Wednesday 10/2 from 6-8 pm
No reservations needed $15+ 10% off wines tasted

Several years ago, a colleague in the wine trade whom I do not know personally complained on the socials about keeping the social justice warrior out of the wine trade. Her censorious kvetch: “Cover product, people, place, history, production, quality…but not politics. FFS can’t we have anything to just enjoy? Wine is controversial enough w/out piling on more. ESP for those of us who aren’t socialists.” This stuck in my craw, as I didn’t and don’t understand how you can obey her commandment without a good deal of self-delusion, to be charitable, but really self-deception, to be less so. It didn’t take years of suffering under wine tariffs that nearly capsized the business of importers with whom I’ve worked for many years to make me see the absurd impossibility of her “shut up and bring me a sammich” demand; it just took a sub-dilettante’s appreciation for the history of wine to see it. Wine is always already a political object, even if you don’t keep a dogeared copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks on your night table.

As a case in point, the focus of tonight’s tasting is wines from the southwest of France, a territory with a long and rich history of making wine but one that may remain unknown to you. And there’s a reason for that, as Paul Strang explains in his book on the wines of the region. Put simply, the greedy Bordelaise dominated the Garonne river, levying a tax every few kilometers on goods transported downstream to the port of Bordeaux. A commodity that started its journey costing a few centimes ended up costing a few francs by the time it reached port, rendering it unsalable. This had a profound throttling effect on France’s southwest, as there was no other way to move goods from the region to elsewhere in France and beyond until the construction of the Canal de Midi in the mid-19^th century, but by then it was too late. And that simple and unfortunate bit of politics is why the wines of the sud ouest remain in an endless state of underdevelopment, even though they can be delightful and deserving of your attention. You feel this when visiting Toulouse, the largest city in the region, which is undeniably French, feels somehow out of step with the rest of France, a brick behemoth of days gone by.

There is one small unseen benefit to this as you will see tonight, which is that growers in the region never abandoned their traditional grape varieties, of which there are an abundance. I imagine that a typical vigneron of the region thought, “well, if we cannot export wines made with our historic varieties, fuck it, we’ll at least enjoy them ourselves.” We’re starting with a dry white wine, simultaneously fresh and luscious, made from petit manseng and gros manseng, old-school Basque varieties grown today in the south of France and the north of Spain. Then, two rustic reds made from local, rustic red varieties, negrette and mansois. Next, a quite different expression of mansois, from Gaillac, where the Gaillacoise refer to it as “braucol.” This wine is from Domaine Plageoles, and it is Robert Plageoles who more than anyone was the staunchest defender of the region’s wines. To finish, a malbec from Domaine La Calmette, one of the new generation of Cahors growers working with their traditional variety but treating it gently so as not to extract too much tannin.