Wines of the Loire

These little towns of the Vouvray district are like no others in France, for they are built in most cases along the face of hundred-foot cliffs into which the villagers have burrowed like so many termites. It is not unusual to see a three- or four-story house with all its windows on one side, or a smoking chimney rising out of a field of vines a hundred feet from the underground kitchen which it serves. The rooms cut out of this tufa are not damp, as one might expect, but dry, wonderfully cool in summer, and, when they face south, so warm in winter that they require hardly any heat. The wine cellars, cut back into this same soft rock, are truly magnificent, and Vouvray certainly owes something of its quality to the incomparable conditions in which it spends its youth.

There are about two thousand acres under vines in the Vouvray district. The grape harvest is one of the latest of France, delayed sometimes even until November so as to give the grapes the benefit of the last pale hours of autumnal sunshine. In no wine district are vintage years more important.

For Vouvray is not one wine but a sort of viticulrural chameleon. In very great years (1921, 1945) it is rich an golden and sweet, like a Château Yquem or a particularly full-bodied Beerenanslese from the Rhine. In poor years it can be as pale, as light, and as tart as a mediocre Chablis. Made into sparkling wines by the same methods as are use in Champagne, it is, after champagne, the best sparkling wine of France. If bottled when very young, it preserves a slight natural effervescence, and becomes what is known as “crackling”; vinified otherwise, it can be soft, with a trace of sweetness, like a Graves, which the French call moelleux. Curiously enough, through all these sea changes it remains Vouvray, delicate, fruity, flowery—the best loved of all the wines of the Loire.

Montlouis

Opposite Vouvray, on a chain of low hills that separates the Loire from its tributary, the Cher, are the vineyards of Montlouis. These, planted in Chenin Blanc, produce a wine so much like Vouvray as to be almost indistinguishable from it; before the present strict controls were set up, practically all Montlouis wines went to market under the name of their more celebrated neighbor. Today, deprived of this privilege, Montlouis is cheap, and is very decidedly a name worth looking for on wine lists both in France and in America.

Coteaux de Touraine

The myriad lesser wines of the Château Country, light and tendre and unfailingly refreshing, have been accorded a single legal classification—whether they come from Chenonceaux or Amboise, from Chaumont or Langeais or Azay-le-Rideau they are “wines of the Touraine Hillsides”: vins des Coteaux de Touraine. Most of these, for the best of reasons, will be consumed locally, but the appellation is not by any means one to be despised, for it means quite as much as Bordeaux Rouge or Bordeaux Blanc. And actually a Touraine wine, being less well known and less commercialized, may well be better.

There is a charming little poem about Vouvray, written for once by a poet who is not famous at all. It goes;

O mon Vouvray,
Nectar doré,
Je se boirai
Jnsqu'à ma fin, je crois,
Sans que ma femme
Jamais reclame,
Car la cbère dme
En bois antant que moi.

This I have rather freely translated as follows:

Chinon

Twenty-five miles west of Tours, with its lovely ruined castle and its memories of Rabelais and Jeanne d'Arc, Chinon is one of the most attractive little towns of central France. And not the least of its attractions is its wine, that “vin bon et frais” of which Pantagruel was so fond, and which the novelist Jules Romains has called “the wine for intellectuals.” Legally, Chinon can be white or rosé as well as red, but the best of it is red, made, as might be expected, from the Cabernet Franc. Light, delicate, with a remarkable fruit and charm, it is a wine of early maturity and relatively short life.

Bourgeuil, St. Nicholas-de-Bourgeuil

Like Chinon, Bourgeuil and St. Nicholas-de-Bourgeuil (which are some ten miles from Chinon on the north bank of the Loire) are red-wine vineyards, planted to the Breton, or Cabernet Franc, and producing in good years some of the most agreeable table wines in the world, a little fuller than the Chinons, but with an unmistakable family resemblance, the same brilliancy of color and the same delicate, elusive bouquet, reminiscent of wild flowers or, some say, of raspberries.

Anjou

As the Loire leaves the old province of Touraine for the old province of Anjou, on its slow and leisurely journey to the sea, the countryside along its banks becomes increasingly lush an fertile, and its wines increasingly rich and golden. The easternmost city of some importance is Saumur, famous for its cavalry school, its viticultural station, and its sparkling wines. Of these, the first has given the French Army more than its share of excellent officers who were also “beaux écuyers”; the second, under the direction of the celebrate Dr. Maisonneuve, became a fountain- head of wine knowledge which ranked with the best of Europe; and the third, the sparkling wines of Saumur, thanks to Ackerman-Laurence, Veuve Amiot, and a few others, have made friends all over the world.

Alas, the hurrying years go by. Cavalry is no longer a major arm in a modern army. Dr. Maisonneuve is gone with the snows of yesterday. The sparkling wines of Saumur, still good, although never quite so good as the better sparkling Vouvrays, in my opinion, find competition in Chile and California an New York State.