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Tag Archives: France

Local Hero

07 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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Arretxea, Courbu, France, Gros Manseng, Hegoxuri, Irouleguy, Pay Basque, Petit Manseng, Wine, Wine tasting

When you read a lot of wine crit, – Yep that’s crit – you become overly familiar (and indeed bored) with some of the language used to describe it. Such as;  ‘fruit forward’, ‘easy drinking’ or, God forbid, my own bete noire ‘smooth’ or ‘generous’ even!

I have friends who are both generous and smooth, so a little context wouldn’t go amiss, along with some joy, unbridled passion, desperately needed emotion, and dare I say love.

So I’m going to give you some love, and show you the kind of wine that makes me as deliriously happy as Pharrell Williams.

I first came across the wines of Irouleguy as a young surfer mooching around the coast of South West France back in the fluorescent wet suited 80’s. The drive from Guethary to Mundaka wound its way through the vinelands of the Pays Basque, and you had to be stupid, blind, or both, to overlook its wines, as they were, and still are, some of the most exciting around.

Irouleguy numbers some nine communes dating back to the 11th century and is a sadly neglected area when it comes to both knowledge, and the subsequent promotion, of its wines and their route to market.

‘Peppery as the Welsh, proud as Lucifer, and combustible as his matches’ was Richard Ford’s pithy assessment of the Basques.

Flaming red is their colour, from their tiled roofs to their distinctive berets, piment d’espalette, and the majority of their wines made from Tannat and the two Cabernets. But what folks often overlook are the miniscule examples of white wine made in the region. There are only about half a dozen producers of these and the standard is off the clock!

Arretxea, from the Basque ‘arre’, meaning stone and ‘xea’, house, comes from a six hectare plot planted with Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Courbu – the principle grapes of Jurancon – on steep terraces with sustainable vineyard husbandry and biodynamics.

Hegoxuri is hand harvested, gets a forty hour maceration on skins, followed by partial fermentation in barrique, and has the kind of remarkable golden straw colour that would excite Rumplestiltskin. This leads into a nose of exotic fruits, peaches and honeysuckle, married with full, rich and heady flavours – redolent of great white Burgundy – and marked with an outstanding nervy acidity.

These local wines, for local people, are rare gems, and whilst you have to dig a little deeper down to afford them, are a true testament to the power of geography over greed. 

Topa!

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Llum’s Yum

01 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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France, French wine, Grenache Gris, Le Roc des Anges, Llum, Maccabeu, Marjorie Gallet, Montner, Pyrenees-Orientales, Roussillon, Wine, Wine tasting

Don’t you just love it when you come across a wine that not only exceeds expectations, but positively confounds them.

Just as I was prepping my palate for a full body massage, and more fat than lean, it rocks up linear, with vibrant, yet delicate, fruit, tons of creamy complexity, an intense, and totally unexpected minerality, cut through with a rapier-like grapefruit acidity.. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of pep and brio, with more than a whiff of the Southern Rhone, but hardly the norm for a white made in the brutal summer heat of the Roussillon.

Le Roc des Anges – I’ll let you work that one out – sits in the village of Montner in the Agly valley, Pyrénées-Orientales, on the northern, exposed, side – and this is the key – of Força Réal mountain. This is tough country, dry and windy with notoriously poor soil, composed of old rotten schists – we all know a few of those!

All vineyard practices are traditional – other than some leaf thinning and essential pruning the ethos is strictly non-interventionist. Majorie (Gallet) describes the wine as a work in progress – but I think she’s being modest.

Simplicity and authenticity are her watchwords. A traditional press is used, vinification is in concrete – with the shape of the tanks, and the level of the fill, determining the gentle extraction – with maturation in concrete – which enhances the aromatic purity and freshness of the wine – and wood (for about 10% of the elevage) in the form of one-to-three year old barrels.

‘Llum’ (meaning light in Catalan) is a blend of Grenache Gris 90% and Maccabeu 10% from 70 to 100 year old vines and is slow to release the full extent of its beauty, only doing so as it warms and broadens in the glass.

Far and away my white wine of the summer – Llum’s Yum!

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‘A Walk On The Wild Side’

26 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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Aveyron, Clairvaux, Fer Servadou, France, French wine, Jean Luc Matha, Lou Reed, Mansois, Marcillac, Peirafi, red wine, Rodez, Wine, Wine tasting

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The wine market is a dangerous place to be right now, especially when 99% of products are imported and reliant on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the currencies from whence they come. If you lob a grenade on the value of those key currencies, you have to adapt quickly.

Do you offset the collapse of sterling, continuous inflationary rises and duty, by buying cheaper plonk, or do you accept that you have to drink less but better.

Personally, I don’t think that good wine is expensive, not because I’m rich, but when a couple of cappuccinos cost six quid and a pint of craft ale almost the same, expecting a naturally made, labour intensive, product like wine to cost just a few pence more is living in ‘La La Land’ – to quote a popular movie.

If I’m being forced to pay more for my wine, I don’t want that extra money to go on a factory made brand, I want to drink something distinctly different and jolly hard to get.

Let’s – in the words of the late, great Lou Reed – take a walk on the wild side.

Marcillac is a tiny, obscure, appellation near Clairvaux in Aveyron, north of Rodez,comprising some eight growers making wines exclusively from the Mansois grape, otherwise known as Fer Servadou.

For almost a thousand years vineyards were the base of the regions economy until they were devastated by phylloxera in the 1860’s. 

The style and, more importantly, the philosophy of the wines are closely connected with the area. Violet tinted, brilliantly fresh reds packed with redcurrant fruit, and an underlying, almost medicinal quality. The medieval citizens of Rodez used to drink Marcillac for their health because it was preferable to the local water.

Peirafi is Jean Luc Matha’s special cuvee based on rigorous selection of old vines fermented in open tanks then aged in well seasoned foudres for 20 months. It’s a big mouthful of forest fruits, spices and an almost mineral acidity, angular and refreshing with a sort of haunting earthiness.

Jean Luc says ‘I love working with the vine up on the hill. And just before I come down, I like to watch the sunset and see how the colours change….I breath and listen to the sounds around me…I am in the midst of nature and feel completely content. The earth, the vine, the frost, the rain and the sun. That, for me, is the beauty of winemaking.’
 

Now, that’s got to be worth more than a couple of coffees!

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Le Vigne D’Albert

23 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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Arbouriou, Bergerac, Cot, Fer, France, Garonne, Luc de Conti, Wine, winetasting

An Alsatian once said – that’s a native of Alsace, not the dog – ‘Each man has two countries, his own and France’ and much as I love the wines of Italy, France was my first love.

When I go in search of some, much needed, purity and truth – sadly lacking in today’s world – it’s that first sentient experience that I’m trying to replicate, harking back to callow youth, when wine, and indeed life, was nothing but pure pleasure, until forced to grow up, conscious of the need to judge, select, codify, dissect and provide either a score or a medal.

This is a wine that takes me back in time, to those very first vintages worked around Bergerac and the middle Garonne, when flavours and sensations were the absolute antithesis of the over-sweetened, aggressively alcoholic, monsters of today.

It’s not rocket science, just that there’s a lot less profit for the investment made and time spent. The key is the encouragement of the maximum expression of the potential of the grapes in the vineyard. Caring for the soil – so that it isn’t a cadaver – nourishing with biodynamic treatments to encourage microbial activity. Manual, rather than machine, harvesting and selection of only the ripest grapes, only releasing a wine if it meets with the highest of standards, and changing the blend according to the physiological ripeness of the grapes.

I love the wines of Luc de Conti, and Le Vigne d’Albert is a lovely addition with a nod to tradition. Guillaume de Conti’s homage to his grand-pere, Albert. It’s made from a cepage historic to the region, harvested together, from a small parcel of vines planted, by Albert, some 60 years ago. These include Mérille (aka Périgourd); Arbouriou, Fer, Côt (Malbec) and others – all massale selected (look it up wine nerds) – fermented with hometown yeasts, left for six months on lees and zero sulphur.

The young man who grew up to be me would have recognized it, I’m sure Albert would too. I’ll leave it for you to decide.

A la votre!

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‘Take Me Away’

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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Clos de Gravillas, France, Minervois, Montagne Noire, Terret, white wine, Wine, Wine tasting

Emmenez Moi Au Bout de Terret

Named after a Charles Aznavour song and roughly translated as ‘Take me along’ or Take me away – to a place in the sun, where one can escape, and forget, the misery of life’ – this ethereal, and nervy, little white from Clos de Gravillas certainly does that!

You can expect the unexpected here, as this is very different from the everyday white wines of Minervois. It’s a lean, green, linear limestone machine, made from organically grown Terret Bourret grapes grown on blindingly white rock from a single hectare plot – Yep that’s one hectare – and aged for eleven months in large Austrian barrels. It’s as fresh as new mown hay, or a new May morn, and picked between the first and third weeks of September.

Gravillas means ‘gravel’ – in the local patois – and the plateau that the Clos du Gravillas occupies has been used – to grow grapes – for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Situated about 300 metres above sea level on slopes beneath the Montagne Noire the vineyards catch the cool evening breezes, allowing the grapes to retain a bright, zippy acidity. The high summer temperatures add the necessary alcoholic oomph to balance that acidity, and create the structural depth and maximum ripeness, concentration and intensity required to make this an unforgettably glorious wine.  


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Mad About Malbec

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

≈ 1 Comment

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Argentina, Auxerrois, Cahors, Clos de Gamot, Cot, France, Lot, Malbec, red wine, Wine, Wine tasting

OK, who’s willing to admit that when they order ‘Pinot’ they mean Grigio – rather than Noir – and when they cry ‘More Sauvignon please waiter’ they expect it to come from New Zealand – rather than its home in the Loire – and every fool knows that Malbec can only come from Argentina!

Once upon a time, when ‘Hector was a pup’, Malbec came from France, and primarily from Cahors, where it’s known as Cot or Auxerrois – not such romantic names I grant you.

It has a long and glorious history, once considered superior to Bordeaux, and exported throughout Europe and Russia as early as the 13th century.

So what went wrong?  Well, first came the protectionist measures inflicted on the Haut Pays by the canny merchants of Bordeaux to promote their own wines. The slight disruption of the Hundred Years War, devastation by phylloxera, and increased market access – due to the railways – to the cheaper wines of the Languedoc.

Isolated and poor – there was little in the Lot – they were still struggling well into the mid 1990’s, and as the only appellation in the South West where both Cabernets are persona non grata, it was searching for an identity somewhere between teeth tingling tannic twig juice, for the old folk, and jammy pap for the modern consumer.

Good vinestock, old clones, low yields, barrel maturation and attention to detail, have ensured that some wines have retained the wisdom of the ages.

Classic Cahors should be inky, rather than black, with a dash of medicinal iodine and jam packed with deep, late summer fruit. Expect touches of fig and liquorice, a lash of spice and tar, and a smattering of herby pepperiness. It’s subtle rather than powerful, classy and understated with a touch of astringency and a lingering acidity to cope with the confit and cassoulet!

I’ll be the first to admit that World Malbec Day is a fiendishly clever marketing ploy to promote the wines of Argentina – but why not buck the trend and go crazy for Cot!

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‘Yesterday When I Was Young’

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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Baudelaire, Charles Aznavour, France, Grenache, Mas Foulaquier, Pic Saint Loup, Syrah, Wine, Wine tasting

‘Yesterday when I was young, the taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue’

I’m often asked what it is that I look for when I taste a wine. I cannot recall my exact answer, but I guess it’s something like the late, great, Charles Aznavour is attempting to describe. Perhaps the search for truth, beauty, love and a return to the simplicity of youth – before life gets in the way and makes things just a little too complex.

L’Orphée is an equal blend of Grenache Noir and Grenache Blanc and 50% Syrah and expressive of the terroir and biodynamic practices of Mas Foulaquier’s  eight hectares on the northernmost edge of the Pic Saint Loup. 

The soil itself, as D H Lawrence would describe it: nurse of passions, stage of dramas, and habitat of local gods.

It opens dramatically with a bit of oxygen, so give a bit of air, put down the Baudelaire, and marvel as the earthy and floral aromatics come to the fore, exploding with rich dark blueberries, plum, pepper and violets prior to a lip smackingly sapid and softly generous finish with a stony minerality and plenty of concentration.

Like rain upon the tongue!

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‘I tread the sand at the sea’s edge’

28 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by juleslewis in Musings, Surf, Travel

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Authors, Biarritz, Books, France, George Orwell, Herman Melville, Jonathan Swift, Landscape, Literature, Surfing, Travel, Vernon Watkins, William Maxwell

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My father walks toward me up the beach his spare frame silhouetted against the sparkling sun. ‘Breathe deeply boy’ he says as he ruffles my hair. I look into his eyes the colour of the sea and realising  a cat has my tongue bury my head in the warmth of my faithful dog’s neck seeking comfort and reassurance in her familiar smell. I am asthmatic and the sea makes me well. It is why we came here.

A daydream takes me to our house in the hills and the grave of the unknown, unnamed, tortoise. He ran away, finding temporary refuge amid the wreckage of my grandmother’s desk – a Christmas present compromised by my father’s ill-timed gift of a tool set – perhaps he had an inkling of what was to come. The doctor says that if we get rid of the animals it will help my breathing. Snowy the rabbit is adopted and subsequently eaten by the neighbours. We are unable to part with the dog.

 ‘The darkness is not dark. Nor sunlight the light of the sun’

Eight summers pass when Alan speaks to me walking by on a startling, sea shimmering, summer morn with salt in his hair and a smile on his face. ‘Why don’t you follow me out’ he says. Squinting upward, I place my trust in him tuck my beloved and battered surfboard beneath my skinny arm and allow him to shepherd me through the rip next to the pier. Forty years later I place my hand gently onto his casket and say goodbye.

 ‘And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty’

 Major Matt Mason sinks slowly beneath the glossy mirror of the mossy moat. Calisto, despite the enormous brain straining against the confines of his transparent green skull, is unable to save his friend. I grasp the Major’s clumsily articulated armature as my father grasps mine as I dive downward. I gaze into those grey eyes once more and recall our journey home from school, the day my brother died, remembering that he buried him alone in the winter rain.

Adrian and I fail to hear Akela’s footsteps on the creaking boards of the scout hall, blissfully unaware of our impending dishonourable discharge. Adrian is my best friend. His father Jack a fine cricketer. But to Ade and I he is better known as a singer, immortalised by his unforgettable, some might say unforgivable, rendition of Al Martino’s ‘Spanish Eyes’. Jack has a lingual protrusion lisp and the line ‘Please say Si Si’ reduces us to helpless laughter. Akela’s glare is far from benign as she spots the crescent shaped bite mark on my thigh and the cartoonesque, egg-shaped lump protruding from Adrian’s forehead. The old wolf uses her wisdom to expel us from the pack, confiscating our woggles and consigning us to the wilderness, like Jason McCord in Branded, to forever fight for our good names.

 Dad’s a rugby man, regularly and eagerly watching as I shiver on the touchline, my skinny, hairless and mottled knees knocking in the bitter northeasterly wind.  I place my frozen hands inside my thin cotton shirt to warm them against my unfilled out torso and wait for the pass that never comes. Checking my opposite number, I accurately guess that he’s been picked for size rather than speed. His fledgling moustache and probable pubic hair suggest that we cannot possibly be in the same academic year. If we are my folks just don’t have a big enough larder.

The ball comes above my head, exposing my bare sinewy midriff. I gather the greasy ball, with stiff little fingers, just as the overfed progeny of Brobdingnag  cuts me in two with a scything tackle that sees me crumble like a Corinthian column in an earthquake. Bundled into touch – where another large and ungainly lad falls on me – I overhear a cry of ‘Who’s that kid on the wing’ and imagine the expression on my father’s face.

 ‘I tread the sand at the sea’s edge’

 ‘What do you think he does all day’ my mother asks?

Becoming an ordinary surfer is a difficult task, but becoming a good one, one that people look up to, well that’s another story….This is how I spend my time.

 The lefthander is technically difficult, requiring one hard turn, mid face, followed by a series of rapid pumps to trim, drive, and out run the crashing lip. I am flying down the line, pushing hard on the first third of my board to flatten the rocker, simultaneously keeping my toe rail down to maintain glide along the fast moving wall. I alternate with pressure on my heels to stop the inside rail from being sucked up and pitched by the lip. Subtle changes are transmitted from my feet to my brain as the water draws off the bottom and the wave disembowels itself on the rocky slab. I take another, staying close to the hook so I can feel the foam-ball spit and spray my back like a fire hose, testing the limits of the board, the bite of the inside rail, the whip of the tail, the alignment and cant of the fins. Oh how they sing at speed.

Over dinner, silently pondering minor adjustments and the shape of my next board. I conclude that talking would make me sound like Orwell’s ‘rattling stick in a swillbucket’ and besides, I don’t like the sound of my breaking voice. My father glares at me, but I am fourteen and have long stopped listening to my father.

I feel my mother’s eyes on me, as I prepare for my first big trip, and wonder what she makes of her one remaining son. A poorly designed wetsuit seam has reduced my belly button by half over the summer, and my left foot, strapped with duct tape, has a wound that fails to heal as I refuse to stay out of the water. Add to this knees full of skating grazes, permanently bloodshot eyes, a condition called surfers ear and a mop of unruly, unwashed, salt encrusted hair. Despite, or perhaps because of this, she kisses me on the forehead and with a tear in her eye holds me just a little too long.

The first trophy is hard earned in double overhead surf. ‘The kids ok in the small stuff, but lets see how he does when it gets bigger’. Hiding it behind my back I try to look disconsolate in front of my girl – who has a Saturday job in the pet shop – but she can tell I’ve won and laughing loudly tosses her dark hair that smells of birdseed and pony nuts.

Pushing through the crowd at the water’s edge, away from the American and Australian surfers who’ve consigned me to an ignominious first round exit from the contest, I avoid Sylvie’s sympathetic smile realising that no matter how good I think I am, I’m not in their league. Sylvie returns to Biarritz knowing that I do not love her enough to follow. I return home to race rats and do not surf again for seventeen years.

 ‘Time past and time future. What might have been and what has been.’

In the waveless world of the city, where my wife grew up and my boys were raised, it’s difficult to imagine the sea, and  when I dream of home it is not as it is now. Unnatural and false full regularly appearing in colour supplements, its caramelised onions and cappuccinos fortifying overindulged, overfed, middle aged alphas, unforgivingly shoehorned into shorties by their mean lipped, male hipped wives, before their next bespoke tutored surf session. Once the epitome of cool, my sport is neatly packaged as a lifestyle choice and used to peddle  4×4’s, seaside property and life insurance for the newly retired. I don’t begrudge them their fun, but they belong on paved sand-less streets not on the last of the country’s uncommitted land, their baby soft feet weeping for the safety of shoes.

‘The free person who runs away is no better off than a fish with a hook in his mouth, given plenty of line so he can tire himself out and be reeled in calmly and easily by his own destiny’ 

Leaving the warm car in the leaf strewn lane I strike out alone down the sheep strewn banks where livestock once walked to market. Past the simple castles – mounty banks – their battlements crushed by the Normans and where Edward I danced a jig on the bones of Llewellyn the Great. Past the ancient caves, facing south into the meagre warmth of the ice age sun, where Eynon once walked with the sea in his blood and the rain on his face, his feet bare and damp, like mine, on the dew of the new morning’s marram grass. Through a cleft in the valley I glimpse the silver grey faces of the new swells, polished by the oarweeds and marching to the mournful sound of the sea bell, the legends of the drowned churches, and the incandescence of the dead.

‘Sweet fields beyond the the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green’

Entering the chill water, its surface the colour of armour, I push out relieved to escape the land and the incessant nanny ping of the cell phone. Quiet now save for the saw of the wind and the siren call of the sea. ‘Breathe deeply boy ‘ it says.

‘The end precedes the beginning, and the end and the beginning were always there, before the beginning and after the end.’

 

 

 

 

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‘The Hills are Alive’

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

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France, Savoie, Travel, Wine

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‘It’s your turn’ the VOR says, disturbing my concentration, as we motor through the Alpine tunnels.
I love driving through ‘La Belle France’ its wide empty roads a refreshing change from the congestion, drizzle and perpetual greyness of my home on Kong’s Island.
Each leg of our journey is a revelation. The battlefields of the Marne and the Somme, the vineyards of Champagne, the Chickens of Bresse, the wildness of the Parc Naturel Régional de Haut Jura and the overdue promise of a Fondue Savoyarde.
The VOR dislikes video games and films and, rather like those parents who insist on wooden toys, prefers ‘I Spy’, ‘I Went to the Shop’ and ‘Who am I’ as (in-car) entertainment much to our children’s chagrin.

I settle on a mineral in ‘Animal, Mineral, Vegetable’ hoping to buy some extra daydreaming time. The kids, having held their breath in the tunnels of Paris, have decided that they might die of asphyxiation in the long Alpine versions perhaps thinking that this might be preferable to guessing my choice of Georgerobinsonite.
We arrive in a heatwave, the high temperatures sapping what little energy remains in my middle son’s teenage body forcing him to lie down (again) lest vertigo take hold.
I settle for an ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ moment with a glass of beer prior to a swim in the Lake – don’t try this at home – to rid myself of my drivers legs. The VOR meanwhile befriends our neighbours, an elderly couple from Paris, who are impressed by her treatment of their beloved language. It appears she has told them that I am a wine merchant and for the rest of our holiday the old man waves half empty bottles in my direction to indicate his tipple of the day.
I have decided to swim to the mile buoy and back twice a day. Although this slightly increases my chances of a premature death by drowning, it is the only way I can think of to burn off the Tartiflette and Gratin Dauphinoise.
There are some 17 crus worthy of the name Vin de Savoie and I intend to work my way through all of them during our stay. The best are Abymes, Apremont, Arbin, Ayze, Crepy, Seyssel, Montmelian, Saint-Jeoire-Prieuré and my own personal favourites Cruet and Chignin. These razor sharp, low alcohol, refreshingly restorative, often perlant whites are made from Jacquere, Altesse (or Rousette), Gringet, Chasselas (Roux and Vert) and Roussanne or Bergeron of Chignin. The reds (please don’t ‘mull’ them) are equally light and delicious and made from Gamay (Noir a Jus Blanc), Pinot Noir, Persan (almost non existent) and the native Mondeuse.
Our heatwave ends prematurely in a massive storm which obliterates the southern end of the Lake making it look like the entrance to the sea. I put down my Mondeuse, batten the hatches, splice the mainbrace and break out the Eau de Vie.
The inclement dawn weather inspires the VOR to venture further into the mountains. I question the wisdom of going higher but only inwardly as cowardice, or is it diplomacy, prevails.
‘I promised the boys a toboggan ride’ she ventures by way of an explanation.
We climb through the kind of narrow, winding, hairpins a cyclist full of EPO would struggle with. Past cows with bells and cute wooden chalets perched precariously on the sides of deep valleys.
‘Does the Tour de France ever come through here’ my youngest asks. 2009 and 2013, I ‘Rainmanly’ add, but my attention is taken by an extremely small man with curly hair stood next to a woodpile.
Before I have adequately thought things through I find myself on a chairlift ascending over heathered scrub and jagged rock into increasingly opaque cloud to the sound of a child weeping. Afraid of heights I know exactly how they must feel. This must look charming in the snow, I think, but again keep it to myself.
“Mont Blanc must be over there” the VOR says, gesticulating toward a thick bank of grey cloud, before the returning chairlift hits her in the calves leaving two peach size bruises which ruin her tan for the remainder of the holiday. I sit next to my cold and frightened youngest son vainly trying to keep him warm, and my camera dry, as a rivulet of rainwater runs down the back of my neck.
We change into dry clothing under the tailgate of the car before running to a charming, chalet-style restaurant for lunch and some much needed warmth. ‘This is nice’ and ‘Pull yourselves together’ says the VOR to our hypothermic offspring over the sausages and beer. Our fellow diners all appear to come from the north of England, presumably eager to find somewhere that resembles the Lake District in February, they do not seem to be cold at all.
Hours later, whilst driving back through the mountains with the heater on full blast, we pass the same man next to the woodpile and I imagine him in lederhosen made from Captain Von Trapp’s curtains.

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Sharpener

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by juleslewis in Wine

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Chambéry, France, Savoie, Vermouth

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A “Sharpener” is a drink designed to alleviate dullness, put an end to ennui and torpor and lift ones spirits in preparation for the evening’s festivities.

As the weekend approaches, here is a tipple to stimulate the appetite, commonly referred to as an aperitif.

This is Dolin; a Vermouth made near Chambéry in the Savoie region of eastern France.  It’s a blend of alpine herbs and spices, although like all good drinkywinks, the exact recipe is a closely guarded secret. Light, lively and refreshing on the palate – a little less viscous than Noilly Prat – it is generally accompanied by tonic, lemonade or mineral water.  Personally I prefer it on the rocks, or of your spirits really require a kick start, mix it with Campari for a variation on the “bicyclette”

£9.89 from larger branches of Waitrose.

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