Birthday wine tasting

The weekend has been pleasantly busy with social pursuits as we celenbrated Stephen's birthday with a wine-tasting on Friday evening and Saturday morning. It was good to take time out with friends and fun to put together wine and cheese to share together.
Everyone attending brought a quote about wine. More details in a special guest post by Dr B.

A Sunday Collage from the Fete des Vendanges in Cessenon

You can see there is less blue sky on these photos, our holiday weather has turned more autumnal. We avoided rain at the wine harvest festival in Cesseonon and ate some great food at the Restaurant de L'Orb. We pottered around the village, tasted some wine, chatted to a really interesting woman who took over her parents' vineyard about four years ago. Her Parisian husband took over dealing with the vines and she moved from her job as an air hostess to take over marketing and promotion. It was agreat story and the wine was lovely. The wine is called Domaine La Maurine Rouge and their ordianry red is named for their children and called Ange ou démon. Angel or demon - as I said on my facebook update it tastes fiendishly angelic.

Wine, women and ... St Chinian

When we first came to St Chinian ten years ago, we bought a wonderful little guide from the Maisons des Vins to the vignerons of the St Chinian appellation. We couldn't possibly have visited every vineyard, so the first year we decided to limit ourselves to organic vinyards, and the second, to women winemakers. That was when we discovered Line Cauquil. Her father had owned the local garage and was also a "vigneron", delivering his wine to the local cave cooperative. When he retired, his son took over the garage, and Line - who worked in IT - decided to take over the vineyards, creating her own domaine, the Domaine Deslines (the feminine theme is reflected in the label for the "Grand Cru", which unfortunately proved too risqué for an order from the United States). Like most St Chinian wine, Line produces red, and we often end up driving back to Ferney with lots of red, but little white. So this holiday we decided also to test white wines, and started with a wine produced by Hildegard Horat of La Grange de Quatre Sous, at Assignan, a couple of kilometres from St Chinian. Hildegard is originally from Switzerland and arrived in the Languedoc in 1983. Her wines are "Vins de Pays" - but don't let that fool you into confusing them with the cheap generic wines in supermarkets. Like other vignerons in the area, Hildegard chose the VdP option to give her greater flexibility in the grape varieties she could use than if she had opted for the St Chinian or Côteaux de Languedoc appellation, and she uses organic methods (though doesn't promote her wine as such). When Hildegard started producing wines, a female vigneron was a rarity, now she belongs to an association of 18 women vignerons in the region called vinifilles - oh, and her domaine has just an echo of the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera, which in French is the Opéra de quat'sous - now, there's a reason to raise a glass!

Driving through a wine list

On Saturday, we set off from Nyons to get to St Chinian for a journey that seemed at times as though instead of following a map, we were working our way down the wine list of a restaurant. Leaving Nyons we first went past the road to Vinsobres, which became a Cotes du Rhone Villages in 1967, and then, in 2006, got promoted to being a stand alone appellation. We then skirted the southern edge of the Enclave des Papes, a territory once part of the Papal States that became part of France only in 1814, close by Visan, where our wine imbibed the previous night came from, and whose label bore the papal arms. On the road to Bollene, we passed by the industrial complex of the Celliers des Dauphins, known for its massive production of Cotes du Rhones wine for supermarkets and other outlets. Crossing the Rhone we continued through the Cotes du Rhone and Cotes du Rhone Villages appellations before crossing into the Department du Gard, moving into the Coteaux du Longedoc territory, first through Sommieres, then the various sub-appellations such as Gres de Montpellier, Pic St Loup (where we passed by the Domaine de l'Hortus, whose wines feature on the wine list of the Chanteclair restaurant opposite our home in Ferney), then on past the signs to Montpeyroux, which also boasts a wonderful cafe des vins called l'Horloge at the centre of the village.
Throughout the journey we would get stuck behind the narrow tractors that are used to harvest the grapes in the vineyard while the smell of pressed grapes would waft into the car as we drove past the village cooperatives. Then, as we got into the home straight towards St Chinian, we entered the Faugeres region, and drove past the signs to the Domaine Moulin de Lene, whose hat obtained on a previous visit Dr B still wears as protection from the sun, and whose wine we drank for the first evening of our stay in St Chinian. Finally, after going past the Domaine de la Liquier, we turned off the D909 to St Genies de Fontédit, and saw our first sign from a producer of AOC St Chinian ... but that will be another story ... one you're all going to get bored by by the end of this holiday!
(This post was written for the stranzblog by guestblogger Dr B)

Primeurs du made in Sushi

We've been wine tasting the Beaujolais nouveau round the corner at the splendid Cave vins de France. It was fun and a meeting place for local characters and old friends. I particularly liked the white primeur Colombelle from Gascony. But at home we're now drinking a bottle of the BEaujolais pictured here. Strangely the only place to find a picture of it was at this Japanese blog. Even this seemed to fit in rather well with life in Ferney Voltaire as tonight saw the opening of the Made in Sushi bar just opposite the Cave vins de France. You can find an English machine translation of the Japanese site here, strangely bits of it sound like Dutch.

Paradigm shifts and old wine on a Friday evening

The Germans call it "to live like God in France" (Leben wie Gott in Frankreich) which means I supose living it up. So tonight in a gentle way that's what we've been doing.
One of the problems with owning too much wine is that everyone knows you like wine so they bring you more. Our wonderful polyglot friend Olive ( who speaks 6 or 7 languages including Russian, Arabic and Ketchuan) recently turned up with some bottles cleared out from her cellar. So with a friend we've managed to commit vinicide on a bottle of wine as old as our marriage - a 1991 Lynch-Bages Pauillac. Yes I know it almost sounds as if I know what I'm talking about but actually I'm just typing what the label says. It was however delicious and even nicer for being drunk with a very simple meal.
Finally talk meandred on to paradigm shifts, what they are, whether the world is going through one at the moment with the fuel and food crisis, how you explain what a paradigm shift is. S tried to tell me about how a paradigm shift is like putting bags of sugar on the shelf one at a time over a period of time and not noticing that they are there until there are so many that they bring the shelf down. I still wonder whether many paradigm shifts actually happen rather more subtly than that though. Then I wondered about whether the gospel passage about new wine and old wine skins etc. is also about paradigm shifts in some way - I shall have to revisit the text.
Although vinicide does stimulate the beginnings of philosophical discussion it doesn't always help with seeing the arguments through to conclusion of some kind. In this case the paradigm shift seems to have fallen asleep on the sofa ... this is what happens when you live like God in France.

Vinicide - an excellent Friday night activity

Our colleague Linda gave Stephen the brilliant card pictured here to congratulate him on his doctorate. A bottle accompanied the card (some very delicious-looking red burgundy) and inside she wrote "what better reason for a spot of vinicide than a successfully completed PhD."
Not too much vinicide this week but tonight is Friday and we've enjoyed some champagne with a bit of the smoked salmon left over from Christmas. Earlier in the week we did drink our only bottle of Le Mas de l'Ecriture from Jonquières in the Languedoc when friends came over for supper.
Anyway the card is by Liverpuddlian artist Steve Best and you can find more of his work here. Alcohol seems to figure quite prominently in it.
Anyway now the doctorate is over perhaps the Herr Doktor will start a wine blog, we'll see!