Bonjour a tous! Hello, all, and welcome to Cépage et Cuisine, Mary’s and Brian’s wine and food blog. Like most days of our France excursion, we started with a walk to the boulangerie. Mary’s choice today was pain aux raisin, a raisin pastry. What a treat these freshly baked breads and pastries have been for her. I have enjoyed the aromas, ambience, and interactions with the people. To get to the boulangerie in Le Puy Notre Dame we must walk up a short street, an alley, really. Before we reach the top, we smell the aroma of baking bread.
We set out for the western area of Anjou du Pays to visit Savennières. We have enjoyed wines by a couple of producers from that area. The grape of Savennières is a white grape called Chenin Blanc. I have heard several of the French refer to it simply as “Chenin.” Chenin Blanc of Savennières is an expression quite different from wines of the same grape grown elsewhere. As I mentioned in a previous post, Savennières requires greater patience and thought to understand and enjoy it. The wines can be intensely mineral and austere, almost stony. A few years are often necessary for the fruit flavors to integrate with the structural elements. Tropical flavors of peach and apricot are complemented by almond and spice notes. The texture has an interesting viscosity, sometimes described as like lanolin or beeswax. It is fascinating to see how this particular wine is so different from the Chenin Blanc of Saumur or Vouvray.
Along the way to Savennières we stopped for lunch in Angers, which is a large city in the area. Mary ordered a Coca-Cola and got the old-fashioned glass bottle and drinking glass we don’t see much anymore in the U.S. Sometimes you just need the “Real Thing."
A nice feature of the producers in the area of Savennières is they don’t require or encourage appointments. They have regular hours and welcome walk-in visitors. Our first stop was at Coulée de Serrant, the estate of Nicolas Joly. Monsieur Joly is well known for his biodynamic approach to growing grapes and has gotten rave reviews for his wine. The estate includes at least three distinct terroir, or growing areas, the nearly vertical Coulée de Serrant climat, or vineyard, Savennières-Roche aux Moines, and a straight Savennières, all south facing.
The wines had nice flavors and aromas, but to be honest, I thought they were all a little hot. The alcohols were labeled as 14.5% to 15.5%, which to me is high, especially for a wine to drink with food. A couple of them had a slight brandied aroma and felt warm on the finish, like swallowing distilled spirits. On the whole, I didn’t think they were well balanced and the ripeness may have made it difficult to distinguish the three sites.A lesson here is to trust your own palate and avoid relying too much on the ratings of wine writers. If a critic’s rating score or an article makes you want to try a wine, that’s great, but if you don’t enjoy the wine or disagree with the wine critic, that’s fine, too.
The estate was incredibly beautiful, on a steep hillside with great vistas. Here are a couple of photos. We aren’t sure what these little flowers are, but Mary thinks they look like lilies of the valley. If you know the name of the flower, please post a comment!
Our next stop was in the beautiful village of Savennières itself at Domaine du Closel. We became aware of this domaine through a nice short video by Wine Spectator. Click on the link below to see the video, called Five Generations of Women.
The estate and the chateau are lovely with a self-guided walking tour of the vineyards and grounds, explaining the importance of various aspects of the terroir in the resulting wines. The soil has both volcanic elements and schist, which is a layered mineral formation, composed of silicates, talc, graphite, and quartz.
An interesting feature of the tour is a now-dry bed of a branch of the Loire River. In a much earlier time, this branch of the river was a shipping route for the wines of Savennières to distant markets.
A very nice young lady at Domaine du Closel tasted us through the estate’s wines. More balanced than Monsieur Joly’s wines, they were nonetheless higher in alcohol than I expected, over 14%. I wonder if the weather is hotter in this area than in the eastern areas we visited such as Chinon and Saumur, or if other factors contribute to the trend toward higher alcohols in this area.
We crossed the river to Rochefort-sur-Loire and happened upon Domaine des Baumard by happy circumstance. We were trying to figure out driving directions back to Le Puy Notre Dame and we just saw the sign for the domaine. The domaine and the vineyards have been in the Baumard family since 1634! 
The lady who appeared to be the only person on the premises gladly allowed us to taste their wines even though it was already 5:00 p.m. and almost closing time when we arrived. We tasted the straight Savennières, then the Savennières Clos du Papillon and I immediately thought, “Here is what I was hoping to find in Savennières.” The wines were balanced with freshness and minerality to complement the almond, peach, apricot, and spice flavors and the waxy, full textures. They had a nice, long finishing quality. The alcohols were 13.5% or less. Although the grapes may have come from slightly different vineyard parcels, or lieux-dits, than the wines we tasted earlier in the day, I think there may be a stylistic influence in picking date decisions. Picking later at the other domaines may lead to higher alcohols. Mary and I agreed the Savennières of Domaine des Baumards were the nicest we had tasted today.
The final wines we tasted at Domaine des Baumard were from Coteaux du Layon, a different appellation south of the Loire River. The cépage is Chenin Blanc, like in Savennières, but the topography causes a greater degree of humidity late in the autumn. The grapes become infected by a fungus called Botrytis cinerea, often termed “noble rot.” The fungus attacks the skin of the grapes and causes the grapes to lose much of their water, leaving a highly concentrated, sweet juice. Grapes are picked in successive passes through the vineyard, called tries (pronounced like “tree”) to obtain grapes that are perfect for the production of a luscious, sweet, dessert-style wine. The flavors are like candied lemon peel, which the French call citron confit, dried apricots, honey, and spices. They are very sweet, but not cloying because they retain good acidity for balance. We were so thrilled by the Coteaux du Layon that Madame opened a bottle of a single vineyard Coteaux called Clos de Sainte Catherine, which was equally delicious but with a more acidity and lemon character. Catherine happens to be our granddaughter’s name, too! We are definitely going to search for Coteaux du Layon when we get back home.
On the way back to Le Puy Notre Dame, we took a back road through nearby vineyards west of the village. Mary took this picture as the sun was beginning to set.
We cooked dinner at the gite, which is to say I assisted Mary by snapping the haricots vert we bought the previous day at the Montreuil-Bellay market along with fennel, garlic, and salad vegetables, and the pork cutlets. Our original idea was that fresh fennel would add flavor to the pork because we had used ground fennel seed at home for the same purpose. What she did was something different and more delicious than I expected. Here’s Mary.
I boiled the green beans in salted water. I browned the pork cutlets in a frying pan with olive oil. I sliced the fennel bulb and added that to the pork. When the beans were almost done, only about 15 minutes since the haricots vert are thinner than the green beans we get at home, I drained them and added them to the pork and fennel. This is when I added the garlic. We plated the whole thing as you see in the photo. I basically experimented and improvised as I went along and it turned out great! The whole meal…pork cutlets, green beans, fennel, garlic, salad greens, tomato…was less than 10€. We finished with Epoisses, one of our favorite cheeses. Here’s Brian with the wine.
We opened a bottle of Domaine de la Paleine Saumur rouge we bought during our visit the previous day. It is their basic estate wine, a Cabernet Franc, not highly complex, but smells and tastes like Cabernet Franc. Varietal integrity is important to me in enjoying wine and pairing it with food. The minimum I ask of a wine is that it smells and tastes like the grape it claims to be. That’s what we get with this wine. It was approachable, can be enjoyed when young, had good fruit, and expressed the grape and where it was grown. We happily enjoyed a delicious meal of local food and local wine, at low cost, prepared at the gite in Le Puy. Here are my notes on the wine.
Domaine de la Paleine Saumur 2007. This is not the most complex wine we have tasted on this trip but what we really liked about it is its varietal typicity and reflection of the appellation. It had nice dark fruit aromas but also had characteristic cassis, floral notes of violet, and mineral notes of Cabernet Franc. It was medium in body and acidity and had nice red and dark fruit flavors. Nicely balanced, moderate complexity, medium length, just a good, solid wine at a good value. 13.0% alcohol. We paid 8€ at the winery, a terrific value.That’s our post for today. We hope you found it interesting and enjoyable. Keep checking back at Cépage et Cuisine for more of our culinary and wine adventures in France. Until then,
Cheers!
Mary♥Brian
Thanks for the wonderful trip through France with you both. The food, wine and wonderful scenic pictures were fantastic. Mary, I'm sure I'd have a pastry each and every morning myself!
ReplyDelete