Saturday, November 29, 2014

Coals to the New Castle




October 17

Today we visited the ville of Chateauneuf du Pape. That’s the new castle of the pope, maybe his summer home away from Avignon. It’s also a super-prestigious wine appellation in the Rhone Valley. 

So here we were in the south of France. Larry’s turf. And today, for a big change, maybe the only time it’ll happen, I got Larry’s ass unlost. 

But first we hit the road early to go to the Friday morning market in Carpentras, a few kilometers from Beaumes de Venise.

We parked on the edge of town and entered by the Orange Gate, a remnant of the old city walls. There were vendors set up everywhere in the narrow, medieval streets.

I had been talking one night at dinner about Joanna’s skill at cooking, especially fish, and somehow she was put on the spot to prepare a fish dinner Friday night. She found bonita and bought two. 

The seller cut them into steaks. The meat was red. Sort of like Roussillon ocher or the aged steaks of La Maison Gouin.

We also made a stop a large produce stand because Larry thinks one of the girls who works there is gorgeous. Joanna got a shot of Larry buying vegetables from her.


There were also vegetables and fruit. There has been a running gag here about pears. Joanna bought three of them at the market in Vaison the other day. Larry said we should buy more. I said three’s enough, a half for everybody. They’ll go bad. I eat half a pear a month on average.

Turns out, everybody here loves pears. So at Carpentras we bought two dozen. I think we picked up some more at the Carrefour supermarket on the way home.


We got back to put everything away, and set out for Chateauneuf du Pape sometime around 11, I guess. The Google map started us out on the same route we tried for Roussillon, sending us to roads that either don’t exist or aren’t marked. We had one false start and then realized we needed to head to a town called Courthezon, which is about two-thirds of the way there. 

The rest was easy. Actually, it was all easy for me because I sat there like a gangster while Wheels did the driving.

So we got to Chateauneuf du Pape a little after noon. The town is built on a hill, with the new castle on top. The actual chateauneuf isn’t so neuf anymore and all that’s left of it seems to be a tower and part of a wall.

That wasn’t what we came for anyhow. Larry called ahead and reserved a table for 13 o’clock at a cafe called Le Pistou. 


Le Pistou is up a hill. Most places are up hills here. This was a narrow street with a 20 percent grade. Maybe even straight up. But we got there. 

One of the specials of the day was coq au vin. I can’t remember the last time I had rooster in wine. This was going to be comfort food.

And it probably would have been, too, except that Le Pistou had run out of it by 10 to one. I was unhappy about that, but went back to the menu and ordered the next best thing, pork cheek in mustard sauce. Joanna had tripe sausage with the same sauce.

Because this is Chateauneuf du Pape, le Pistou served the local wine by the glass. Larry tells me that some of the producers of Chateauneuf du Pape are not turning out great quality wine. I don’t know. Any of the stuff I’ve ever tasted has been great.

Anyhow, I had a glass of red and another of white. The pork cheek overwhelmed the white, but the red was full of fun and held up just fine. It was also good with the bite I took of Joanna’s sausage. The pork cheek was very tasty, but the sausage was even more so. 

After lunch we strolled down to the tourist office for directions to some of the wine caves that Larry had picked out for us. They were all within walking distance. 

We stopped first at the Famille de Perrin store. This family has a range of wines, including a white that I buy at home under the name Vielle Ferme, or Old Farm. It’s made in the Cote du Ventoux section of the Rhone Valley. It isn’t officially a white Cotes du Rhone, but has the strong flavor I like, so I often have a couple of bottles in the fridge. It costs less than 10 bucks a bottle.


The company has other wine operations that climb the price ladder to the top of the line, a Chateauneuf du Pape called Chateau de Beaucastel. They had reds from 2012, 2005, and 2001 that ranged in price from 60 to 90 euros.

After sipping those, we walked over to another cave, Domaine Pegau.


Pegau is a clay wine pitcher, from which, we were told, the pope was served his wine. I don’t know if the wine was called Chateauneuf du Pape back then or not. The cave had a pegau on a shelf.


Pegau had a great, tasty white, which we wound up buying.  

Then we went to my favorite place, Eddie Feraud & Fils. There is a puppet with a big red nose outside the door. I had noticed it earlier when we drove into town looking for the parking lot.


Joanna took the picture of the day, a study in noses. All right, so the puppet wins this one, but at least I was a contender.

The bar was overseen by a laughing Provencal lady, and the wine-maker himself strolled in and offered us a taste of a reserve of some kind. We wound up buying a  bottle of 2012 white and one of 2011 red. Both cost less than 20 euros.

The wine was terrific. We wound up getting a couple of bottles here. I would have done that even if the lady hadn’t let me go down into the cellar.


It was great down there, dark, lined with oak casks, smelling of ancient mold and cobwebs.


Then Larry, consulting the map from the tourist office, led us up a hill and we started down a street full of wine caves, but not the one belonging to Jerome Gradassi, the guy we were looking for.

We backtracked, and Larry showed me the map. Here’s the Rue des Consuls and the street we want goes uphill opposite that.


I look at the map and lead everyone back. We don’t want to head this way, but off to the left. Look. There’s a sign. I can’t make it out exactly from this distance, but it could say Gradassi. And it did. 

Larry said, “This is going to make your blog.” I said, “It’s going to be the lead.”

Gradassi wasn’t there, but had posted a phone number. A man and his mother were standing outside with us, and he phoned.

Gradassi came to the door a few minutes later and let us in. We walked past more casks and cobwebs, but he had only one wine for tasting, and it was too young.


We backtracked to Eddie Feraud and Pegau, and that’s when we bought the bottles. Then came the big one. We went to Perrin. Larry tried the '05 and '01 again. We opted for the '01 as a gift to the family for having let us stay in their house. We’re going to spring it as a surprise with the daube on Sunday night.

We were getting tired, and Joanna was on the hook for making dinner, so we came back to the house. Joanna fried the bonita in grape seed oil with ginger, scallions, leeks in a sauce of wine and oyster sauce. That went with broccoli and white rice.

Went with? Hell, it was all superb.

We had that with lots of local wine, a Sablet white and Gigondas red, for instance.

This is really la plus belle Provence.

Be well, all.

Harry


Exploring Provence




October 17

We set out Thursday morning for the ocher cliffs of Roussillon. We had Google maps for the town and for several recommended wine caves on the way. We also had recommendations for a couple of restaurants in the area. 

So after the third or fourth traffic circle, nothing matched up. 

We found Route D977, but it was headed the wrong way. We never did see 950D, so Larry drove us into the town of Sarrians, where we found a bar and someone who could give useful directions: Turn left at the next corner and follow the signs for Monteux, and so forth.

That makes a lot more sense than go 1.4 km and turn right onto Rue de St. Whatever. Road signs are few and far between in this territory. Far from telling you what towns you want to make for, the Google directions don’t even tell you the compass direction you are taking. 

It reminds me of Alexander the Poet, whom I once heard at a reading. He had a haiku called “Why I Hate MapQuest”: 

I went to MapQuest
to get me some directions,
but they were fucked up.

Once we go to Monteux, we were to follow signs to L’Isle sur la Sorgue. Only, there weren’t any. So we stopped again, this time at a stationery store where they told us they hadn’t heard of the place. One lady dismissed us with the back of her hand to go ask somewhere else. 

The guy across the street at the pizza shop told us to follow signs for Cavaillon and it was on the way to Cavaillon, which happens to be the melon-growing capital of France, that we got onto the road to Isle Sur la Sorgue. From there we were to go in the direction of Apt, and we would find Roussillon on the way there.

The road to Apt led us to Coustellet, which is the site of one of the restaurants that Claude had recommended, La Maison Gouin. We thought it was supposed to be around the corner on Route D2, but couldn’t find it.

Larry parked and went to get more directions.

His first stop was a boulangerie, where the baker didn’t even know the name of the road that the store is on. He came back and said we should try the police station. But it was closed for lunch. 

Joanna saw a map across the street, so we jaywalked to read it. We knew we could get away with it because the police were out to lunch.

Larry, meanwhile, found an outdoor furniture store and was told the restaurant wasn’t on highway D2, after all, but on the main drag, D900, the Road to Apt. 

We finally got there and it looked closed. But a small sign on the door said to enter at the back. You can get to the parking lot from Route D2, but the Gouin faces the main street through town, hence the confusion.

The place was packed, but a waiter said to come back in 10 minutes. Joanna and I went to wander the deli in front. The store sold rich, red aged beef, and several prepared specialties, including something called vol de vent, which looked like a pastry.

While we were there, the waiters set up a table in a small space just inside the store. This was space they were making for us.

Joanna and Larry had a very strong fish soup to start. I tasted a spoonful of Joanna’s along with a bit of cracker and aioli, a garlic mayonnaise. Having no idea what it was, I ordered tartine a la mousse de foie gras. It was a creamy mousse flavored with goose liver and served with raw greens on a kind of biscuit.

I wanted to find out what vol de vent is, so my main course was vol de vent de volaille (chicken), a standalone chicken pot pie. 

I had a Côtes du Rhone red with the tartine and a Rhone Valley white with the main dish. The white’s appellation is officially Côte du Ventoux, but that’s right in the neighborhood of Beaumes de Venise and Côte du Rhone Villages, etc.

Joanna had salmon on a bed of green beans and skipped wine. 

Larry had lamb, like we had for dinner the night before, with pasta, which was on tonight’s menu, because he can’t get enough of either one.


Roussillon is built high up an almost vertical mountain on cliffs of ocher. Purple, red, orange, yellow. It’s one of those medieval towns where some of the thoroughfares are pedestrian stairways. 

They built them high up in the Dark Ages so the barbarians would take one look and say; How much plunder can fit up there? It can’t be worth the climb.


We, on the other hand, are not marauding barbarians. We don’t maraud; we’re curious. So when we see stairs winding up, we have to climb them. At the top, there were more ocher cliffs and a house—a door, windows with curtains, etc.—built into the living rock. 

The photo of the day is Joanna standing next to that house (I see now that I didn’t get it into frame) with the lookout tower overhead. Actually, I don’t know how authentic that lookout tower is because it also has curtains on the windows.


The stucco and mortar are colored with ocher. The paints are chosen well to go with the rich earth tones. Shutters, for instance, are shades of red or purple.


This was a residential neighborhood, and so we went back to the car, consulted the tourist map and drove around the mountaintop to the hopping part of the village, which is packed with tourists whose average age seems to be 90 or so. They make me looked tuned in.

We sat at a cafe overrun with the aged tourists. I had a beer named for cicadas. Larry, who is driving, and Joanna, who doesn’t drink much, had bottled water.

We had stopped at the local tourist office for directions back to Carpentras, which is very close to Beaumes de Venise. The tourist rep spoke no English. Larry had enough French to get directions. But we got lost again. Then Larry saw a sign for the route touristique to Carpentras. The scenery was beautiful. Snaking mountain roads opened onto great vistas and then plunged into rocky ravines. There were hairpin turns and no shoulder. 

Larry was a nervous wreck. Good thing his hands were on the wheel. There was one really exciting moment when the car came around a bend and discovered an oncoming car. My steering wheel didn’t work, try as I might to pull us out of the way, but Larry got us there just fine. 

It’s also good that he kept his hands on the wheel, or else he might’ve bitten his nails down to the quick. But he got us home without a scratch or a bump.

Back at the house, Larry started to unwind. He made a savory pumpkin sauce, with onion and lots of butter, for pasta. Joanna had picked up some vegetables earlier and we had those too. It was a mix of several things cut small, maybe pepper, zucchini, and onion. 

Most dishes here have lots of garlic, but the stuff isn’t anywhere near as pungent and sharp as the garlic I’m used to. I generally don’t like much garlic, but the mild variety here is just fine. maybe I can find some when I get home.

It was early to bed because tomorrow we go to the market in Carpentras.

Have fun, everyone. Lift a glass of Côtes du Rhone, and help out the French with the euro.

Harry


Friday, November 28, 2014

Wine and Horses






October 15 (or 16?)

We stayed local this morning. We went to the other side of the village and stopped at the Beaumes-de-Venise wine co-op.

We got there, and Larry asked for a tasting. He had helped out as a volunteer in the tasting room before, so they told him, “You do it.” 


One of the things the co-op does is to separate the grapes into three groups, based on the characteristics of the type of soil where they are grown. One, called Ferisien, is grown in soil rich with grey marl that surfaced during the Upper Jurassic. Another, Bel Air, is from chalky limestone soil that’s a younger formation. The third, Trias, grows in the oldest soil, formed maybe 250 million years ago, that is rich in limestone and dolomite. Ferisien and Trias are both made from a blend of grenache, syrah, and mourvedre grapes. Bel Air is grenache, syrah, and cinsault.


The idea is to keep them as much alike as practical and let the flavor of the land show through. They are all wonderful, but if we had to choose just one, Larry and I both prefer the Trias. That comes in two versions, one aged in oak and one not.

Larry doesn’t like the oak aging. He says it tastes too much like vanilla. I like it and believe it’s the smoky flavor that I enjoy in many Bordeaux wines.

Claude actually cut time out of his schedule to take us on a tour of the place. I’m not going to recap it all, because I’m not sure my memory would be accurate anyhow. 

The co-op makes about 2 million bottles of wine a year. It is best known for a sweet muscat wine. When the wine reaches a certain point of fermentation, they dose it with almost pure neutral grape alcohol. This immediately raises the alcohol level to about 15 percent and kills the yeast to stop fermentation. That’s why it’s called a fortified wine and that’s why it’s fortified.


Wine ferments for a relatively short time, measured in weeks. The fermentation time varies according to things like sugar content of the grapes. Lots of other things, too. But I’m not a winemaker. I’m the guy walking through a winery for the first time.


The wine ages after fermentation has stopped. The co-op ages some wines in concrete tanks, others in stainless steel, and some in oak barrels, depending on the result it wants.

Joanna took a shot of some of the stainless vats, and it turned into a kind of inadvertent selfie.


The remains of the grapes were piled up outside for processing. There is still enough alcohol in them (you can smell it in the air) to make it worthwhile to extract it and sell it as industrial alcohol. Seeds become a source of grape seed oil, which is used for cooking. I think there are some other uses for the grape mulch, too. What remains goes back to the vineyard as fertilizer.



From the co-op we went back to the house for lunch. Larry heated up some rabbit cacciatore with linguine.

I got a little writing done, and then Wheels Leventhal had us on the road again.


We rode for a while on charming mountain roads, past a farm here, a village there, and then Larry put the car into a hard right. “I’ve been trying to get into this place. Let’s see if she’s here.”

I caught a glimpse of a sign with the word “cheval” on it. OK, so Larry has developed an interest in horses. 

But no, it was better than that. We drove up a stone road to a low house on the top of the hill. The house looked out over sloping grape vines and a granite bluff on the far side of the valley—well, canyon, really.


The tasting room was open, and we went in. Larry said something in French, and the lady behind the desk answered him in English. It turns out, Claude would tell us later, she comes from Germany.

Larry asked if we could taste some of her wines or if he should make an appointment for later. She shrugged. “I’m here now.” Hell, Joanna and I were game, but we were just along for the ride. Larry couldn’t believe his luck.

The lady’s name is Corinna, and she runs Martinelle, a small-scale artisanal winery in the village of Lafare.

There is a photo in the tasting room that was clearly taken just outside the door.

A man is working at the top of the vineyard, and you can see the rock face in the background. He is cutting weeds from between the vines using a device pulled by a horse. According to Corinna, he speaks to the horse in old Provençal.

Most of the vines are in the Ventoux growing area. A minority are in Beaumes-de-Venise. Some of her wine is a mix of the two. That violates government rules on appellations, so she has to call it wine of France, and isn’t permitted to put a vintage year on the label. 

She gives the wine a new name each year. We sampled a bit of Deuxieme, or 12th.  I wonder what year those grapes are from? The same mix from the year before is Onzieme, or 11th.

We had some other wines from ’11 and ’12, and Larry was remarking how one of the wines had aged quickly. Corinna looked up and said something’s wrong. I thought it was great, but what do I know?

According to Corinna, the cork had let oxygen into the bottle and aged it too quickly. She opened another bottle of the same wine and asked us to pour out what was left in our glasses. She set the cork aside to study it later.

This is where it got over my head. Larry showed me. You hold your glass at an angle over a white surface, and if the edge of the wine is dark, that’s a sign of immaturity. A lighter rim color is a sign of aging. I think I saw it, but can’t be sure.

I don’t know that my palate is sensitive enough to pick up much difference between those two bottles. It was all great wine, so Larry bought one of each bottle she had for sale, five in all.

He put the box, clearly marked "Martinelle," on the dinner table so Claude would see them when he came in. He saw them, all right, and his reaction was clear.

I can’t be sure that he actually said “ou-la-la,” but that’s what came across.

The photo of the day is Joanna and Larry collaborating on dinner, which was lamb shoulder. It went well with the 2010 Cantarelle and a 2008 Chateauneuf du Pape that we bought, in all places, at the local supermarket. 


I have to go drink wine now, so I’m signing off.

Love to all.

Harry




Oct. 16

Hi folks,

Perhaps I shouldn't be such a "budinsky," as my mother would have said, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

Let me first say, both Harry and Joanna are making quite an impression on our most gracious hosts. They are almost as excited as I am to have them here. Not only have they proven to be excellent company, but their enthusiastic reactions to almost everything is infectious.

I should also point out, just to clarify, that the "terroir series" (Bel Air, Farisien, and Trias) I poured for Harry at the co-op's high-style tasting room and retail space are actually dry red wines. Beaumes de Venise is best known for sweet wine, but also has an official appellation classification for its very nice reds.

And the trip to visit Corinna was very exciting for me. I've been hearing about her and her wines for months, but never got a chance to visit. Harry and Joanna were very patient with me and my wine obsession. I fell in love with both the wine and the woman (too bad for me she's married).

And in the photo, Joanna is actually helping me make the daube, a traditional Provençal beef stew, which won't be served until Sunday night. It's best when cooked and re-heated several times.

More importantly, our hosts are most excited that Joanna will be cooking a Chinese dinner for us tomorrow (Friday) night. My guess is it will soon be the talk of Beaumes de Venise!

I hope you all are lucky enough to visit this beautiful place someday!

Best wishes to all!

Harry's (and now Joanna's) humble sherpa,

Larry