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| Gaspard “Bulles” Touraine NV Garnier “Gamay Aunis” Vin de France 2024 Tardieux “Le Temps des Aunis” Vin de France 202 La Grapperie “Adonis” Vin de France 2023 Domaine de Bellivière “Rouge-Gorge” Côteaux du Loir 2022 |
| On an unremarkable workday in the spring of 2006, I met with Shawn Mead, my rep from the French wine importer Louis Dressner, to taste a few selections from the Dressner portfolio. One of the wines we tasted was a red wine bottled in a curious, tall, thin “flute” bottle, similar to what you might find in wines from Alsace but bearing zero relationship to the wines from that region, and really, bearing zero relationship with wines from anywhere else in the universe. The wine, named “Rouge-Gorge” (French for robin redbreast), was from an area north of Tours, near a tributary of the Loire confusingly named “Loir,” and the vigneron was named Eric Nicolas. I’d studied the wines of the Loire Valley in some detail, and also greedily consumed a fair number of them; the Loire remains my spiritual wine home, a place populated by growers singularly dedicated to the viticultural past and future. But I was not, I am embarrassed to admit, familiar yet with the appellation, Côteaux du Loir, a fact that would change after I tasted, retasted, and tasted again Eric’s wine. The wine was made from a medieval grape variety grown in the Loire, perhaps as early as the 9th century, pineau d’aunis, of which I learned that just a few hundred acres remain under cultivation. I found it cryptic, captivating, compelling, an experience repeated after I’d purchased the wine, and was able over a period of a few weeks to visit and revisit my oddball old uncle, redolent of a long-forgotten cologne, the pine forests of northern Minnesota, a whiff of cavendish tobacco amongst his piles of newspapers. Here was a wine that unlocked some secret passage in my soul that I did not know was there, and I kept returning to the wine and that place to see if I could unlock its secrets and know it better, but after years of trying, I never have.
Pineau d’aunis is not a grape that vignerons can make bank on – they grow it because they love it, and so when you see it, and if you are susceptible to the grape’s charms, it’s worth investigating. In the mid-20th century, over 4,000 acres of it were planted, but by the turn of the century, only about 1,000 acres remained. Why the steep decline? Some of the old vineyards were grubbed up to make way for railroads, but the truth is, it’s a cranky, sometimes challenging to cultivate variety, untamed, and bears little resemblance to any other modern grape. Given its erratic habits, Eric only produces pineau d’aunis (he makes two cuvées of it, one from fifty-plus year old vines that we’re tasting tonight; the other from very old vines) when the vintage is appropriate for it, and he’s better known for producing white, chenin-blanc based wines, some dry, some off-dry, that are both flinty but also textured, honied. My set of descriptors for Eric’s wine is admittedly juvenile. It’s dry, medium-bodied, darkly pigmented, and smells downright arboreal. I picture Robin Hood somewhere nearby and suspect that Friar Tuck might suddenly appear at any moment. It tastes, for lack of better words, medieval, like an herbal nostrum a medieval apothecary might proffer you when you present a list of symptoms. Today, the pineau d’aunis scene is quite different from where it was twenty years ago. Eric still makes red wine when the vintage is appropriate but is now joined by a small set of growers who make rosé (Eric makes a bit of rosé, too, but it’s not imported), fizz, and vin de soif from the grape, but Eric’s expression remains my touchstone. We’re thrilled to have a few bottles of Rouge-Gorge to share with you tonight, as well as some pineau d’aunis rosé fizz, a gamay-pineau d’aunis blend, and two other renderings, one soif-y, the other more structured. |