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let's talk about aix: the côteaux d'aix en provence AOC

October 1, 2018, 11:31 am
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When I spoke to Var natural vigneron Jean-Christophe Comor back in July, he aired certain criticisms of the Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Provence, or CIVP: chiefly, that tended to market rosé colour over rosé terroir. He found it absurd that the rosés of Provence are divided into the appellations Côtes de Provence, Côteaux Varois en Provence, and Côteaux d'Aix en Provence. "They don't all have the same terroir," he said. "But they all do the same [vinification] techniques."

As an itinerant wine writer and bystander to the scenario, I'm actually perfectly happy there are three distinct Provençal appellations, because it apparently means there are several distinct promotional budgets. So it was that, in the wake of a press junket to the Côteaux Varois this past May, I was invited to return to Provence in late September to attend a tasting of the wines of the adjacent Côteaux d'Aix en Provence appellation. The kicker - in fact, the trip's redeeming feature - was that this time we were to principally taste the region's oft-overlooked red wines.

At 4127ha, the Côteaux d'Aix en Provence appellation has only about a fifth of the planted surface as the adjacent Côtes de Provence, while covering a similar area. This testifies to the more urbanized landscape of the Côteaux d'Aix en Provence appellation, which extends from Arles and Saint-Rémy to the respective outskirts of Marseille and Aix. The terroir is, to put it lightly, diverse, varying from hilly sites bordering the Côteaux Varois to lowlands bordering the Étang de Berre and coastal sites west of Marseille. That's not to say the appellation's reds lack identity. The tasting of the appellation's red wines, held at the Château Vignelaure, revealed a slightly anachronistic Bordeaux fascination, presumably attributable to the fabulous wealth and conservatism of local landowners. But there were highlights, too.


One thing about the tasting surprised me immediately: I hadn't realized quite how much cabernet sauvignon was planted in Provence. It was largely absent in the Var, for example. Yet it formed a basis for many of the Côteaux d'Aix en Provence reds. Philippe Bru, the cellar master at Château Vignelaure, explained that it was in fact the original Bordelais proprietor of Vignelaure, Georges Brunet, who was among the first to plant cabernet sauvignon in the region in 1966. It later occurred to me we weren't far from Les Alpilles, where Domaine de Trevallon has seen great success with cabernet.

Château Vignelaure winemaker Philippe Bru. He's not actually standing in cabernet vines here, as I recall.

I don't have anything against cabernet sauvignon. But like many of the dark, heavy varieties that were planted throughout the south since the late 1960's, it seems a relic of a different era - the one Robert Parker would seize upon ten years' later.

For what it's worth, it was also a cooler era. Nowadays I sense a certain wistfulness among Provençal winemakers who wish they had the vines and the climate to produce something other than highly technical rosé for refreshment in the Provençal heat. Even in late September, the temperature was such that most red wine was rendered unpalatable.

A splendid lunch at Château Vignelaure.

A notable exception was Domaine du Sulauze's 2014 "Chapelle Laïque," a biodynamic, low-sulfur single-vineyard cinsault with a touch of co-planted grenache. Lean, wiry, lightly spritzy, it was a simple raspberry-toned red one could easily stomach in the southern heat, evoking a bygone time when light reds and rosés resembled each other rather more.

Apart from Domaine du Sulauze, the only estates present with any significant ties to the natural wine market were Château Bas and Château Revelette. Château Bas is the far larger of the two at 72ha, while Château Revelette, owned by UC Davis-educated German winemaker Peter Fischer, extends over 24ha. Both domaines kind of have it both ways, producing great quantities of extremely safe organic wines alongside smaller quantities of more interesting natural cuvées. The latter were not presented at the tasting.

I sense that Fischer in particular commands great respect among fellow winemakers in the region; I hope someday to better understand why. The 2006 Côteaux d'Aix en Provence "Le Grand Rouge" was among the older vintages presented at the tasting that day, showing powerfully, punishingly over-extracted and over-oaked. It felt almost like a parody of the style indicated in its name. The wine beside it, Château Bas' 2005 Côteaux d'Aix en Provence "Cuvée Temple," suffered from similarly monumental treatment. Given Trump, climate change, and ebola, it seems possible the world will end before these wines open up.


Château Bas were also responsible for the day's most surprising wine, a white "Cuvée Temple" from 2003 that was opened over lunch afterwards. Deep golden, honeysuckle-scented, and grippy from a touch of skin maceration, the rolle-sauvignon blend was an unlikely triumph, preserving just enough acidity despite age and a hot vintage. Unlike almost all Provençal white wine produced today, Château Bas'"Cuvée Temple" does malolactic fermentation, a key criterion for an age-worthiness.

Old foudres at Chateau Vignelaure. No longer in use, sadly.

Among the most interesting wines of the tasting, at least from a historical perspective, was Château Vignelaure's 1985 rouge, from back when the domaine still aged the wine in their beautiful old foudres.


It showed its age, but one sensed it had been made with an admirably traditionalist, old-school Bordeaux ideal in mind. Cellar master Philippe Bru's work today is more modern, but his wines showed impressive restraint compared to others in the tasting, never going outright over-the-top in extraction or oak.


Two other nearby domaines, the organic Domaine Les Bastides and the biodynamic Domaine La Réaltière, caught my attention that day for their wines' frank, dimensional aromas - sure indicators of indigenous yeast fermentation. Domaine La Réaltière's carignan-grenache-syrah blend "Canta Gau" was rather more feral and tightly wound, whereas Domaine Les Bastides unassuming cuvée "Tradition" was extraordinarily pleasureful and supple, with a wholeness to its nuanced dark fruit.


It was also, at 10€ départ cave, the greatest bargain of the tasting. As with certain other areas of Provence and the bouches du Rhône, real estate in the Côteaux d'Aix en Provence AOC is under simultaneous high demand for non-viticultural development, which may contribute to the high pricing on many of the reds we tasted that day. (Many of the selection-level bottlings were between 25€-40€ ex-cellar. Château Lacoste's thoroughly undrinkable 2012 "Grand Cuvée" took the cake at 50€.)

Another reason for this pricing could be simple immodesty. The owners of the châteaux in Provence are, as I mentioned, fabulously wealthy, and they quite understandably wish to produce at least one wine that friends and family who enjoy similar purchasing power might consider sufficiently expensive as to merit esteem. Hence so many titanic, dense wines, collectively resembling a wannabe Bordeaux on the mediterranean.

The barrel room at Château Vignelaure.

In this we can still nonetheless read positive signals. The Côteaux d'Aix en Provence AOC produces 85% percent rosé, which sounds high, until one realizes that Côtes de Provence and the Côteaux Varois en Provence both produce just over 90% rosé. This gives the Côteaux d'Aix en Provence AOC a slight head start at the realignment that would occur, should mass consumers one day tire of faceless chemical Provençal rosé. And as the wines of Domaine du Sulauze, Domaines Les Bastides, and others demonstrate, the terroir is perfectly capable of producing distinctive, balanced blends based on lighter grapes like grenache and cinsault, if given the chance.

A very meat-intensive welcome dinner at the Château Barbebelle. We were heaped in meat.

Related Links

A good comprehensive 2016 post on Peter Fischer of Château Revelette at Marion Barral.

My visit and interview Jean-Christophe Comor this past July.
My visit to the Côteaux Varois en Provence AOC in May.
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