Wine Tasting, Vineyards, in France

Cheap Wine on the Seine

A bug with the Typepad editor displayed erroneous dates on my last 2 posts - sorry for thatThe best tables in Paris these daysParis in July (not a weekend but a thursday !)
This is the high season again for picnics along the Seine in Paris. Temperatures have been in the low 30s' (°C) since the end of june (it's been cooling a bit recently though) and this brought even more people on the river banks for what has become a typical summer outing in Paris.
After a hot day at work (air conditionning is still rare here) and commutes in the moist and somehow stinky Paris Metro, the evening brings a welcome respite, especially near the water. Parks are fine, but the Seine is even better. With the long days and clear skies, who needs to be indoors anyway ? If going out to the restaurants is an option, the prospect of sitting and waiting orders in a poorly ventilated dining room puts off many. The terraces are already better but even there it's hot late as the pavement and buildings stored the heat of the sun and give it back long after the sun has lowered on the horizon.
And frankly, once you have experienced a picnic along the Seine with your dear one or with friends, there's hardly a terrace (even a prestigious one) to beat it. Along the Seine and its banks, the cobblestones and cement also reverberate the heat of the sun, but there's a gentle breeze that makes a difference, the water acting as a natural cooler.

Jacky Preys' Fié Gris (Loire)

Jacky Preys in his Fié-Gris vineyardMeusnes (Touraine, loire)
This story is about a grape variety, a distant cousin of the Sauvignon named Fié Gris, which survived disappearance thanks to a serie of improbable circumstances, luck, and thanks to the steady will on a single vigneron of the Loire, Jacky Preys.
The Loire had long ago many more grape varieties grown side by side than today. There was no vignerons growing only grapes then, but farmers growing different crops including grapes, and doing farm animals together. The empirical wisdom helped the farmers determine which grape to grow where, and what use to make of the juice. This was before two earthquakes brought havoc in this diversity landscape dotted by real farms : The Phyloxera and the Appellation rules.
The phyloxera destroyed the vineyards at the end of the 19th century and after the disaster, farmers had to replant hastily in an era when wine consumption in fast-growing France was increasing rapidly. Having to build a vineyard from scratch, they disregarded the empirically chosen variety of the past and resorted to plant higher-yield, newly-selected grape varieties to let the wine-tap flow again. the second disaster for the minor varieties was the newly-created Appellation system and rules which came later and edicted which variety could be blended in this and that Loire Appellation. The minor varieties like Menu Pineau, Fié Gris and others were not aknowledged for their particular qualities and weren't given a place in this Appellation system, which was designed, it has to be said, by the major players of the industry. in Touraine for example, Sauvignon and Chardonnay had the lead role among white varieties, and the rest were simply ignored. From then on, many vignerons just uprooted their own minor varieties to grow the recognized, marketable ones (with the Appellation-sanctionned label) while others, by tradition, inertia, or because they would just blend the juice from the minor varieties with the Sauvignon and the Chardonnay, kept a few blocks here and there. But with the successive generations of growers and occasional replantings, they eventually faded away.

Wine News (23)

Back from the grazing fieldBack home
On goat cheese, wine, garden shoes, crashing birds....and Wal Mart
As soon as I came to the Loire, back from my trip in Israel, I rode to the old farm lady who makes goat cheese from only two goats (remember this goat-cheese story on Wineterroirs), with the idea to visit her and buy a couple of goat cheeses. As I was parking the bike in front of the farm, I could see her in the far coming in my direction as she was coming back from the field with her two goats (picture]. Alas she hadn't any goat cheese left that day and I stopped at another goat-cheese farm that I have never reported on until now (could come up one of these days) and bought one of their raw-milk goat cheese. I had it that same evening with a bottle of Sauvignon that I had just bought in bulk to André Fouassier for 1,5 Euro a liter and bottled myself. Unfiltered wine (you can really see it), without the usual sulphur-addings of the bottling. The sticker I wrote on the bottle neck says Fouassier A. 08, vif (means vivid) because I bought him Sauvignon from two different vats, one being more rich (gras) and the other being more fresh and vivid. The cheese was a 8-day cheese, at the beginning of its elevage, already a bit refined and dry but not yet very expressive in terms of aroma strength. I paid 2,2 Euro for it. It was 8pm when I took the cheese and the bottle out to the garden, but still so hot with the sun, and I had to find a shadowy place near the hedge and the cloth line to enjoy this treat.
Being back home is one of the pleasures of travelling, you digest your experiences and put them in balance with your home surroundings, it's so different. On my way to the Loire (on the motorcycle), I rode part of the way on the Nationale 20 behind three guys on Harleys (actually, I saw later that there was a woman biker among them). Great experience, the sound and everything... Two of them had 34 license plates (34 is the administrative number of Herault, a departement in the southern France) and the 3rd had British license plates. The way they were riding together had an Easy Rider feel, I just missed the music, this was a great thundering experience... It gave me the will to try one of those machines one day, but I wonder if they're reliable (I'm not a mechanic and hate having to fix my machine).
Another strange thing happened to me that day. I'm used to watch for wild animals on the forested roads of the Loire, roe deers or wild boars, but didn't see that one coming : while riding as a relatively high speed on a deserted forest road in the Sologne, I saw in a millisecond a white thing coming from my right that struck me on the chest. Destabilized a moment, I kept my way, wondering if I had any thing broken, like my collarbone (that's were it struck me), but everything was OK, except the bird (that was a bird), I stopped and went back looking on both sides of the road and found the poor thing laying dead on the ground : a jay. Lesson of this story, if in the future you don't see a new post in, say, a month, that could be a wild boar instead of a jay...

A Grape-Grower's Tale (Israel)

Shay Nir in the machinery & tools storage barn Moshav Mata, Jerusalem hills.
Thank you again to Ze'ev who made a keen intelligence-gathering here and led me to this moshav for this last Israeli story after foreseeing that there was a lot to learn and see there.
This story is about very important people for the wines of Israel, people who are very rarely in the spotlight, the growers. Even in France, I've never made a report on a grower although many do such an important job, and here I am in Israel reporting on one...
Growing grapes and making wine are still often very separate sectors in Israel, a country where contracted vineyards and purchased grapes are the norm. The growers have been more and more distancing themselves from the high-yields practices of the past, an era started when the Baron de Rotschild paid the growers exclusively by the volume of grapes without regard on the link between yields and quality. Here are these growers, the Nir brothers, who seem to work enthusiasticly, planting carefully-selected varieties on land leased by the State of Israel with samely carefully-chosen plots deemed to make the best of the terroir.

Vitkin (Israel)

Asaf, Sharona and Doron in the vatroomMoshav Kvar, Vitkin
Vitkin is a small family winery making small-batch cuvées near Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, from vineyards located on the Carmel mountain slopes and in Ella valley in the Judean hills.
A convergence of destiny made the three people involved in this venture to enentually follow the winery life after other life experiences. Just think : the current winemaker Doron Belogolovsky was a marble and stone dealer in his former life. For his business, he travelled regularly to Italy, in particular to Verona for a couple of years, where he got used to, and learned to like, guess what ?, wine. This was the 1980s', wine was a commodity then virtually non-existent in Israel, speaking of quality or even of drinkable wines. His wife Sharona was an architect, and she happened to have a brother, Asaf, who went to the agricultural school with different side courses and who eventually studied winemaking. That was right at the time Doron's interest into wine increased a few notches, especially after one of his Italian marble-and-stone business partners brought him to a family winery there for a visit and tasting in the cellars. That was a revelation. This is how it all had its start. The family farm in moshav Kvar was the ideal place to begin, and they're still there today, 7 years after the winery formally opened (2002). Doron was the initiator and wine lover (not that the two others don't like wine I guess) turned winemaker, Asaf got the formal winemaking education, with internship abroad, in Bordeaux, California and Australia. And Sharona, after keeping her architect job for a while, joined when the business took pace.

Seahorse Winery (Israel)

Ze'ev Dunie in the cask cellarMoshav Bar Giora, Judean hills
The SeaHorse winery is located in moshav Bar Giyora. Seahorse is Suson Yam in hebrew, Suson meaning small horse and Yam, sea. We reach the moshav after driving along a very scenic road through the Judean hills [picture on left], a narrow canyon-like valley bordered with lots of trees and rocks.
The collective-farm community was founded by Yemenite jews in the 1950s'. Ze'eve Dunie, the man behind the Seahorse winery is one of these decisive actors who took part in the early years when small, qualitative wineries sprouted all over Israel.
When we arrived at the winery, a young family was leaving the winery after a visit. The Seahorse winery grounds are far from being neatly arranged and landscaped like some other more commercial wineries. There is no tasting room and the lot in front of the facility (a former chicken farm) is quite messy and grassy, but Ze'ev Dunie doesn't care too much about these secondary details. This man, who didn't enter the wine world through an enology school and wasn't backed by wealthy investors, fell for the Israeli wine while shooting a documentary about wine in Israel. He has studied film making in California in the 1970s' and worked for TV in New York, which led him to Israel for a story about wineries there. That's when he got the virus. A personality who follows his own intuitions and doesn't hesitate to go against the wine trends, he makes a wine range with cuvées that respond to names like Lennon, Camus or Antoine [de Saint Exupery] in homage to authors and artists that he admires.

Domaine du Castel (Judean hills, Israel)

Eytan Ben Zekan along the early Castel vineyardsRamat Raziel, Judean Hills
The Domaine du Castel winery is located on the Judean hills in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It sits in the Ramat Raziel moshav (collective farm) in the place of a former chicken farm. The moshav structure has evolved throught Israel from the one of a collective farm where co-residents follow a semi-independant life but still centered on commodity production to the one of a residential community. Ramat Raziel, as such a residential community, didn't see positively the setting up of a winery in their midst even though it was to become one of the best wineries of Israel. The Castel vineyard was planted in 1988 and the first wine from these first rows was made in 1992, at a time when outside of the Golan Heights winery which had been founded short time ago, there was not much good wine produced in Israel, the wine landscape being dominated by several long-established mass bottlers like Carmel and Binyamina. This 2-casks-only 1992 wine was bottled 3 years later and through a common friend, one of these bottles landed on the table of Sothesby's Serena Sutcliffe (head of Sothesby's international wine department) who was stunned by the outstanding quality of the wine. Eli Ben Zaken was heartened by this prestigious regognition and it helped make him the move to make wine on a larger scale. The wine production at Castel has been now around 100 000 bottles for a few years now. Eytan says that the size of this production may question for some their being still considered a "boutique" winery, to quote the name of this wave of new small wineries which sprouted all over Israel a few years ago. It's not clear if there should be a limit in terms of production to still be considered a boutique winery, but anyway, they consider themselves as a professional winery whilst keeping with the initial spirit of the early years.

Yatir Winery (Israel)

Eran Goldwasser, winemaker at YatirTel Arad, Southern Hebron Mountains (Israel)
The Yatir winery is outstanding in many regards among Israeli wineries. First by its location. Imagine one of the hottest regions of Israel : we are here in the south, these are the slopes of the Hebron mountains, nothing would have grown here a few dozen years ago, the landscape was rocky and extremely arid at the border of the Negev desert which lies further on the south. The Yatir forest is a wonder by itself, it is the biggest man-made forest in Israel, and the extreme climatic conditions in which it was planted make the whole enterprise quite admirable. Lots of research, thinking and human expertise allowed this, but the idea was fathered by a single man : Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, who is said to have mandated the scientists of the country to study the practibility of creating a man-made forest here to bring this area back to life. The scientists, according to the story, said that it was not feasible due to the extreme climate there and the aridity, but when Ben Gurion was reported their negative answer he just said something like "No problem, let's change the scientists", and he pursued his personnal dream against common wisdom with the help of the KKL-JNF Fund. The result is amazing, a diversity and a wild life that you can even see on day time when it's hot (when the sun rises it must be worth to see). The Yatir forest as a pilot program has been a model for other desert region across the world. See this State of Israel document [Pdf] about desertification : on the climate/soil map of Israel, Yatir forest lies in the semi-arid region in the south (near Be'er-Sheva) and gets very little rain while the Golan in the upper-right corner is described as a humid region. And the Yatir vineyards, the planting of which having commercially begun in 1996, are nestled in the middle of this huge forested area [click on the picture on left, the pale-green patch in the middle is the vineyard]. These vineyards are surrounded by wild life and take advantage of the altitude and the terroir to resuscitate the wineries that were covering the region 2500 years ago (see the 1st story of this post).

Margalit Winery (Israel)

Yair MargalitCaesarea, Israel
If there's someone who can be credited for starting the boutique winery movement, that's Yair Margalit. This scientist-trained, turned-winemaker/wine-lover created his winery in 1989, well before the other independant small wineries which sprouted all over Israel in the early 2000s'. We must remember that until the mid to late 1980s', Israel's wine landscape was quite uninteresting, there was basically only mass bottlers like Carmel around and virtually no small player or independant wineries set up by passionate individuals like the ones that came later.
Yair Margalit learned the trade in California and wrote his first winemaking book there in 1990, a book that is dubbed the bible of winemakers in Israel and helped many aspiring vintners to make the leap and start a winery. He has since published other books (bottom of the page) about winemaking, all with a scientific approach on the different stages of winemaking.
Chemist and physical-chemist by profession, he worked in research in Israel and started his interest in winemaking while in California when he was at UC Davis, studying chemistry unrelated to winemaking. The enology school at UC Davis was right near the chemistry department, he adds with a laugh, so he sneaked inside and from the 1st lecture he had there he fell in love with this field. So he took in one single year the full enology course which is usually stretched over 4 years (because you can study everything you want there, in parallel to your initial field). When he eventually came back home in israel he began making wine with his son who was very young then, crushing grapes with the feet.

Tzora (Judean Hills, Israel)

Eran Pick, the winemaker at TzoraKibbutz Tzora, Judean hills (Israel)
Ronnie James, the initiator of the winery venture at kibbutz Tzora played a very important role in the emergence of quality wineries in Israel. Initially an agronomist and a grower, he had spent 30 years growing grapes for purchasing wineries in the Sorek valley (Samson region). Making wine himself with the grapes he grew was a dream for him, but you may know that the original spirit of the kibbutz was rooted in a relatively austere version of socialism, even if human-sized and respective of the individual; wine was not really favorably considered by the idealistic kibbutzim then, it could even be considered as a bit decadent, and it was not among the utilitarian commodities that this type of economic entity was supposed to produce for the development of Israel. But Ronnie James kept pushing in this direction and eventually succeeded to overcome the reluctance of the kibbutz directorate. An other thing made a problem then, says Zeev : in the kibbutz egalitarian culture, everyone is supposed to hold every position and job at a time or another, rotating from the simplest tasks to the highest responsabilities, and that's just not possible in a winery, there's only one winemaker and you don't take the reins overnight unless you don't care about the quality of the wine.
Anyway, the winery was created at last in 1992 at Tzora (see the gate to the kibbutz on the right), some equipment was bought or borrowed here and there (just finding winery equipment was not easy at that time in Israel), and the first vintage yielded 1500 bottles in 1993. Kibbutz Tzora kept growing grapes for other wineries as it did before, but Ronnie James could at last makes wine there from part of the grape production, I would guess from the best of the grapes that Tzora grew, as along the years he had learned which plots and combination of varieties/terroirs yielded the best result. Ronnie James passed away last year in april, alas, and we couldn't ask him firsthand about his experience.