Meet a group of craft producers

In early February, I came back from a nice sunny break in Marrakech and I had to attend a dinner, immediately before the increasingly successful Wine Paris show, to accept a prize on behalf of my colleague from the Australian writer James Halliday.

Unsurprisingly, there are several Marrakech flights in Paris, so it seemed wise to take one of them, then the train in London. To make sure that I was on time for Sunday evening dinner, I was asked to fly on Saturday afternoon and I therefore had that evening and all day on Sunday to kill.

Of course, I planned to spend Sunday at the Louvre or the Musée d'Orsay, but my friend Mark Williamson of the Willia's wine bar told me that he planned to attend a very good wine tasting with the splendid name of the wines (“Long live Wine!”), So I joined it instead.

I had spent Saturday evening with friends of the juveniles, a wine bar at the corner of Will's, founded by the former partner of Mark's businesses, Tim Johnston, I am therefore afraid that there is an Anglo-Vino theme for my stay in the French capital. I really wanted to try to enter the name of Notre-Dame restored, having failed to penetrate the crowd during a short day in Paris in early January, but when I woke up on Sunday morning, it was cold and rainy. And my bed was extremely comfortable.

I had never consciously heard about the wines of the wines, but when I examined my reception box, I realized that, since 2018, I had been invited to their tastings, held on the eve of the main European wine fairs in Düsseldorf and now Paris. The initiative was born in 2007 “strong connections (trained) between other producers when they travel with importers we share in various countries”, according to its founder Laurence Texier. She is the woman and mother respectively of wine producers Eric and Martin Texier. The location of the Texes vineyards provides an index on the genesis of these wine tastings.

The Texes make distinctive handicrafts in a sort of the land of the Rhône valley between Valence and Montélimar, it therefore enments no more precise designation than the Côtes du Rhône, one of the most extensive appellations in France. Creating a reputation for their wines was therefore not easy. Like the other winegrowers showing their wines this Sunday, they believe passionately (forgive me for this capacity but overculed speech) in the wines motivated by terroir.

According to the High Wines ManifestoWho complains about the normalization of wines, the products they present share the objective of “a return to more nuances and sensitivity”, and “remain closer to the natural nature of the wine by rejecting the systematic use of the techniques defended by agronomy and modern oenology”. All these winegrowers are family affairs relatively on a small scale – generally practicing organic, biodynamic or regenerative viticulture and a minimum intervention in the cellar – so that they can undoubtedly make more noise by meeting rather than acting alone.

They are not helped by the fact that France does not have an effective national distribution system for wine, so an event on the eve of a show is ideal for meeting a maximum number of potential customers rather than depending on them to visit their areas. But I was intrigued to see the list of exhibitors who sent me in advance that it was not a projection of all French. There were producers of wine from Germany, Austria, Spain, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Switzerland. The vast majority of them, however, came from all over France (but not the fancy appellations, unless you count the only Tarlant Champagne). They were completed by a producer Norman Cider and Calvados and a Cognac, Fanny Fougerat distiller.

Curious, I advanced to the art space in the House of Metallos – where else? – The 11th arrondissement, the Shoreditch of Paris, and was struck by the obvious bonhomie. Exhibitors are deliberately mixed to promote as many useful discussions as possible between them, which is not so useful for visitors who try to make their way through the tasting book which benefits each company. However, he does not lists exposed wines, probably to allow producers to choose at the last minute which bottles to bring. A Mexican catering truck had been carefully provided just outside to keep the exhibitors by their tables as long as a groaning stomach would allow it.

Looking at the list of about 60 winegrowersI realized that I only knew 17 of them, so I started to educate myself. There was no wine with an industrial taste among them. And I learned a lot, although many exhibitors brought so many wines that it was impossible to taste them all. What I noticed was the number of inventive names and difficult to recall the wines, and how many wines were labeled not with an appellation, nor as IGP, the less demanding geographic name, but the simple wine of France, which allows producers even more freedom.

One problem was that it was the most recent vintages of these wines that were shown in Paris, and far too few of them are still available in the United Kingdom.

One of the most impressive ranges of wines came from a good producer outside of France, Vino Gross from Slovenia represented by Maria and Michael Gross, who, according to the profile they have submitted for the catalog, try to teach their young children “a conscious and open approach to their environment”.

But I mainly learned a lot about some of the less known wine regions in France. Yann de Agostini from the Domaine du Petit August came to Paris on the High Plateau des Hautes-Alpes around the city of Gap and told me that there were now 11 vines that push vines, at an altitude of up to 700 m. It started in 2009 and was certified organic by 2013. Its wine names are particularly creative (the weight of superfluous, for example), but I particularly appreciated its reds according to the very local grape mollard.

Camille and Thomas Fort du Domaine de Mouscaillo in Limoux had come from the extreme southwest, and showed me again how much Pinot Noir grew up in these Pyrenian foothills.

The producers in the southwest of France were particularly interesting and understood a couple trying to make new wave wines in Bordeaux. I was also struck by Marc and Thibaut Penavayre of Domaine Plaisance Penavayre in the small designation of the pediment north of Toulouse. According to them, it was “to die five years ago”, but now there is a new dynamism. They campaign to obtain a new special designation for white pediment made from their local grape bouyselet.

Fortunately, I did a lot like the wines of Eric Texier, husband of the organizer of the wines. He reported that the influential of the Perrin family in the south of the Rhône (CH of Beaucastel in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Miraval Provençal Rosé with Brad Pitt, etc.) bought in depth in his region. “So Bhézemus will probably soon have its own name. It took me 10 years to do what the perrins did in one,” he observed, with regret. Hollywood connections clearly help, even in the wilderness of the Rhône valley.

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