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When
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Tuesday, August 4 from 5:30 to 8 pm
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Where
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Café Soleil, 839 17th Street, NW (@ Eye Street); Farragut West Metro Station
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What
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Five delicious French wines (see below for details) sure to get you through the end of summer (plus nibblies)
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Cost
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For $20 you get six 4 oz pours of three wonderful French wines (a Cheverny, Muscadet and Rose) — that is, you get to enjoy each of these wines twice. For $25, you get four additional 4 oz pours of two wonderful reds — a declassified Bandol from Provence and another from Corbieres.
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Please, please, please — tasting is limited to first 40 reservations and I’ll need to know how much wine to bring (smile). If link fails, email: hillarythrasher@me.com.
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A huge thank you to the folks at Café Soleil (2009 Diner’s Choice Award Winner) for hosting us! Please consider making a reservation for dinner following the tasting — food is yummy!
If you want more of the straightforward wine details (more fact, less editorializing), go straight to the Tasting Notes.
Stealing from my new lexicon so that I can communicate clearly with all of you wine aficionados reading this blog — thanks to editors of The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia — the wines we’ll sample are gorgeously “gluggly” (I can’t make this up; see right for definition). When I re-posted most of Kermit Lynch’s blog about “perennial quaffers” (and by the way, those wines are sold out), I knew that I needed to bone up on this technical vino-neologism to navigate the nuances and keep pace with the Lafites.
Perfect example, this weekend I drank a bottle of 2008 Domaine de Fontsainte Gris de Gris from Corbières (an AOC appellation of Languedoc-Roussillon). It’s a Rosé.
No it’s not. It’s vin gris. (I’m parroting Serge Lescouarnec‘s admonishment by the lady representing Kermit Lynch at the Sud de France tasting when he called the Domaine de Fontsainte Corbieres a Rosé. “No she said, it is a ‘Gris de Gris’.”
Jancis Robinson wrote: “Vin Gris is not, happily, a grey wine but a pink wine that is usually decidedly paler than most rosé, made exactly as a white wine from dark skinned grapes, and therefore without any maceration. No rules govern the term vin gris but a wine labeled gris de gris must be made from lightly tinted grape varieties described as gris such as Cinsaut or Grenache Gris.”
Or not. David McDuff pointed out in his blog that the wine’s production methods and blend contradict the “rules” mentioned in Robinson’s Oxford Companion. The wine does see a brief maceration before being bled from the vat in the typical saignée method and includes dark skinned berries like Syrah, Mourvèdre and Carignan. Blah, blah, blah…
Ahem, clearly we ‘ll have to a-gris to dis-a-gris.
The second wine we’ll feature at the tasting is 2007 Le Petit Chambord Cheverny from Domaine Francois Cazin. Cheverny is a relatively new AOC entitled to add its name to the appellation of Touraine in the Loire Valley; by legislation, a Cheverny wine has to be a blend of varietals (in this case 70% Sauvignon Blanc and 30% Chardonnay). Raz (and others) describe wine made from Touraine’s Sauvignon Blanc as “baby Sancerre,” and, accordingly, about half the price. We (heart) that.
Francois Cazin tends vines of considerable age and the resulting yields are well below average in any given year. The result is great concentration of flavor. This wine is vibrant and fresh with intense fruit flavors. When you add the overlay of acidity and minerality, the wine finishes dry. The combination will make you want another glug. This wine has the weight of some New World whites with considerably more elegance, better acidity and lower alcohol. Cazin is the only grower in Cheverny to harvest all his fruit by hand and since 1997, the wine has been bottled unfiltered by gravity. His wines have consistently been the top pick of the vintage at the annual Loire Valley wine show in Angers.
Keeping in the Loire, we’ll also taste a 2007 Muscadet from Domaine de la Pepière from the appellation Sèvre-et-Maine AOC in Pays Nantais. This is classic Muscadet from a 
small area containing most of the best wines. This Muscadet is wonderfully dry, equally light-bodied, a bit reminiscent of a modest white Burgundy.
Winemaker Marc Ollivier’s Muscadet-sur-Lie is the authentic item — it has lees contact (hence the reference “sur-Lie”) until the time of bottling, generally in late May. This extended contact gives it the crispness that makes Muscadet so refreshing, and the classic wine match for seafood. It is the traditional way to make Muscadet, but has become the exception as growers and shippers rush to bottle “technically correct” wines by early January.
“I am in conversion to organics,” Ollivier reveals. “I harvest everything by hand, and this is something that only 10% of the growers in the region currently do. I don’t use any products for vinification –- just a bit of sulfur dioxide before bottling.” An outcome of turning away from chemical products in the vineyard is that manual work in the vineyard eliminates the surface roots of the vines. “The consequence is that the roots go deeper and the wines have more minerality because we work the soil,” explains Ollivier.
So, it’s also a wine you can feel good about. Good green gluggies. What’s not to love?
