Wines of the Loire

My affection for the wines of the Loire (I cannot say so much for my knowledge of them) dates from longer ago than I am prepared ordinarily to admit, from a certain “year of glory” when I was a freelance writer in Paris and

"When all the wines succeeded
From Douro to Moselle,

And all the papers neede
The wares I had to sell…"

In those rosy days on a Left Bank street, not far from St.-Germain-des-Prés, there was a dilapidated little bistro that specialized in the wines of Vouvray and Anjou. Its proprietor, an impressive old fellow with a fine, white beard, became, after a fashion, my mentor and my friend. He belonged to a species that was once common in Paris but is now almost extinct—the tavern-keeper with vague literary pretensions à la Ragamand, a first-rate Boniface an a third-class bomme de lettres.

Back of the bar there was a large painting, somewhat in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes, of a Bacchic procession, the young men quite unbelievably well-groomed and handsome, the bacchantes chastely swathed in vine leaves. Below the painting was a scroll with a quotation from Ronsard: “Corydon, lead ahead. Show us where goo wine is sold.” Monsieur Audibert was excessively proud both of the painting and the quotation.

“Jeune bomme,” he would say, “Hippolyte Audibett is the Corydon of the rue du Four. We, my wines and I, come from the garden of France, the cradle of French letters, the land of Rabelais and Ronsard, the one province where the French language has retained its antique purity.

“Jenne bomme, taste this white wine, this Pineau of the Loire, which the immortal Rabelais called wine of taffeta. What do you think of that for one franc a glass? Or try this Coteaux du Layon from Anjou, farther downstream. Roll it on your tongue, close your eyes. Do you not find in the aftertaste what Joachim du Bellay called la douceur angevine?”

Every year on the first of August, Monsicur Audibert would shut up shop and disappear for a month, leaving in his window a faded, ancient poster with a message for his customers and friends. “Your patron,” it said, “has left on his annual trip to the Loire vineyards, to select the wines of impeccable quality which will be served you beginning September first.”

The second time I saw this poster I decided to follow Monsieur Audibert's example. I acquired an ancient car, a secondhand copy of Rabelais, a pocket Ronsard, and set out for Tours. Since then I have spent in the Loire Valley a good many of the pleasantest weeks of my life, but I have never forgotten and shall never forget my first pilgrimage to a wine country, on the trail of the white-bearded, long since vanished “Corydon of the rue du Four.”

I learned a great deal: that the proper name for a half bottle of Vouvray is not a demi-bonscille, but a fillette, or young girl; that vin breton never comes from Brittany; that Curnonsky, “Prince Cur I,” the most famous gourmet of contemporary France, is not a Pole but a native of Anjou, and that this is not at all surprising; that the most celebrated vineyard of the Loire, the Coulée de Serrant, is owned by the descendants of one Count Walsh; that the poet Ronsard used to drink nine glasses of wine in honor of his lovely Cassandre, one for each letter of her name, and that “long names for girls have been popular in Touraine ever since”; that Rabelais was the first to record a familiar phenomenon: “This wine is delicious, but the more I drink of it, the thirstier I get.”

There are few places on earth pleasanter than the Loire Valley in spring or summer or early autumn, and there is certainly no more agreeable trip that a wine lover can make than to go leisurely across the smiling face of France, following the shallow Loire and its quiet tributaries. Unlike the Bordeaux country, where wine is an industry as well as an art, unlike Burgundy, with its hundred famous vineyards crowded into forty narrow, closely planted miles of hillside, the Loire, which produces the “most literary wines of France,” if not necessarily the best, is magnificently casual about the whole thing, and it is quite possible for a tourist to visit the Château Country without seeing more than an errant vine or two.

But for those who take their food an wine as seriously as their architecture, to whom a star opposite the name of a restaurant in the Guide Michelin is quite as important as a star in Baedeker,there are rewards aplenty. By and large, the Loire has the best country auberges of France, a regional cuisine famous for its lightness and distinction rather than for the richness of its sauces and the length of its menus, and a whole constellation of wines—none, perhaps, of the first magnitude, but a full half dozen of the second, and more good vins du pays than a score of Pantagruels coul catalogue in a score of lifetimes.

The Loire is one of the longest rivers of western Europe. Its source is in the Cévennes, southwest of Lyon; in the course of its six-hundred-mile journey to the sea at St. Nazaire, it crosses eight provinces and its basin includes almost one-fifth of France. With a bow of apology to a great many villages where I have dined well and drunk the wine of the country, I shall confine myself to the Loire wines which you can generally find in Paris and, occasionally at least, in this country.

Like all other districts of great wine, the Loire Valley owes its pre-eminence to a happy combination (or a series of happy combinations) of grape variety and climate and soil. Such equations are only arrived at by trial and error over a period of centuries; it is not by any means by accident that the Pinot Noir, rather than the Cabernet, is the grape of Chambertin, and that the Cabernet, rather than the Pinot Noir, is the grape of Château Lafite.

A region as large as the Loire Valley has, as might be expected, not one grape but a half dozen or more, each specially suited to the province in which it is grown. As often as not, to make matters more confusing, the same grape will have three or four different local names. Fortunately, our botanists and ampelographers (a fifty-cent word for a botanist specializing in grapes) have begun to clear away a little of this debris and fin a few lowest common denominators. In view of the increasing trend towar grape names on American wine labels, this information is valuable to the layman as well as to the specialists.

The most celebrated white grape of the Loire, although known as the Pineau or Pinot de la Loire since the days of Rabelais, is not a true Pinot at all, but a no less distinguished vine properly called the Chenin Blanc. It has been identified in a number of California vineyards, particularly in Napa County, where its high quality and good productivity will certainly lead to its wider cultivation. In California, its wine is usually labeled White Pinot, to distinguish it from the Pinot Blanc, or true Pinot, of Burgundy. In the Loire Valley it is responsible for all of the wines of Vouvray, almost all of the great Anjous, an for the delightful lesser wines at Jasnières and Azay-le-Rideau.

Second in importance is the Sauvignon Blanc. This, in the Bordeaux country, is blended with the Semillon to produce both Sauternes and Graves. In California, it gives to wine a pronounce (sometimes too pronounced) character, but one of considerable distinction. On the Loire, especially around Sancerre an Pouilly-sur-Loire, where it is known as the Blanc-Fume, its wines have an extraordinary bouquet and great finesse; they are, to my own palate, the best straight Sauvignons in the world. Quincy an Reuilly are two other Loire districts in which the Sauvignon grape is treated with the respect which it deserves.

The other white grapes are of much less consequence. The so-called Muscadet of Nantes, which has the doubtful distinction of being the only wine made in Brittany, is a fresh and charming vin ordinaire made from the Melon, a commoner among grapes wherever grown. There is a little true Pinot Blanc, but less every year. And unfortunately, especially at Pouilly-sur-Loire, there is a good deal of Chasselas. This is an excellent and productive table grape, known as the Fendant in Switzerland, as the Gutedel in Germany, and as the Sweetwater, the French Chasselas, or the Chasselas Doré in California. It has no place in a wine press.

The great red wine grape of the Loire, the Breton, of which Rabelais and a hundred others have written with immemorial affection, is really the Cabernet Franc, called the Bouschet in St. Emilion and Pomerol, where it is the predominant variety. It is a close cousin of the Cabernet, or Cabernet Sauvignon, which is responsible for most of the outstanding red wines of California. In Touraine, it is the cépage of Chinon and Bourgeuil.

A small quantity of remarkable red wine, reputed to have been a favorite of Edward VII, has been made since about 1880 at the Chateau de Parnay and at Champigny, near Saumur, from the Burgundian Pinot Noir. And a great deal of good wine, throughout the Loire Valley, use to come and still does from the Malbec, or Cot, a red wine grape from Bordeaux. All of these, and several others less distinguished, are used in the production of vin rosé. Anjou Rose, except in the country of its origin, is hardly a name to inspire confidence on the average wine list.

And now to the vineyards:

Vouvray

Considering the fact that its over-all production is less than that of a good- sized vineyard in California, Vouvray is surprisingly well known in America, and plenty of people who don't know the difference between Geisenheimer and Graves seem to have at least one bit of occult wine lore at their finger tips—Vouvray, they will tell you confidentially, does not travel. I had always attributed Vouvray's widespread reputation along these lines to the fact that most of the people who like Vouvray do travel, which of course recalls the story of Mohammed and the mountain. It was only during World War II (I was not old enough to be bottled in Worl War I) that I learned the truth; the fame of Vouvray, so far as the Unite States is concerned, is based on a streetcar line.

En avant, my friends and pères de famille, officers and doughboys of 1917, come forward to my defense! Surely some of you remember when AFHQ was at Tours, and the streetcar line that ran over the old, gray stone bridge across the Loire to St. Symphorien and Ste Radegonde, and an infantryman coul make Vouvray from Radegonde in under half an hour. Plenty of us, in World War II, owed our bon accueil to the friends you made, and if you were told that Vouvray does not travel, it was perhaps in the hope that you woul come back to drink it at the end of the streetcar line.

For Vouvray, obviously, does travel. Anjou is a good deal like Vouvray, an long before we knew as much about wine-making as we do today, the better wines of Anjou were classified as “vins pour la mer” (for shipment overseas), and the less good as “vins pour Paris.” I have drunk good Vouvray aged seventy in Vouvray itself, and admirable Vouvray aged thirty in New York.

Technically speaking. Vouvray is a white wine, still or sparkling, or in a sort of delightful intermediate limbo where it may be perlant, or pétillant, or crémant (various degrees of natural sparkle); it must be made from the Chenin Blanc, or Pineau de la Loire; and it must come from one of eight communes, or townships, on the north bank of the Loire a few miles east of Tours. Just for the record, since you are not likely to see these names on a label, the communes, from west to east, are Ste Radegonde, Parcay-Meslay, Rochecorbon, Vouvray, Vernou, Noizay, Chancay, and Reugny.

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.

There remain a few wines from the Saumur district which are unique. They are mostly still wines, red and white an rosé, made from the traditional grape varieties, plus the Pinot Noir, in Parnay and Brézé and Montsoreau and Dampierre and Champigny-le-Sec. The local demand for these is well in excess of the production, and most of the vignerons treat prospective buyers as di Monsieur Cristal, the famous old proprietor of the Château de Parnay, who would say to the uninitiated and unworthy, “Sell you my wine?” and laugh.

The greatest wines of Anjou come from considerably farther downstream, from two small districts southwest of the historic old city of Angers—the Coteaux du Layon and the Coteaux de la Loire. The latter really consists of little more than the one lovely township of Savennieres, and its most celebrate vineyards are the Coulée de Serrant, the Château d'Epiré, and the Roche-aux- Moines.

The much more extensive Coteaux du Layon take their name from one of the Loire's tributaries, and a half-dozen vineyard towns strung along the Layon produce lovely golden wines which are quite in a class with the great Sauternes of good years. The most famous single name, perhaps, is Quart de Chaume (a vineyard in the commune of Rochefort), but wines that carry such appellations as Beaulieu-sur-Layon, St. Aubin-de- Luigne, Rablay, Faye-sur-Layon, an Thouarce are well worth looking for. All too little known in America, these, in years such as 1943, 1945, and 1947 (an incomparably fine year everywhere), are among the most gracious and most charming of all the wines of that great vineyard which is France.