Wines of the Wind Surf, with a Shipboard Tasting

An Adriatic cruise beleaguered by rain, however disappointing in many respects, is certainly fine for exploring your vessel’s wines and bars. Diane and I undertook a lot of such investigations during our soggy week aboard the MSY Wind Surf.
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The ship’s basic wine list leaned heavily on young wines, many of them from California or the Pacific Northwest (the company, Windstar, is American-owned). We nevertheless managed to find a few bottles pleasing to our more Europe-oriented palates – a good Fèvre Chablis, for instance, and a really elegant Batasiolo Barolo, as well as a nicely maturing Pouilly Fuissé – so there was no danger of our dying of dehydration.

Wind Surf’s dining rooms were staffed by several wine stewards: Eleonora, the ship’s young senior sommelier; Noel, who served us our first evening on board; and Jaerve, who poured for us our last and talked to us passionately about wine.
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Tom and Jearve

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One particularly grey afternoon Eleonora organized a tasting of some of Wind Surf’s higher-shelf bottles, which my vinous curiosity prompted me to try, even though I have happily abandoned most large-scale tastings.
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Eleonora

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This tasting was a totally different creature. Professional tastings tend to be like marathons; this one was more like a stroll in the park. Professional tastings will confront you with anywhere from 10 to 30 wines, chosen to show an audience of journalists, importers, and buyers the spectrum of a producer, a region, a variety, or a consortium; and meant to be sampled and spat more or less in silence.

Eleonora’s tasting was quite appropriately aimed for those of the ship’s clientele who were interested in wine but not necessarily very knowledgeable about it, and it consisted of only five wines chosen from among the most exotic or most interesting or most expensive of Wind Surf’s stock.
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This audience was exactly the kind of consumer we journalists, back in the day, used to call civilians, and who – we constantly had to remind ourselves – were the people we were writing for, not for each other, as was an ever-present temptation. (I have long believed that the reason so much wine writing becomes so recherché is because writers keep trying to impress each other rather than enlighten a consumer.)

Another major difference between this tasting and the ones I had grown accustomed to: no spitting. You were encouraged not just to taste the wines but to drink them: instead of an austere plate of dry crackers or bread slices, an attractive little tray of snacks accompanied each set of glasses. Very appropriate to the audience and the occasion, I thought, although a bit of a shock to me: What’s sauce for many geese isn’t sauce for every gander.
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The five wines formed a nicely mixed group, well chosen for showing the range available on shipboard: two whites and three reds, Pouilly Fumé and Vouvray, a Supertuscan, a Châteauneuf du Pape, and a Spanish Supertuscan type.
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The Pouilly Fumé, a 2021 Les Deux Cailloux by Fournier Père et Fils, opened the tasting. It smelled quite classically of grass and smoke, with a distinct sub-aroma of wet leaves. Those elements were not as emphatic in the mouth: The wine was smoother and rounder than its nose. A little taste of dried apple came up as it opened in the glass. I found this a pleasant enough wine, even though Sauvignon blanc is probably my least favorite of the French noble varieties.
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The Vouvray, a 2021 by Alban de Saint-Pré, had a fine earthy, chalky nose and showed good body and balance. It tasted a little sweet in the finish – a bit of dried apricot – but, just opened, it was clean and refreshing. Unfortunately, from my point of view, the longer it sat in the glass the sweeter it got, but it was one of the favorite wines for many other tasters. In the Loire, Chenin Blanc yields everything from superb dry dinner wines (such as Savennières) to incredibly age-worthy sweet dessert wines, so this was a fair representative of the breed and a good introduction to it for this audience.
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Then Eleonora moved to red wines, starting with 2016 Lucente, a Supertuscan created on one of Frescobaldi’s Montalcino estates, in what was originally a joint project with Robert Mondavi. This was a wine of deep color and deep aroma, the latter still very grapey – lots of Sangiovese – because of the wine’s youth. The Sangiovese was also evident on the palate, along with other grape flavors (turned out to be Merlot) and plenty of tannin to restrain Sangiovese’s abundant acidity. This was a winemaker’s wine, not a grape farmer’s, and still very young. The blend, by the way, was 60% Merlot and 40% Sangiovese, but the Sangiovese made a fight of it.

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Then came a 2019 Châteauneuf du Pape from Maison Castel. That is about ten years younger than I like to drink Châteauneuf, but this was a good specimen, more forward and ready than I’d expected. It showed a great earthy, underbrushy nose, and on the palate dark cherry/berry fruit. It finished dark as well, with earthy, black fruit flavors persisting nicely  Despite being so young that it was almost purple, it drank quite pleasantly.
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The final wine was the oldest of the group, a 2012 Campo Eliseo Toro: Toro is the denomination, Campo Eliseo the estate. This was, in effect, a Spanish version of a Supertuscan wine: 100% Tinto de Toro, a variety of Tempranillo (a grape that is in Spain traditionally blended with others in wines like Rioja), and evidently aged long in abundant new oak. The palate was dominated by dark, dried cherry flavors and by forceful acidity and tannins. It’s a wine that needs beef and old cheeses. I thought it should have been showing better for its ten years of aging, but then I am not enamored of what all that wood does to and for a wine.
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This tasting was a very interesting experience for me. I was particularly curious to hear people’s reactions to the individual wines and to hear the questions they asked – some very shrewd, some quite naïve. As a wine journalist, I know how easy it is to get caught up with the shrewd questions and to forget that the naïve ones are just as worthy, and certainly more needing, of attention. Eleonora did a nice job of attending to both, with respect and enthusiasm. This was for Diane and me a very pleasant way to spend a rainy afternoon at sea.

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W(h)ining on the Seine

When I think about shipboard dining, I tend to time-warp fantasize about a first-class table – and wine list – on a transatlantic crossing on the old Normandie or Île de France. Glamor and great bottles!  Alas, those days are gone forever, and the kind of shipboard dining I actually do is far more quotidian, aboard river boats cruising French rivers. The wines there amount to sort of a cross between the wine list of a decent resort hotel and what’s available on the Jersey Shore – long on utility, but very short on glamor.

All this is prologue to telling you about the casual imbibings of Diane’s and my recent stint in France – three days in Paris, plus a week cruising on the Seine. Very relaxing, even charming, but in no way glamorous.
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The dining room on the MS Seine Princess

 

Of course we drank wine every day: Being in France, and on vacation, twice a day, lunch and dinner, which is something we almost never do at home. A lot of the wine was quite enjoyable, simple stuff for easy drinking, which, when you think about it, is what a river cruise line ought to offer. Certainly none of the other 136 passengers on the Seine Princess seemed at all unhappy with any of it. Me, I’m a crank, a wine snob, and/or a fussbudget, as most of my readers already know, so I kept looking around for more or better. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Croisieurope line, with which we were sailing, routinely offers a short list of wines at lunch, dinner, and the ship’s bar, from which it pours generously and at no charge. It has a reserve list of somewhat better wines at low fees for the special occasion or the more demanding client. That was us: We hit the reserve list almost every dinner. We hadn’t gone on vacation to save money.

Given the chef’s heavy leanings toward fish, fowl, and white meats, with most lunches we drank the basic list’s decent unoaked Languedoc Chardonnay, which made a pleasant lubricant for most of the kitchen’s fare.
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Dinner was not quite as white-wine exclusive, but even there, whites were often called for. The reserve list accommodated: There too, white wines – some nice older ones included – preponderated. The most interesting of those wines for us was a very nicely aged 2010 Alsace Riesling from Roland Petterman, which showed a good structure and still-interesting fruit – a nice, mature white wine.
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Not as old but still quite interesting – and red! – were two 2016 wines from Chapoutier: a Crôzes Hermitage, Petite Ruche, and a St. Joseph, Deschants.
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Both were very fine and representative of their kinds, even though I would have liked them just a few years older. I’ve always been fond of Rhône wines, white and red, and I find that most of them age exceptionally well. These two fit that bill very nicely and were certainly the most enjoyable wines we drank onboard.

I should add that for our three dinners in Paris, we most happily drank red: a very nice 2020 Chinon from Marc Brédif at Père Louis (see Diane’s post), a fine but young 2014 Brane Cantenac at Benôit, and a very nice 2008 Domaine de la Chevalerie Bourgueil, Busardières at our beloved Au Petit Riche. I’ve always loved those Loire reds also, and Au Petit Riche has a Loire-based kitchen and cellar.
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See?  It doesn’t take a lot to make me happy.

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More Wines of The Wine Trust

In a recent post, I wrote about a fine California Charbono from The Wine Trust’s portfolio, and this time I intend to talk about some of its French and Italian wines.

The name, The Wine Trust, will probably not resonate much with most wine drinkers, who rarely pay any attention to who imports or distributes the wines they love. That’s not a grave error, though the information can be useful. Among other reasons, it’s worth knowing about an importer’s other wines, since different importers’ portfolios reflect different interests and preferences and styles of wine. If a particular importer brings in a wine you really like, you might very well find other gems in its lineup. Obviously, this is particularly true of smaller, more specialized importers.

The Wine Trust, for instance, shows great strength in Bordeaux: Its collection features many of the famous châteaux. What is of special interest to me, since most of those more famous wines have moved well beyond my economic range, is that The Wine Trust also has an impressive array of the smaller, less celebrated châteaux, which increasingly represent the real values in Bordeaux. I mean estates like Cantemerle, Cantenac Brown, Giscours, Clinet and my special favorite, Ormes de Pez. I think a selection like that is an excellent sign that the importer in question is using real discernment. Anyone can go after the famous names: It takes some knowledge and taste to find the real beauties in the ranks of the many less famed.

But the firm’s portfolio ranges farther afield than Bordeaux, and many of its less costly French and non-French selections seem to reflect an interesting palate at work. With that in mind, I sampled two French whites and two Italian reds from its portfolio. The results were interesting indeed.
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The whites were two classic French appellations from very different zones along the Loire river: a 2017 Muscadet Monnières-Saint Fiacre from Menard-Gaborit and a 2016 Chenin blanc from Idiart.
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The Menard-Gaborit was classic clean, lean Muscadet, crisp, mineral, and slaty, with dry floral notes and a long finish. We drank it very happily with fried scallops, which fattened it up somewhat. It all but screamed for fresh shellfish, making it absolutely clear why Muscadet is generally conceded to be the oyster wine par excellence. This bottling would be fine with any selection of oysters or clams on the half shell, or with any selection of sushi and sashimi, for that matter.
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The Idiart Chenin blanc derives totally from its eponymous grape variety, a specialty of the middle Loire valley, where it has been cultivated for centuries. Compared to Muscadet, this is a bigger-bodied wine, rounder and deeper and less edgy: the acid is held more in check by other fruit and mineral elements. This particular example rested ten months on its fine lees, which gives it a touch more richness. I thought it a nice, chalky young Chenin, with fine potential for drinking over the next few years. (Loire Chenin blanc can take bottle age quite nicely.)
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The two red wines I tasted from The Wine Trust’s portfolio were a Valpolicella and a Barbera, both from the 2017 vintage.
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The Valpolicella, a Classico from Monte Santoccio, sported an intriguing nose of dry grapes and volcanic soil. (The Valpolicella and Soave zones have the northernmost volcanic soils in Italy.)  Dried cherry and peach appeared on the palate. It seemed a bit austere for a Valpolicella, but fine, beautifully balanced and enjoyable drinking – especially with its easy-to-take 12 degrees of alcohol, a rarity these days. By the way: cheese brought up this wine’s fruit very delightfully.
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The other Italian red, a Barbera d’Alba from Giacomo Vico, showed a lovely black cherry nose and palate, exactly as one would hope for in its kind. This was an intriguing wine, less “barolized” than many Alba Barberas. It felt light on the palate, and long-finishing, with fine balance and more obvious bright acid (which is absolutely characteristic of the Barbera grape) than many Alba specimens. In short, it was completely true to its variety but in a way slightly different from most of the examples from its zone.
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That too was true of the Valpolicella, with its little extra touch of austerity and restraint. So we have an importer who chooses paradigm French wines and very fine Italian wines with a bit of a twist. I call that interesting.

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines II

I’m posting now about the inexpensive case of mixed, everyday red wines I put together as a complement to the dozen everyday white wines I talked about two posts back.

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We drink a lot of white wine at Casa Maresca, but we consume even more red. I’d guess that two out every three, maybe three out of four, dinners we make call for red wines – and since I care strongly about making the wine and food play happily together, it means I like to keep a good variety of red wines on hand. And that means, of course, reasonably priced wines, for all the obvious reasons.

Enough prologue: Here’s the list.

• Barale Barbera d’Alba 2017 Castlé
• Barale Dolcetto d’Alba 2017 Le Rose
• Bodegas Olarra Rioja Reserva 2010 Cerro Anon
• Cà Lustra di Zanovelli Marzemino 2017 Belvedere
• Centopassi Nero d’Avola 2016 Argille di Tagghia Via
• Château de Plaisance Anjou Rouge 2017 Entre Copains
• Cuvée des Galets (Côtes du Rhône) 2016
• Filipa Pato (Vinho Tinto Bairrada DOC) Baga 2017
• Oreste Buzio Freisa del Monferrato 2017
• Oreste Buzio, Grignolino del Monferrato 2017 Casalese
• Villa Sant’Anna Chianti Colli Senese 2015
• Viña Real Rioja Crianza 2015

In selecting this batch of wines, I was not trying to be experimental, to try new wines or kinds of wines I’m not familiar with. Food compatibility was the goal, and compatibility with the kinds of food we cook every day was the guiding principle of selection. Hence the preponderance of Italian wines on the list, and especially the large presence of Piedmontese wines, which I think are particularly food-friendly, and which – happily – are available in good variety in the New York area.

Barbera and Dolcetto I find are especially useful. Barbera’s medium body and high acidity make it compatible with an extraordinary range of foods, from – to choose a few random examples – asparagus frittata to tomato-based sauces to grilled sausages or even steaks, especially gamy cuts like skirt steak or hanger steak. Dolcetto is softer-bodied and far less acid, and it loves buttery sauces, mushrooms, more delicate meat – especially veal in any form.

Nero d’Avola is also medium-bodied, and on the palate feels and tastes Merlot-ish. Its strong suits are stews and brown-sauced casseroles – really any dish that isn’t aggressively sauced or spiced.

Even more useful – the utility infielder of red wines – is that perfectly named Anjou red, Entre Copains – “among pals,” which is how I envision large quantities of this wine must be drunk on its home turf. It’s 100% Cabernet franc, which is a Loire valley specialty, and this is one of most welcoming versions of it I’ve encountered. Its pleasing, soft, generic red fruit would match with anything from a good pizza on up the culinary scale to simple roasts and grilled meats. It’s practically the definition of an enjoyable everyday wine.

The Côtes du Rhône wasn’t quite that all-niches useful: By itself, it was a fairly light, high-acid Rhône, with cherryish fruit and a good finish, but it rounded nicely and gained some flesh with food, especially with cheese.

The Baga from Filipa Pato was also surprisingly soft on the palate and versatile with food. It stood up well, for instance, to mideastern spiced lamb meatballs and to Indian chutneys and pickles. Filipa is the daughter of Luis Pato, the acknowledged master of this grape in Portugal, and with this particular wine she has chosen a different path from that of her father’s formidable bottles.

The Grignolino and Freisa are more specialized wines that I couldn’t resist buying, since I don’t encounter them that often. Both are light-bodied, light-fruited reds ideal for warm weather quaffing, which is exactly what I’m saving them for. I should have done that too with the Colli Senese Chianti: These are always at-most-medium-bodied and fruity, with a touch of Sangiovese elegance, but this bottle was a tad too light for matching with cold weather dinners.

The Marzemino was another wine I selected simply because I don’t get many chances to taste it. This one turned out to be a big, not entirely balanced wine, black-plum fruited and a touch hot: It loved steak and mushrooms, but wasn’t too happy with anything else.

The two Riojas – Crianza and Reserva, at opposite ends of the aging spectrum – were both a bit disappointing. I love Rioja and find it very useful as a dinner wine, but of these two bottles the Reserva was too young of its kind and yet still too important for everyday utility, while the Crianza had been exposed to too much oak, which diminished its freshness and charm. I won’t give up on Rioja, however: I’ll just have to sample some others.

And there’s my necessary excuse to order some more wine. Diane, look away.

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Enjoyable Everyday Wines I

If you’re a committed wine lover and need your fix every day, it’s a great advantage to live in New York City. The variety of fine wine available is unmatched anywhere in the world, and shopping is a snap. Let it sleet and storm outside: You can sit at your desk – perhaps sipping a glass of wine – and let your search engine (Wine-Searcher is a good one) investigate for you. That’s especially handy if you know more or less the kind of wine you’re seeking.

Even handier is the search service provided by several of the larger retail shops in New York, which allows you to rummage through their entire inventory by any of several different criteria.
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I’m especially fond of one that Astor Wine and Spirits offers: searching by price range. That’s useful for any number of reasons, but I especially like that it offers me things I might not have thought of, wines outside my usual Italian and French go-to categories. We all get into ruts: This helps push me out of them. Twenty minutes of online browsing and I can put together a case of 12 different whites and another of 12 different reds at prices I like – say between $10 and $20 for everyday wines – and they will probably be delivered within 24 hours. For an aging wino, it doesn’t get much easier.
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Let me be clear: When I say everyday wines, I mean every day. Diane and I have wine with dinner every night. All right, maybe once or twice a year we have beer, but 99 times out of 100 we opt for wine – and like most people in this galaxy, we can’t afford to drink great wine every time. Not that I haven’t done my best to raise the level of our daily bottle by, for decades now, buying wines young and unready but at reasonable prices and squirreling them away for as long as I could.

Besides, it’s not just wine we care about: It’s also and especially what Italians call the abbinamento – coordinating the wine with the food it accompanies. That’s crucial to making an everyday dinner something to relish. You have to pay attention to the way the wine and the food mesh. Much as I love mature Barolo and Barbaresco, I don’t want to drink them with a dish of frankfurters and beans. It’s disproportionate – and besides, good franks and beans are estimable in their own right and deserve a decent wine that works well with them. Don’t send a Brunello to do what a Bardolino can do better, don’t open a Beaune Premier Cru where a Beaujolais Villages is what’s needed.

(Incidentally, the above examples illustrate the first principle I laid out centuries ago in The Right Wine, my book about wine and food matching: Scale is crucial. I feel even more strongly about the second principle declared in that book: Acidity is what makes a wine food-friendly. But that’s a topic for a different post. End of digression.)

Now, just what sort of everyday wines am I talking about? Well, here’s the case of white wines, all under $20, that I recently purchased, most of which I tasted first as an aperitif (we all need to keep up our strength while cooking) and then with dinner.

 

Alsace Auxerrois Leon Manbach 2017 – Very pleasant, light, but substantial enough to handle a choucroute. Nice white-flower and mineral nose, round, but with enough acidity to work with food. Quite decent.

Alvarinho Couto de Mazedo 2016 (Vinho Verde) – Very nice Albariño, crisp, fresh, aromatic: Good aperitif, fine with fish.

Alvarinho Regueiro 2016 (Vinho Verde) – quite fine: rounder and fuller than the preceding wine, more dinner wine than aperitif. Excellent with a roasted orata (sea bream).

Jean-Paul Brun Beaujolais Blanc 2017 – excellent Beaujolais producer. Nice unwooded Chardonnay, with round fruit and great freshness. Very enjoyable.

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Classic Domaine de l’Ecu Muscadet 2016 – This is a Muscadet producer I normally like very much, but this bottle was a bit of a disappointment. Drunk by itself, it tasted too much of oak. Food wiped that out to some extent, but it never rose to the level of crispness and sharpness I had hoped for.

De Cranne Bordeaux Sec 2016 – Should have been really interesting (the blend is 40% Sauvignon gris, 25% Muscadelle, and 35% Semillon), but turned out to be somewhat coarse and disappointing.

Gavi di Gavi Podere Merlina 2017 – Not a big, round Gavi, but a lighter-bodied, mineral-inflected example, with a marked and enjoyable citrus bite. Fine as aperitif and with lighter fare.

Meyer-Fonné Alsace Gentil 2016 – A lovely Alsace wine, so floral that the initial taste seemed German, but it rounded beautifully with a pheasant pâté and roasted chicken thighs.

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Ribolla Gialla Ronchi di Cialla 2017 (Friuli Colli Orientali) – quite fine and characteristic. Stood up beautifully to a choucroute garnie, and I don’t know how much more you can ask of a white wine.

Rioja Blanca Real Rubio 2017 – A bit disappointing: old-fashioned, slightly oxidized white, not unpleasant but with no charm.

Timorasso Colli del Timorasso Ricci 2014 – A lovely light Timorasso, soft-bodied but with sufficient acid; floral aroma and delicate palate of dry pear and apricot. Very enjoyable.

Weszeli Grüner Veltliner Langenlois 2017 – Very good and characteristic Grüner, with nice balance, body, and minerality. Partnered quite nicely with Chinese dumplings and home-made egg foo young. Bright, light on palate.

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I grant you that this is not an earthshakingly exotic list of wines: Had I wished, I could have cast a much wider net. But these are the kind of wines I like, so this time around I stuck with them. Others, of course are free to be as experimental as they wish: There were 88 other wines on the list I was choosing from. Have fun!

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A Cabernet Franc Face-off

When it comes to scenery, Long Island is no match for the Loire Valley. The flat former potato fields of the North Fork bear no resemblance to the steep vineyards and castellated towns that punctuate the shores of the Loire and its tributaries. Moreover, the soils of Long Island’s vineyards differ greatly from those of the middle Loire, home territory of Chenin blanc and Cabernet franc: If anything, the North Fork soils come closest to the low-lying, sandy gravels and clays of Bordeaux, where Cabernet sauvignon is king..

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Loire Vineyard

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Paumanok Vineyard

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But despite all those differences, Loire grapes do very well on the North Fork. White varieties particularly thrive: Almost every grower on Long Island cultivates Sauvignon blanc, the star of the upper Loire, and Paumanok Vineyards particularly has had startling success with Chenin blanc, the prized white grape of the middle Loire.

Given that, I wondered how well Cabernet franc, the chief red grape of the middle Loire, which makes such charming dinner wines as Chinon and Bourgueil, would fare on the North Fork. To find out, I decided to taste a representative Loire Cab franc from a classic appellation against Paumanok’s Cab franc – Paumanok because of its achievement with the middle Loire’s Chenin – and check out the similarities and differences. Easy and fun: my ideal combination for all chores. And made all the more fun when Beloved Spouse opted to make a classic Loire dish for us to taste the wines with: the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday, eating and drinking our own personal sunshine.

For this experiment I had on hand a 2016 Domaine de la Haute Olive Chinon and a 2014 Paumanok. It turned out to be just as interesting and enjoyable as I had hoped. Both wines smelled and tasted authentically of the variety – light fruit aromas, perhaps a little raspberry, with earthy, herbaceous notes and even a hint of smoke, soft on the palate, with moderate acidity and subdued black fruit: not powerhouses but charmers. Those are classic Cabernet franc characteristics.

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Tasted by themselves, in the sort of isolation that so often marks professional tastings and judgings, they seemed unexciting, but sound and well made. A hint of what they were capable of as dinner wines showed in the way both got the digestive juices flowing. They wanted food, and made the tasters want it too.

As a textbook illustration of everything that’s wrong with formal wine tastings and their resulting scores, these wines changed dramatically when dinner appeared: Both just blossomed, opening complex, soft flavors that interplayed differently and beautifully with each dish. Their differences from each other, almost invisible in the formal tasting, showed more clearly with food, the Chinon slightly lighter bodied and more elegant, the Paumanok fuller, earthier – but both interacted splendidly with the dinner. (You can read about our dinner dishes on Diane’s blog, here.) It’s no wonder Rabelais loved the wines of Chinon: They played his game.
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It was abundantly clear from this little experiment that Paumanok Vineyards has gotten Cabernet franc right, verifying in my mind that it has a vocation for Loire grapes. The question it raises for me is, how much of the North Fork shares that vocation? The predominant red grapes planted there are, unsurprisingly, Cabernet sauvignon and Merlot, just as in California. The prestige of Bordeaux wines has largely straightjacketed American winemaking since the 1960s, and the small amount of Cabernet franc grown here is almost always used only in Meritage wines and other replications of the orthodox Médoc blend – so Paumanok deserves praise for having the courage to bottle a monovarietal Cab franc, and even more praise for getting it so right.

The Cabernet franc red wines of the middle Loire make wonderful drinking, without being overly expensive: Sunday dinner wines you could call them, if families still made Sunday dinner a weekly special occasion. They don’t demand long aging, though they can take it, and they don’t require reverence or ceremony in their consumption. Though, come to think of it, they can probably take that too: I am just remembering that humble Cabernet franc constitutes about two-thirds of the blend of the fabled Cheval Blanc, one of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines. I do hope some Long Island grape growers will also remember that.

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France’s Least Known Great White Wine

Unique is probably the most overworked word in the whole wine lexicon, but if there is any wine it really fits, that’s Savennières. If you don’t know this Loire rarity, it’s time you made its acquaintance. This is an intriguingly paradoxical wine: both austere and opulent, with a set of aromas and flavors that instantly separate it from all the Chardonnay- and Sauvignon-based white wines you’ve ever tasted. Those flavors grow more intense and more distinctive as it ages, and it is a white wine that can age very long indeed.

I had promised Long-Suffering Spouse no wine visits on our Loire vacation, but one of our shore excursions included one. Ironically, we went off to this visit not even expecting it: The description of the morning’s attractions didn’t mention what for us turned out to be one of the highlights of our entire trip, a visit to the Domaine du Closel/Chateau des Vaults, a premier estate in the tiny Savennières appellation.

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The Savennieres zones lies just southwest of Angers, on the north bank of the Loire – one of the most precarious places in France to grow grapes. Most of the zone is hilly, affording lovely views of the Loire valley from the tops of the vineyards, the best of which lie on south-facing slopes about 100 meters above the river. It’s the soils that give Savennières its character. At Domaine du Closel, for instance, the best sites have a thin layer of topsoil over bedrock of slate and quartz, which forces the vines to send their roots very deep into cracks and runnels seeking nourishment. That kind of stress can make great wines, and in Savennières it does so quite often.

Evelyne de Pontbriand, the proprietor and winemaker at Domaine du Closel, walked us up the steep slopes to view the vineyards. These immediately adjoin those of Nicolas Joly, for some years now the most famous name in Savennières. It was breezy up there, and the vines grew fairly close to the ground – not more than two-and-a-half to three feet tall, as I recall.

A biodynamic grower, Mme. de Pontbriand in her brochure describes her soils in loving detail: “They are shallow, very warm and consist of purple and green schist, purple sandstone enriched with volcanic rocks (quartz, phtanites and organic matter).” I’ve visited many vineyards, and I can vouch that that qualifies as a very complex bed for vines.

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I should say vine, not vines: In Savennières, there is only one: Chenin blanc. This is not a variety highly regarded in most of the wine world, but on the banks of the Loire – most usually the south bank, I grant you – it yields lovely wines, ranging from dry and charming to sweet and magnificent. Most of those come under the Vouvray appellation. Savennières forms Chenin blanc’s greatest dry expression, a wine of tremendous complexity and great aging potential. I have been lucky enough to drink a few twenty-year-olds that still live in my memory for their vibrancy and depth.

The tasting that Mme. de Pontbriand provided after the vineyard tour didn’t extend to older wines, unfortunately, but it did include all three of her bottlings:

La Jalousie 2014, her base wine, a relatively early-harvested (to preserve the fruit and acidity) wine with a greenish-gold hue, dry and light with a touch of elegance. This shows a muted version of Savennières’ distinctive flavor spectrum. It is a drink-every-day wine, with – Mme. de Pontbriand insists – an extraordinary aptitude to marry with asparagus and artichokes, which certainly shows just how different a white wine this is.

Les Caillardières 2013, a wine of deeper gold coloration and deeper aromas and flavors. I sniffed pears and baked apples and mineral notes, with similar elements emerging on the palate. Already somewhat complex and elegant, this wine seemed to want a few more years to develop further.

Clos du Papillon 2015, the top cru, which Mme. de Pontbriand regards as “one of the most beautiful expressions of Savennières.” I won’t argue with that: Even this young, I found it very elegant and complex, with unduplicatable floral and vegetal aromas and flavors – almonds and apricots, lemons and nuts and flint – a whole potpourri. De Pontbriand says “The Clos du Papillon is harvested in two selections: The first selection during the « fresh fruit aroma » period and the second one later with some botrytis during the « cooked fruit, quince and smoked aromas » period. Both selections are put in barrels and assembled 16 months later. The wine then remains a few months in vats.”

We purchased two bottles of the 2006 Clos du Papillon on the spot, and last week opened one to accompany a dinner of turbot in the sauce beurre blanc that the Loire had failed to give us. The wine was so good that I seriously regret not throwing away half our clothes and filling the suitcase with bottles of it.

It tasted indefinably spicy on the palate – woodruff and star anise, maybe – with a vigorous herbal/vegetal attack and with minerals present but secondary; a wine totally different from the Chablis one might be tempted to compare it to. It had clay and earth aromas in there too, but not stone, and as it warmed, dry honey came up, even distinctly acacia honey; I think that’s the touch of botrytis speaking. It was a very big wine, but not at all fat: the finish in fact was very long and lean. As I said at the start, Savennières is paradoxically austere and opulent, and this bottle fit that description perfectly. I plan to get more of it, and hope to live long enough to drink it when it matures.

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Rollin’ on the River: Loire Wines

I’ve just enjoyed eight days of lazily cruising up and down the Loire between its mouth at St. Nazaire and Bouchemaine, the river’s farthest navigable point for a vessel the size of our paddlewheeler, MS Loire Princesse. In wine terms, that’s a journey through the winebibbing home of Rabelais. We journeyed upriver, into the heart of vinous lightness – from the land of the Melon de Bourgogne, which makes Muscadet, and into the realm of the red Cabernet franc and the white Chenin blanc. These, usually alone but sometimes with other grapes, make a whole range of light to medium-bodied wines, mostly named for the places they’re grown – Bourgueil, Chinon, Saumur, Vouvray, etc.
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This was not, however, a wine trip. It was a vacation. I had promised my Long-Suffering Spouse no wine tastings, no vineyard visits, a complete break from all that. I hadn’t promised not to drink wine, however, an activity LSS heartily approves of, so we enjoyed the Loire Princesse’s plenty throughout our long sunny days and protracted evenings on board. I hadn’t really registered how far north the Loire lies: Daylight lasted until around 10 pm every day.

Now, the Loire Princesse isn’t one of those floating apartment buildings that ply the Med or the Caribbean: It’s a small – 90 passengers – shallow-draft sidewheeler specially designed to navigate the difficult waters of the Loire, which is often wide and shallow, with multiple channels, all prone to flooding at some seasons and going almost dry at others.
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So the ship doesn’t have huge storage space, and its wine offerings were consequently distinctly limited. They were, however, reflective of the region we were sailing through, and the simpler ones were included in the basic trip amenities and always generously poured. Some better labels were available for purchase at very reasonable prices. Moreover, they matched very well with the cuisine of the cruise. Best of all, in the true Rabelaisian spirit, they were enjoyable wines in themselves and very efficient reminders of the affability and adaptability of Loire wines.

I confess that I often forget about Loire wines. That is really unfortunate, because they are, by and large, genuinely enjoyable and very affordable. There are only a handful of really great ones, but there is an abundance of delightful wines that tend to get lost in the frantic search for Wine Advocate or Wine Spectator 90-pointers. Most days, with most meals, I would much rather drink a superior Chinon for $30 or less than an inferior Bordeaux for the same price or more.

The Muscadet appellation has several regional subdivisions. The one we most often encounter in the US is Muscadet Sèvres et Maine, which is what the Princesse was offering: 2015 Château Cassemichère Muscadet Sèvres et Maine sur lie. “Sur lie” means the wine was allowed to remain on its lees until bottling, a practice that gives normally lean Muscadet a bit of depth and roundness. The Cassemichere was a typical Muscadet, a light white wine with small citrus and mineral notes, very clean and fresh.
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There is a lot of Muscadet on the US market, and most of it is like this wine, simple and enjoyable but in no way distinguished. There are, however, a handful of outstanding Muscadets, either because of the character of their soil and microclimate or the care of their producers, or both. Some I have enjoyed include Domaine de la Pepière, Domaine de l‘Ecu, Bregeon, and Louvetrie. Bear Muscadet in mind the next time you’re serving any shellfish: It’s usually inexpensive, and the crustaceans and the wine seem to love each other.

The Muscadet zone is very consumer-friendly: There is essentially one appellation and one grape variety. The red wine zone of the middle Loire, upstream from Nantes and the Muscadet country, is only a little more complicated. There are several appellations, but just one dominant variety, Cabernet franc. Forget anything you may know about this grape from its appearances in Bordeaux: the Cabernet franc of the Loire is a completely different animal – softer, fruitier, with more enlivening acidity and fewer abrasive tannins. In very good harvests it can age for a decade or more, but most years it makes a much more accessible wine to drink relatively young. Loire reds show elegance and gentleness more than power or depth: They are for me perfect summertime red wines, companionable with all sorts of food, intensely satisfying and accessible, never confrontational. If you’ve forgotten that a red wine doesn’t have to be up in your face to be impressive, you need to try some Loire reds.

The main appellations for them are Bourgueil, Chinon, Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil, and Saumur. Of these my favorite tends to be Chinon, which I find slightly more elegant, slightly more intensely varietal, and slightly more age-worthy. On shipboard, we drank 2015 Domaine Olivier Bourgueil, 2014 Clos de Perou Saumur Champigny, and 2015 Clos de la Lysardière Chinon.
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I grew quite fond of the Chinon, which had delightful fresh fruit and enough depth to match well with the chef’s fondness for wild mushrooms and complex sauces. Other good Chinon producers include Domaine Couly-Dutheil and Domaine Philippe Alliet.

The Loire Princesse didn’t stock any Vouvray, which disappointed me, because this charming white wine, vinified from the Chenin blanc grape in the middle Loire, in its driest forms makes an excellent dinner wine. I can recommend Domaine Huet and Domaine des Aubusières and the Cuvee Silex of Vigneau-Chevreau.
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All in all, the valley of the Loire remains still what it was for Rabelais, a soft and pleasant land teeming with palatal pleasures. It served as a healthy reminder to this wine journalist that a wine doesn’t have to be profound to be estimable or powerful to be enjoyable. I hope all your vacations are as delightful as mine was.

Next post: France’s least known great white wine.

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Celebrations of the Everyday: II – Muscadet

A few weeks back I wrote a post about Chianti Classico, the first of several pieces intended to celebrate wines that are friendly, adaptable, reliable, and pleasurable, even though of less prestige, less pressure, and less price than the stratospheric level of great ones. Now I will nominate for membership in the Cheerful Confraternity of Amiable Wines (CCAW, pronounced ca-CAW, like a fish crow summoning his flock to a beach party) a vastly underappreciated white wine, Muscadet.

Muscadets can be, and these days often are, very lovely wines, and they are rarely costly, but nevertheless they don’t get much respect. Maybe it’s because the name is too easy to mispronounce (I once, eons ago, actually heard someone order a “mouse cadet,” as if Walt Disney ran a training school) or maybe it’s because, in the ‘70s, the wine was overproduced, uninteresting, and ubiquitous on French wine lists (and back then that meant 90% of all restaurants that had wine lists).

Whatever: All that is long past, and the Muscadets coming to this country now are a pretty nice crop of wines – still ideal with oysters, as their long-standing reputation has it, but fine too as aperitifs or as dinner companions with any seafood. The best bottles have heft and character to go well beyond that; they pair comfortably with chicken, veal, pork – with white meat dishes generally, unless they are very richly sauced. So Muscadet these days is a wine enjoyable to drink in many circumstances, versatile with many foods, undemanding of attention but rewarding should you choose to give it – in short, an ideal candidate for CCAW.

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No one is quite sure where the name Muscadet came from. The one thing certain about it is that the grape has nothing whatever to do with Muscat. In fact, though the grape is sometimes referred to as Muscadet, its real name is Melon de Bourgogne, though Burgundy is not believed to be where it originated. We do know that it was several times banned there, because various Dukes of Burgundy put their power behind Chardonnay and Pinot noir. (No one has ever faulted them for that.)

Wherever Melon de Bourgogne – the Melon of Burgundy! what an undignified name for a wine grape! – originally came from, it eventually wound up at the mouth of the Loire, and upstream as far as around the city of Nantes. From that stretch of hills all the best Muscadet now originates. There, with a climate somewhat moderated by the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel, the peripatetic Melon settled in on lean, stony soils to make wines that drank beautifully with the bountiful seafood so close by. Like people, grapes have to find their right place, and the hills near Nantes and the sea let Melon de Bourgogne find its vocation.

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These days, more and more growers are working hard to let the grape express its best nature, carefully choosing the sites on which to grow it, fermenting and aging it sur lie – on the yeast lees – to give it greater roundness, controlling yields very tightly to get more concentration. Their labor has paid off: Muscadet now is, at its least, a very pleasant wine to drink young and fresh, and at its best a distinctive, mineral-inflected wine with a moderate complexity and a moderate capacity to age.

Bear in mind too that with Muscadet, “mineral” covers a multitude of flavors. Exact science types point out – rightly – that we can’t taste “mineral,” but I know that I taste in various Muscadets elements that to my palate say slate, or chalk, or limestone, even oyster shell. Muscadets vary too in the foregrounding or backgrounding of their fruit (usually lemon or lime, occasionally white fruits). What this means for the consumer is that there are many styles of Muscadet to choose from – and since Muscadet is inexpensive – sometimes as little as $10, very rarely up to $30 – you can afford to try several bottles to find a style you like.

Here are a few of the many available I’ve been enjoying lately:

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Cormerais, Clisson 2008
Old vines and lean soil yield a classic round, full (for a Muscadet) food wine, surprisingly fresh and vigorous for its age. This one very pleasantly surprised me. It would be worth cellaring some of these for a decade, just to see how they develop.

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Domaine de l’Ecu, Cuvée Classique 2011, Expression de Gneiss 2011, Expression de Granite 2011
Grower Guy Bossard names some of his wines for the kinds of soil they grow in. The Classique is a blend of several vineyards, meant for drinking young. The other two are from the named soils and are a bit more austere – mineral-structured rather than fruit-driven – and can take a little bottle age. Very different from each other, and all very good drinking.

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Domaine de la Louvetrie, Amphibolite Nature 2012
Totally dry, lean and fruity – slightly citrusy – with the mineral notes well in the background. Excellent aperitif wine and good accompaniment to light hors d’oeuvres and appetizers.

Domaine de la Pepière, Muscadet 2012
This is what I think of as classic Muscadet, dry and mineral-driven, with white fruit notes throughout. This is also Pepière’s basic Muscadet: the estate makes several others (for example, “3” and Chateau Thebaud Clos Morines), of increasing degrees of complexity and/or intensity. I haven’t yet had one I didn’t like.

Luneau-Papin, Pierre de la Grange 2011, Clos des Allées 2012
Both wines are from old vines and show intense minerality and a slight lemony character. Pleasant drinking now and structured to take some age.

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As I said at the beginning of this post, Muscadet has had a checkered history in this country. From the ‘50s to the ‘70s, when most wine in America spoke French, Muscadet was everywhere. It was simple, it was inexpensive, and it was almost obligatory with oysters or clams on the half shell. Then, as with so many simple, enjoyable white wines, its popularity undid it. Production rose to meet demand, and that meant overcropping and cultivating unsuitable sites in order to pour more and more wine into circulation. Inevitably, as quality fell, Muscadet’s market died, and for a decade or two the wine virtually disappeared from retail shops and restaurant lists.

Since the turn of the millennium, Muscadet has been making a comeback, both in its production and on the market. Intermittently, attention has started being paid. A few years back, for instance, Eric Asimov wrote a nice article for the New York Times about the pleasures of Muscadet that caused a momentary flurry of interest, but few other journalists followed through, and enthusiasm for Muscadet has really stayed at a low-ish, just-above-cult level for a while now. I don’t expect my purple prose will change that, but at least I’d like to cast my vote for it. Muscadet is an amiable wine if there ever was one.

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Hot-Weather Red Wines

Nowhere is it carved in stone that you must drink white wines or rosé all summer long. Not that that’s bad, mind you: I’ve had some lovely whites and enjoyable rosés so far this tarmac-melting season. But I can only go so long before my system requires red wine. The first signs of my withdrawal symptoms are usually quickening of the pulse at casual mentions of, say, Beaujolais, followed at the next stage by scent hallucinations: I keep thinking I smell Gragnano or Freisa. When that starts happening, Attention Must Be Paid.

Maresca family legend has it that this addiction was formed in my earliest childhood, when my Neapolitan grandfather – the man whose youthful moustache style still adorns my upper lip – fed me slices of peaches that he had cut up and soaked in his glass of cellar-cool red wine.

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Maresca Grandparents in their Vegetable Garden

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The most extreme forms of the story have me still in my highchair, which became a high chair indeed as I imbibed those wine-soaked peaches. I barely remember any of this, but I still enjoy peaches in wine. My grandfather’s wine was, I am sure, homemade stuff from the-cousins-down-on-the-farm, but peaches and I are adaptable: We’ll both work with just about any fresh, fruity red wine.

The easiest recourse, of course, is Beaujolais. It’s available everywhere, and there are many good producers. In a pinch, I can even drink some of Georges Duboeuf’s better cru bottlings. His Julienas and Fleurie and Regnié seem to have a more modest touch of the banana-oil scent so prominent elsewhere in his line, which many years ago led some less-reverent wine journalists to refer to him as Georges Du Banane. Duboeuf has the advantage of availability: His wines are sold almost everywhere. NB: For peach-soaking purposes, his simple Beaujolais Villages works best.

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But for savoring purposes, there are many excellent smaller Beaujolais producers whose wines are worth seeking out. Two of my favorites are Jean Paul Brun’s Terres Dorées and Coudert’s Clos de la Roilette. The latter’s Fleurie and Christal and the former’s Morgon, Fleurie, and Chénas are among my all-time top Beaujolais.

In the US, Chénas is probably the least-known of the Beaujolais crus, but it’s one of my favorites for its intense individuality – and its surprisingly ability to age. In France, I have drunk 10- and 15-year-olds that were just lovely, almost Burgundian in their velvetiness and complexity. Moulin-à-vent is the cru that is best known here for its cellaring potential, but Morgon shouldn’t be overlooked in that regard either. Remember, it’s acidity that keeps a wine alive, and all Beaujolais have an abundance of that.

Some Loire reds also serve very well in summer, since their soft fruit – Cabernet franc – makes them tolerant of a little chilling, in the manner of Beaujolais. Don’t ice them to death, but serve a good Saumur or Bourgueil at a true cellar temperature, around 50 to 55 degrees, and you can enjoy them in the steamiest of Julys and Augusts. I haven’t actually tried slicing peaches into any of these, but I see no reason why the combination shouldn’t taste fine. In the old days – which are getting more and more distant all the time – when red wines normally ran about 12 or 12.5 degrees of alcohol, you could even enjoy St. Emilion or Gigondas served cool on a hot summer evening, but today’s higher-alcohol wines don’t respond well to such treatment, and would probably overwhelm a humble peach – alas.

More recondite choices come from Italy: harder to find, perhaps, but worth the effort. Bardolino is a reviving appellation that deserves more attention than it gets. The best of them combine the kind of light, fresh fruit and vivacious acidity that make an excellent warm-weather dinner drink and companion to fish, white flesh, or salume or pastas – a very useful, almost-all-purpose wine, and certainly suitable for soaking a few peaches.

Gragnano – a personal favorite, and probably close to the kind of wine my grandfather first dunked his peaches in as a young man in Italy – makes the perfect pizza or pasta summer wine. Grown in the Sorrento peninsula, it was once the ubiquitous everyday red wine of Naples, where I’m sure it still cradles many a peach slice after lunch and dinner. Several good growers – Grotta del Sole, Federiciane, and Monteleone for example – are now reviving the breed. Gragano is vinified from a blend of Piedirosso, Aglianico, and Sciascinoso, the latter a very localized, very Campanian variety.

Sicily, as you might expect, offers some lovely warm weather reds, most notably Frappato and Cerasuolo di Vittoria. The latter should not be confused with the Marche’s Cerasuolo, an entirely different wine from an entirely different grape. The principal variety in both Sicilian wines is the indigenous Frappato, which makes a charming, light-bodied and light-cherry-colored wine under both denominations. Both are delightful hot-weather drinking and worth some effort to find.

Back in the north, in addition to the big, austere Nebbiolo wines, the fields around Alba also produce Freisa and Grigolino, two wines that have lost ground – in the most literal sense – to the growth of Barolo and Barbaresco. Freisa and Grignolino are almost polar opposites of those two wines: both are lighter-bodied, acidic, and sprightly – indeed, you often find slightly fizzy examples. Freisa smells and tastes like a strawberry/raspberry cocktail with an underlayer of tar (we are in the Piedmont after all), while Grignolino is the grittier, earthier, seemingly more rustic wine of the two. Pio Cesare makes a lovely example of it, and several good small growers have remained loyal to/are turning back to Freisa. Both make great companions to a summer lunch or dinner, and both take a little chilling without losing anything – in fact, a slight chill seems to me to better release their aromas.

So there are lots of wines to choose from, and you have no excuse to give up red wine because of the weather. Get busy peeling and slicing those peaches!

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