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| Chateau de Minière “Bulles de Minière” Rouge Vin de France NV Lo-Fi Cabernet Franc Santa Barbara 2023 Tête Rouge “Bibus” Chinon 2021 Arnaud Lambert “Tue-Loup” Saumur 2021 Olga Riffault “Les Picasses” Chinon 2017 |
| Cabernet franc feels like it should be familiar to us: after all isn’t it merely cabernet sauvignon, merely with a different surname? In California we typically fold both grapes together and treat cabernet franc much the same way we treat cabernet sauvignon: we pick it very ripe and then oak the shit out of, ironing out all its kinks, a real nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land. Cabernet franc as we now know through DNA analysis, turns out to be the rustic, kinky parent of cabernet sauvignon (grape genetics being as complex as they are, it is no surprise that cabernet sauvignon’s other parent is the white grape, sauvignon blanc). So, what are these kinks of Loire cabernet franc of which I write, and could they be specifically what Rabelais, the great poet of vulgarity, relished when he drank deeply of the wines of his region?
The two dimensions that make cabernet franc a bit of a problem child are pyrazines and petrichor. Pyrazines are naturally occurring sulfur compounds in all grapes and in many of the other things that we put in our mouths, e.g., green bell peppers. Pyrazines smell and taste grassy, most noticeably in cool-climate sauvignon blanc, and are often a marker of grapes that are picked at the edge of ripeness—pyrazine levels decline as grapes ripen, and wine growers who eschew them will try their best to suppress pyrazines with various growing decisions (e.g., canopy management, in which growers selectively de-leaf grape vines to expose the grape clusters to more sun). In France’s Loire valley, however, locals dig pyrazines and consider them essential to the typicité of cabernet franc. Travel to Bordeaux, just a few dozen kilometers to the west, and these green flavors are a sin, a sign of vulgarity, both in cabernet franc and sauvignon. The other kink is petrichor, a distinctive feature of many Loire reds that smells like wet slate or pencil shavings. I supposed for the longest time that it was a function of slate-y soil, but little in wine is that simple and we now know that that the origins of petrichor are biological rather than mineral. Again, the Bordelais consider petrichor, like pyrazines, a sin. Pyrazines and petrichor appear rustic to a civilized palate (picture a post-prandial fireplace crackling in a book-lined study, an old hound at your feet, a Stilton wrapped in a napkin) precisely because they are rude reminders of the country, where citizens in stained tank tops and gimme caps drive tractors, belch, and harvest hay. They are artifacts of the agricultural origins of wine, that wine is a product of nature rather than culture, the raw rather than the cooked, of the country mouse, not the city mouse. This week’s tasting explores the pyrazines and petrichor of cabernet franc, mostly from its homeland, the Loire, where they don’t iron the kinks out. |