A Vineyard in My Glass

PART ONE

France

Map 1. Wine regions of France

FRONSAC

Chalk and Clay, Legs and Thighs

In the 1960s I used to buy wine for the British market directly from growers on what was then known as the Côtes de Fronsac, one of many small, often overlooked wine regions that complete the viticultural patchwork of Bordeaux. Its two- or three-thousand acres of vines are at the eastern end of still largely neglected territory separated from Pomerol and Saint-Emilion on one side by the river Isle, a tributary of the Dordogne, and from the Côtes de Bourg, the prolific source of Bordeaux’s workaday wines lying to the northwest, by the old Bordeaux-Paris highway.

It is possible to reach Fronsac by taking that Paris road from Bordeaux (now duplicated by an autoroute, imperiously abstracted from its surroundings) just for the pleasure of looping high across the Dordogne near Cubzac-les-Ponts on the long girder bridge built by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in 1882; but then, at Saint-André-de-Cubzac, one must deliberately separate from traffic on its way to the easier pickings of the Côtes de Bourg and slip away on an ill-marked side road toward the town of Libourne.

Alternatively, one can take a direct, and shorter, route to Fronsac, crossing the Dordogne at the stone bridge of Libourne, fifteen miles upstream. But many set out that way only to be diverted at the last moment, alas, by the appeal of signs to Saint-Emilion and Pomerol as they come off the bridge. Because both routes from Bordeaux, then, so strongly tempt the traveler in other directions, it is not surprising that Fronsac sees only the most determined visitors.

In the eighteenth century, buoyed perhaps by the influence of the Duc de Richelieu, owner of considerable estates in Fronsac until they were seized and sold in the Revolution, the region’s reputation for wine had been high above that of Pomerol, the neighboring village now particularly distinguished for Château Pétrus, its chief growth. In Richelieu’s day, Fronsac wines were bracketed for quality and price with what were described as the third growths of the Médoc. (The official 1855 Médoc classification still in use today was preceded by constantly revised groupings with no formal status.) William Franck, whose Traité—published in several editions starting in 1824—is one of our best sources of information about Bordeaux in the last century, went so far as to claim that Canon-Fronsac wines, despite what he called their lack of lightness and bouquet, had formerly been preferred to those of the Médoc. That was probably so; but then the majority of the great Médoc growths now familiar to us, hardly established until well into the eighteenth century, had not won their honors until the nineteenth.

They are deeply colored, firm, with a strong, heady flavor, Franck wrote of the Fronsac wines he knew. They develop well, and do not begin to lose their power until after fifteen or twenty years.

Morton Shand had much the same to say of Fronsac a hundred years later in his 1928 volume, A Book of French Wines. "These big, round, and powerful wines, coarse and rough though they are during their infancy, have for long been extremely popular in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Great Britain.

They have been called the Burgundies of Bordeaux, he went on, warming to his subject, "and there is a certain superficial aptness in the parallel, for [brokers] are fond of saying of a good and promising Fronsac that it has ‘plus que de la jambe, de la cuisse’ [it has more than legs, it has thighs], by which is signified that it is a decidedly stout-bodied wine, buxom and lusty as a fine strapping peasant wench."

By the time I was squandering my youth scouring Fronsac properties for wines, however, the appellation had lost something of this earlier sex appeal. The deprivations of wartime, following years of economic depression, still clung to many wine regions of France in the fifties and sixties. The owners of the internationally reputed classed growths of Bordeaux could finance quality winemaking by selling their annual production before its release (as they still do). For a time in the fifties they went even further and presold their annual production while the grapes were still forming on the vines, so badly did they need cash advanced to finance vineyard cultivation as well as barrel aging.

But elsewhere growers had no such pull in the market. With neither capital nor sales assured enough to convince the banks to help them, many were hardly able to maintain appropriately, much less replace, essential vineyard and cellar equipment. In any case, lacking the means with which to hold onto their wine for aging and bottling, they were compelled to sell it off in bulk as quickly as possible after the vintage, usually at prices based on nothing more subtle than color, condition, and alcoholic degree. If their wines had lost their brilliance since Shand wrote his book, there lay the reason. The growers could hardly have been expected to extend themselves to preserve local character or vineyard individuality—assuming it had been possible for them to do so—when distinction of any kind would have been no more than a nuisance to the négociants-éleveurs, the Bordeaux merchants, who were buying the wines only to replenish their anonymous blending vats.

The growers I most often dealt with had well positioned vineyards and produced impressive wines from time to time—firm, with high color and good flavor. But they were inconsistent. Whether it was because of the condition of their tanks (there were few barrels and those there were did not inspire confidence), their rule-of-thumb methods, or for some other reason, I usually found that on one property, in one vintage, there could be both delicious and worse than doubtful lots. It was of constant concern to me to ensure that the batch I selected was the one actually shipped to London.

I had little reason to return to Fronsac after moving to the United States in 1970. A strong dollar had made the classed growths of the Médoc and Saint-Emilion so accessible that few American Bordeaux lovers were interested in going beyond them. Increased demand for such a restricted group of wines soon pushed up prices, however, and, when these were magnified by exchange rates, a broad gap opened between the fashionable growths and the minor properties of the Côtes de Bourg that Fronsac was perfectly positioned to fill. One of the first to see Fronsac’s renewed potential was Jean-Pierre Moueix, the distinguished Libourne merchant and vineyard proprietor who had led the renaissance of Saint-Emilion and Pomerol after the war. With his son Christian he showed his faith in Fronsac by investing in two or three properties there. He counseled the proprietors of other vineyards and undertook distribution of their production to make sure there would be enough good Fronsac wine on the market to be noticed.

Fortunately, the Moueix firm’s reputation and strength were themselves enough to revive interest in the appellation. But they could not have sustained it had the generation now in charge of Fronsac’s vineyards and chais not pursued vigorously the opportunity before them.

Partly from curiosity and partly from nostalgia, I went back to Fronsac for a few days last spring. In the mostly low-lying landscape of the Gironde, Fronsac’s two peaks are exceptional. Though barely two to three hundred feet high, they are so compacted on their tongue of land between the Isle and the Dordogne that they seem dramatically lofty. In the eighth century Charlemagne had built a fort on one of them, dominating the confluence of the two rivers. The Duc de Richelieu, before his exile, had imposed on its ruins a decorative Italian pavilion for what Féret, the Bordeaux Bible, describes coyly as elegant, witty parties, which were gossiped about well beyond the confines of Aquitaine—perhaps thereby giving rise to that later confusion of legs, thighs, and Fronsac wine.

It is pretty country, much favored by Bordeaux families for their secluded and unpretentious summer houses. The lanes that twist down the hills are mostly enclosed, English-fashion, by hedgerows overgrown with wild roses, and the vineyards are punctuated by old Romanesque churches and ruined windmills.

In 1976 the word Côtes was dropped from the appellation in favor of plain Fronsac, but the smaller, associated appellation of Canon-Fronsac can still be described with or without it. There are fewer than two thousand acres of vines within the Fronsac appellation, and another 750 produce the wine entitled to be called either Canon-Fronsac or Côtes de Canon-Fronsac.

Despite the superiority implied in Canon-Fronsac, the permitted grape varieties (Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, and Merlot), the permitted yields, minimum concentration, and all the other legal paraphernalia used to prop up French wine appellations are the same for both. Canon-Fronsac is distinguished from Fronsac by the squiggly outline of an eroded limestone plateau. Overlapping the villages of Fronsac and Saint-Michel-de-Fronsac, Canon-Fronsac’s location is described by Henri Enjalbert in his great tome on the wines of Saint-Emilion, Pomerol, and Fronsac as a "privileged viticultural terroir."

What really distinguishes it from Fronsac, however, is no more than an exposure of the chalk elsewhere hidden under a thin layer of reddish soil and the surrounding steep abutments that give its vines a springtime advantage by draining away cold air. In Fronsac, as in Canon-Fronsac (and as in Saint-Emilion), among those layers of limestone deposited by ancient incursions of the Atlantic there are mixtures of clay, sand, and gravel contributed by millennia of wash brought down with the Dordogne from the Massif Central.

On the first morning of my recent visit to Fronsac, Christian Moueix had arranged a tasting of a few 1985s put in perspective by a group of 1982s. His own Château Canon-Moueix stood out among the 1985s, closely followed by Château de la Dauphine, another Moueix property. Château Canon-Moueix, the firmer and fuller of the two, had a complex flavor; Château de la Dauphine relied more on its light, tender fruitiness. Among the 1982s, Château Mausse intrigued me with its marked bouquet and long flavor of violet-scented pastilles, but I especially liked the elegant Château Canon de Brem, now also a Moueix property, its vineyards adjoining those of Château de la Dauphine, of which it had once been a part. The wine’s structure seemed somewhat severe at first, but it had an intensity of fruit that charmed away all resistance. Delicious though it was, however, it had been placed at a disadvantage for tasting after the outstanding Château du Gaby, a richly concentrated, long-lasting wine that succeeded in dominating the entire group.

I lunched with Christian Moueix, who was generous enough to offer me his Château Pétrus ’71 with roast lamb. Having prepared my palate with what is considered to be one of the greatest vintages of Pétrus in the last twenty-five years, he then produced, to my astonishment at his Thurberesque bravado, a bottle of Château Canon de Brem ’64. It stood up to the Pétrus admirably: The mutual check of fruit and structure that had so impressed me in the 1982 tasted earlier was here melded by time into a richly balanced and lively whole.

The following day the associations of growers of Fronsac and of Canon-Fronsac had arranged for me a comprehensive tasting of their 1985s, again with a backdrop of older wines for perspective. Reviewing the high and consistent quality of those wines while remembering others from those same properties tasted twenty-five years before, I felt I had strayed into a school of frogs turned to princes.

Later, when I visited some of the properties, I understood the transformation. Behind the same crumbling stone walls and unruly gardens were new presses, gleaming fermentation tanks, and well kept—many new—barrels. I sampled some 1986s still in wood and was heartened that there was now the wherewithal to hold and age these wines as they deserved. The proprietors seemed better informed, too. Whereas, in the sixties, their fathers would each have kept much to himself, even eyeing other growers with caution, they were now familiar with their neighbors’ wines, ideas, and strengths and willingly talked of them as enthusiastically as they talked of their own.

To list and describe each wine tasted would be both tedious and pointless, because few of them are yet available in the United States. But among those that stand out in my memory, in addition to those I had already tasted with Christian Moueix, were the wines of Château Moulin Pey Labrie and Château La Grave (both, I discovered, made by Paul Barre, son of the man who had made that magnificent Château Canon de Brem ’64); the big, intense wines of Château Dalem, their quality and structure reinforced by the proprietor’s policy of using only new wood; the fleshy wines of Château Rouet; and the full-flavored wines of Château de la Rivière, presently one of the best, and best known, Fronsac wines already distributed and widely available here.

Jacques Borie, the ebullient proprietor of Château de la Rivière, who has packed into one life what most of us would have difficulty in accomplishing were we given, like cats, the boon of nine, persuaded me, while I was temporarily lulled at the close of lunch by a piece of cheese and his remarkable 1962, to get a better grasp of Fronsac topography from his ULM.

For the benefit of other innocents who might presume, as I did, that a ULM is another well wheeled European alphabet car, let me explain that it is nothing more complicated than a midget motor, with what seems to be a toy propeller facing the wrong way, attached unconvincingly to a single canvas wing held by two struts above a long pole. The pilot—if that word can be applied to the manipulator of a few pieces of wire—and his passenger, sitting one behind the other astride the pole, whizz through the treetops on this contraption like a pair of sorcerers on a broomstick, the passenger, as I can tell you, preoccupied most of the time wondering what he is to do with his feet when (if?) they ever come down to land.

I shall look forward to tasting again, and soon I hope, the wines of Canon-Moueix, La Dauphine, Rouet, De la Rivière, Canon de Brem, La Grave, Moulin Pey Labrie, Mausse, Du Gaby, Dalem, Arnauton, Villars, La Fleur Cailleau, Du Pavillon, Mazeris-Bellevue, and all the rest. But next time I pray I shall be spared having first to inspect the roof tiles of each one in close-up.

Originally published as Fronsac in Gourmet, March 1989.

The Moueix family has now divested itself of its Fronsac properties. Jacques Borie sold the Château de la Rivière. A modification of law allows owners of properties in the Canon-Fronsac appellation to sell their wine as plain Fronsac if they prefer.

VOUVRAY

Tufa and Temperate Summers

Vouvray, a cluster of houses by the Loire, a few miles east of Tours, would be unremarkable were it not for the wine that bears its name. Centuries ago Rabelais described that wine as tasting of taffeta, and it remains one of the most appealing in the world. When it is young, its fresh bite brings zest to a soft, natural sweetness, like the crisp taste of a newly picked apple; when it is well aged, and especially when it is made in a year when the grapes had been left to hang late into November, its bouquet and flavor can be of incomparable range.

The four thousand acres of vines that produce Vouvray spread into and over seven other villages and hamlets as well. Sainte-Radegonde, Rochecorbon, Vernou, Noizay, Chançay, Reugny, and Parçay-Meslay carry in their High Gothic names an echo of pious knights and illuminated vellum. They spread around Vouvray like ribs in a fan of the chalky tufa that blankets Touraine and breaks into valleys and clefts that open to each other and to the Loire. The slopes and cliffs are of such modest elevation that they seem little more than the twists of an undulating landscape. Here and there a cottage façade, flat against the rock face, appears to be a stage set or an optical illusion until one realizes that its rooms have been gouged from the cliff behind it, with chimneys incongruously puffing smoke among the vines on the plateau above. Acres of other tunnels and vaults extend even farther into the tufa, for what were begun as galleried quarries to build the city of Tours remain in use as working wine cellars.

Tufa, porous and crumbly until exposed to air, is penetrated easily by both water and vine roots. Like well drained gravel or sand it allows a warm surface environment that helps ripen the Chenin Blanc fully while the long, temperate summers of Touraine protect the grapes’ natural acidity. Wire-trained but gobelet pruned, so that in winter the vines look like rows of stubby clenched fists, Chenin Blanc is here at the limit of its climatic adaptability. It ripens late—picking rarely starts before the last week in October—to give juice that, uncommonly, is both rich in sugar and high in acidity.

It is this unusual balance of ripe grape sugar and clean, tart acids inherent in the grapes of Vouvray that brings together a soft fullness and an etched flavor that are characteristic of the wine they give. Paul de Cassagnac, whose 1930 classic, French Wines, guided a post-Prohibition generation, marveled that Vouvray could be both sweet and dry simultaneously. The sweetness, he said, exists in the wine, not as a heavy charge, but as a light transparent veil which allows all the charm to appear and the complete and delicate aroma to be freely liberated. In essence the appeal of Vouvray lies in its sweet-tart character, dry enough to be refreshing, gentle enough to be universally flattering. The natural sweetness gives the wine fullness that sustains it against creamy sauces, and the acidity ensures that it never cloys. My favorite veal escalope dish, with a pan juice, white wine, cream, and mushroom sauce, is at its best, I think, with a not-too-dry Vouvray.

According to legend the vineyards of Touraine began from a single vine shoot brought in the fourth century by Saint Martin, who had carried it in a bone from his native village near what is now the Yugoslav-Austrian border. (It is also popularly believed in Touraine that the depredations of Saint Martin’s ass among the vines the Saint had planted taught growers the virtues of pruning.) In fact, the Chenin Blanc vine that produces Vouvray and most other white wines of the Loire originated in neighboring Anjou (some speculate that it might even have started there as a wild vine indigenous to the primeval forests of the region) and was brought to Touraine, and hence to Vouvray, in 1445 by Thomas Bohier, then Lord of Chenonceaux. Planted by him on the hill of Mont Chenin, the vine, though to this day more often referred to by growers there as Pineau de la Loire, thus acquired its new name.

At first it was the Dutch who discovered these new Chenin Blanc wines. They shipped Vouvray to the Netherlands, where often it was discreetly improved with a little sweet Spanish wine from Málaga. (The seventeenth-century Dutch were the inventors and masters of the art of wine blending.) They encouraged the growers to extend the vineyards and at one period regularly bought almost the entire production. The wars of Louis XIV and the banishment of Protestants from France that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 greatly reduced that commerce; Pierre Carreau, an observer of Touraine at the time, wrote in a 1698 memorandum that loss of business with the Dutch has caused vineyards to drop to a half and a third of their value. Trade picked up in the eighteenth century only to suffer again in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.

Through all these vicissitudes the wine of Vouvray came to be increasingly appreciated for its style, unique among French wines. Easy to enjoy, it became pivotal to afternoon entertaining. Sparkling versions appeared, and when conditions were right the fungus of noble rot attacked overripe grapes causing them to shrivel rapidly, concentrating still further both sugar and acid and thereby producing prime dessert wines of such intense flavor and exquisite balance that they seem to age indefinitely. Morning mist from the Loire and the warmth of a late autumn sun were all that were needed.

Louis Orizet, in his book Les Vins de France, refers to several occasions when he was lucky enough to drink octogenarian Vouvrays, unfailingly all smiles through their wrinkles. Some years ago my long morning’s tasting with a grower at Rochecorbon ended by his reaching for a bottle of the miraculous 1895, buried in sand in a cellar niche. Its orange-gold color gleamed in the light of the cellar candle; the bouquet and flavor, powerfully fresh, were honeyed and rich with suggestions of impossible tropical fruits; and for the full half hour we sat drinking it the wine neither faded nor in any way lost its astonishing freshness. It is curious that where the brilliance of a rich Sauternes at its peak inevitably descends to a dry and sometimes harsh cacophony, fine mature Vouvray, because of its perfect acid-sweet balance, seems only to become more harmonious and increasingly vibrant.

In the nineteenth century white wines shipped from Touraine were often sold as Vouvray, and until comparatively recent times the wines now sold as Montlouis, grown on the opposite, south, side of the Loire, were included in the area of production. The modern regulations controlling the appellation were fought over for fifteen years until they finally established, in the late 1930s, parameters that restrict vines for Vouvray to the shoulder alone of each slope within the eight named communes; land below is devoted to grains, fruits, and sheep pasture, adding bucolic charm to the landscape. Each slope, because of exposure and variation of terrain, is known for the precise difference of quality and style in the wine it will yield. One, perhaps stonier than the others, will sparingly yield an austere wine that brings backbone to a blend; elsewhere, a measure of sand and clay will bring a fuller, more tender element. Then again, wines from valleys closest to the Loire show in their youth a keen acidity, whereas wines from the valleys of Vaux, Cousse, and La Brenne, in what are called the arrières côtes of Chançay, Reugny, and Parçay-Meslay, more often show in their youth a hard finish, with even a hint of bitterness, that also augurs well for aging.

The Vouvray vineyard holdings are small; roughly three hundred growers live from viticulture alone—a considerable number of families for only four thousand acres, especially when one remembers that the total acreage includes a few plots attached to mixed farms as well as those, hardly bigger than a backyard, that serve as weekend occupations. A single, unified, holding is rare: No matter how small, each is commonly split up, sometimes into as many as thirty or forty tiny, scattered patches. Unlike Sancerre, however, where a similar situation has been hard to change because growers fear so much the consequences of localized frosts or sudden hailstorms—quite apart from each man’s conviction that such dispersion of vines brings balance to his wines—Vouvray has seen some cautious swapping of plots to ease the problems of cultivation.

Even so, set as they are on rolling contours among pasture and orchard, meadow and woodland, the vineyards compose a serendipitous picture that entices Parisians down the new autoroute most weekends of the year. Lunch at Vouvray’s Grand Vatel or the cozy Perce Neige in Vernou, a picnic, or, more grandly, a visit to Barrier’s restaurant in Tours is followed by a taste (or two) in a cool and labyrinthine cave before loading a case (or two) in the car.

There was a time when weekly shipments to the bars and cafés of Paris absorbed much of the production, but that demand seems to have disappeared along with the Art Nouveau décor to which a glass of Vouvray, it must be admitted, once added a shimmering dimension. Vouvray is a period wine with an intrinsic style that is not always in accord with present sensibilities. A white wine that needs its modicum of sweetness to be in balance and some age to show its quality meets resistance when the first duties of a modern white wine are to be dry and young. That is why Vouvray is now in danger of becoming to wine, I sometimes think, what Chaucer is to books. His Canterbury Tales have been so often edited, adapted, abbreviated, and generally pulled about that, even among those who have read them, few have been allowed their full, vigorous flavor. There are Vouvray growers, including some of the best, who have been intimidated, I suppose, by devotees of a nouvelle cuisine that, while inserting irrelevant sugared sorbets in a meal and combining raspberry juice with everything, frowns for no good reason on even a gram or two of needed, natural sweetness in a glass of wine. Such growers attempt to edit, adapt, abbreviate, and generally pull their wines about to fit a dry straitjacket. But Vouvray fermented to complete dryness, I find, is a sorry thing: It is hard when it should be soft, sharp when it should be gentle, boring when it should be beguiling. At dinner recently in a distinguished Touraine restaurant, the only Vouvray on the list, from a grower of impeccable reputation, was made with such painful and unnecessary austerity that to drink it required discipline and gave no pleasure. How I longed for a few empty calories.

Bewildered by this misunderstanding of the very nature of Vouvray, the growers have turned increasingly to the option of using their grapes to make wine by the Champagne method of secondary fermentation in bottle. Production has moved inexorably in this direction so that now almost two thirds of Vouvray appears as sparkling wine. The law allows growers to increase yields and to pick earlier with lower natural sugar for this purpose, and, unfortunately, the subvariety of Chenin Blanc used to provide the intense wines, graceful yet strong, that age forever is making way for more productive strains better suited to the light wines needed for the Champagne process.

By good fortune I was in Touraine this year on a lucid spring day punctuated by gusty showers. Hedgerows were still bare except for sporadic droops of catkins, but apricot trees scattered blossom profligately over stone