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| You are traveling through the Sarthe north of Tours and exit the autoroute and discover that the small departmental road, like all small departmental roads elsewhere in France, which seemed on the Michelin map to be relatively straight, turns out to be contorted and curved, following the Loir, a small tributary of the Loire. And that is OK because you cannot be in a hurry here in a land that feels unhurried, forested, and agrarian. Once upon a time, this northernmost outpost of the Loire where grapes struggle for ripeness (though with global warming, this truism no longer rings so true), was widely planted with vines, but by the end of the 19th century the destructive phylloxera louse nearly wiped out grape growing in the region. It was not until the 70s that vigneron began planting in Jasnières, and even today you will see small towns without an economy, once viable, but hosting neither boulanger nor bouchère, two businesses that are seemingly essential to giving a village life in France. Folks left these small towns to find work in the city, and the places they left behind feel initially quaint (is everyone taking a siesta?) end up feeling ghostly, boarded up and without life. It feels like a depopulated colony, an outpost on another planet, and it does not seem strange that the red grape of the region, pineau d’aunis, makes wines that taste like an emissary of a depopulated colonial outpost of our pre-modern, wine drinking past. The Coteaux de Loir appellation is one in which a vigneron may bottle pineau d’aunis varietally, as elsewhere in the Loire Valley appellation rules deprecate and scorn it, deeming it just too untamed and pre-modern for polite company. Well, we ain’t polite company. Tonight, we are tasting a wonderful pineau d’aunis made from old vines, some of which are over 80 years old. We have offered Roche Bleue’s normale, which contains pineau d’aunis, gamay, and cab franc, whole cluster glou glou, and we dig it, but this 100 percent cuvée is in an entirely other league.
Lavernette Crémant de Bourgogne NV |