from Vacquieres, France: dusting off past harvests

Saturday Evening

Nina, we have visitors from a winery in New Zealand and I’m going to do a tasting for them. Come join us. Jean-Benoit calls up to the office where I am, as usual, frowning over Ocean text and photos.

So this Midwesterner who looks for opportunities to taste good wines and who has, for years, loved to listen to vintners discuss the particularities of terroir is supposed to say no?

A busman’s holiday! The New Zealander tells me. We are visiting wineries and having a good time as well.

Of course, it goes without saying that if you do the first then you will have the second…

Jean-Benoit uncorks a range of wines from his cave at the Chateau de Lascaux. Six bottles – two whites, four reds.





It is a trick to taste the youngest, I think, because you have to predict how it will mature. Many of the vintners I’ve met in France sell you stuff that they want you to keep hidden until the year, say 2012. That’s fine if you have invested in a cave or at the very least, in a storage place that will let the wine relax in wine-spa-like conditions, temperature and humidity-wise. Me, I keep my wines in a dark corner of the loft. It’s the best I can do. Imperfect? Oh yes.

But it is for this reason that Jean-Benoit’s words are music to my ears. I ask him about how his wines will be X years from now.

I sell them if they taste good now. It’s no use selling them for the future. People live in apartments and cannot provide great conditions for wine. It is up to us to do that. You, the customer, buy a wine and you should expect to uncork it and love it.

Jean-Benoit uncorks, we sniff, swish, sniff again, drink.

Or at least I drink. Spitting is quite the acceptable option. But wait. A vintner uncorks his best wines. He shares his knowledge, work, effort with you in that small bit poured into your glass. The aroma and flavors are wonderful. Would your natural inclination then be to spit it out?

I have spat my way up and down wineries where the product was indifferent, or when I was driving, or when I was doing the fast and furious visiting, forgetting that there is always a slow road to take out there. But now, in the caves of Chateau Lascaux, the tastings are gifts from the person who has created the wines. They are to be savored. I savor them.

A neighbor, himself a vintner, is with us, listening attentively. When Jean-Benoit speaks, it is always with something worthwhile to say. He does not indulge in random small stuff. I may have to explain the tone and tenor of Ocean when the time comes.






I join the family again for supper. I eat all meals with them – it was not in the original plan, but I have fallen into the habit of saying yes when they ask and they always ask. I would be a fool to pass on French country cooking. I don’t know if people here even know how to do it poorly.