There is a small, largely unknown area in southwest France called Jurançon. Sitting up against the wall of the silvery, daggerlike Pyrenees that line the Spanish border, and blessed with a dry, clean Atlantic climate, Jurançon is beautiful, rather Edenic actually, and it produces a golden wine that would have been perfectly at home in the first garden. The Jurançon moelleux.
Years ago, I met a man, a sensory wizard, and he had, once, tasted a Jurançon moelleux, and he wanted to taste more of them, and now it is morning, and I am driving with him down the highway from Toulouse’s airport. This man—he’s Italian, Argentine, and French, and sort of English—is a genius of smells and tastes. He loves them. I asked him: “Why?” He thought, and then answered with wine: “I suppose because I’m French, and France is a country of smells. There’s something called pourriture noble, ‘noble rot.’ It’s the fungus botrytis. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice wonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like the sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes.” He rolled his eyes. “In America they’d hand out antibiotics to exterminate half the food in France.”
Luca Turin is a biophysicist. He has created a new theory that may have solved a baffling scientific mystery: how we are able to smell. And he was led into the theory through his love of perfume. Turin is the author of the best-selling perfume guide in France, Parfums: Le Guide.
Of Gucci’s Rush, he writes: “This thing smells like a person. In fact, due to its milky lactone molecule, it smells like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hair spray.” Perfume is his smell passion. His taste passion is wine. “In 1982,” he told me, “a scientist colleague brought to the lab the first good Sauternes I’d ever tasted, a Château Lamothe-Despujols 1981. I bought a case of that stuff, and every time I had a glass it was a religious experience. The guy showed us a photo of the fungus attacking the grape; that, of course, got me seriously into Sauternes, which is, believe me, an expensive habit to acquire. These things have been famous since the 1750s, commanding huge prices forever.
“Years later, when I sold my flat…” (Turin lives with his wife and two young children in London) “…I bought a 1959 Rieussec—a hundred and ten pounds. Some friends and I wolfed it down in the lab. Utterly sensational. A honeyed, summery exterior covering a late November liquid. There are three elements—a beeswax, a woody, and a floral banana—with a perfect balance between extreme acidity and huge, heavy, oily sweetness, like a blend of jasmine and musk. The ’59, in a bottle for forty years, comes out the way James Bond emerges from a wet suit in a perfect tuxedo and murmurs, ‘What kept you?’ ”
But one day he stumbled onto a bottle of sweet wine he’d never heard of that astounded him. “I was in St.-Émilion, and they had a very interesting wine store. I noticed a bottle that looked like a Sauternes—clear glass bottle, gold lettering on a white label. But it was from Jurançon.” (If Jurançon whites are undiscovered in the U.S., astonishingly they also remain little known in France itself.) “The woman said, ‘It’s Clos Thou. Eighty euros.’ I said, ‘A Jurançon for eighty euros? It’d better be good.’ She said, ‘Try it.’ It was incredible. Probably the best sweet wine I’ve ever had. I thought, ‘Who are these guys? Why aren’t they famous?’ ”
And that is why we are driving away from the Toulouse airport in pursuit.
These wines are made in vineyards that lie east of Biarritz on the Atlantic coast just north of Spain. As we move south the land transforms, greener, lusher, the air fresher; the land rolls gently, and suddenly, “Jesus!” says Turin. It is as if the Pyrenees have materialized before you, a mass of astonishing peaks against crystalline and cobalt skies, stretching across the horizon. The car dips down below some hills, then swoops up again, and their imposing, steely beauty is breathtaking.
Late in the afternoon, under silken sunlight, we pull into our hotel in Pau, Le Fer à Cheval. It is an old relais with fruit trees—pear, cherry, apple, peach—and a barn, whose slight dilapidation and big, adorable Labrador make it all the more lovely.
The next morning, Turin and I set off for Domaine Castéra, in the town of Monein. With its manicured gardens and Basque architecture it looks like a pristine, idealized-medieval movie set. Christian Lihour, whose grandfather bought the place in 1895, shows us around with pride, pointing out some huge photos of the grapes (the Jurançon appellation has the right to use five varieties, but almost everyone plants only Petit Manseng and Gros Manseng) overripening beautifully on the vines, just like Sauternes. Lovely dark spots, shriveled and sweet and almost rotting. The flavor practically drips off the photo. But Lihour says firmly, “We try never to have botrytis.”
In the Sauternes region, he explains, they are able to use botrytis to shrivel the grapes because the climate is drier, so the fungus doesn’t hang around in the soil to rot the roots. “Here,” he said, “we use vendange tardive, late harvest, leaving this grape variety all spring, summer, and fall to ripen and sweeten.”
The tasting room is filled with oak barrels and the rush of the marvelous yeast smell. By law the Jurançon appellation may make only whites, but they can be either dry or sweet. Domaine Castéra’s Jurançon (unless there’s a sec in its name, a Jurançon wine is always a moelleux, “sweet”) is 7 euros per bottle (Turin murmurs, with raised eyebrows, “These prices are ridiculously low”), 100 percent Gros Manseng, and aged entirely in stainless steel.
“Lovely,” says Turin, and it is: not truly a sweet yet not a dry, hovering delightfully somewhere in between, bright as summer. (As we walk out, Turin muses darkly to me about his beloved Sauternes: “I’ll say this against Sauternes, they are profoundly saturnine wines, wintry. It’s like, if you listen to Jascha Heifetz play the violin and you’re a little stoned, you realize that it’s actually extremely melancholy.”)
Lihour, with a collegiality that impresses Turin, has directed us down the road to Domaine Bordenave, where Gisèle Bordenave gets out several bottles. The Harmonie is a 2001. “Not interesting,” says Turin, emptying his glass. But he stands inhaling the 1999 Cuvée des Dames and a 1999 Cuvée Savin. “That’s fabulous. Wonderful!” he says to Madame Bordenave. She just looks back, stoically. “The Savin is the more brutal of the two,” says Turin.
At one o’clock we finally find what seems like the one restaurant in Monein. Small French towns at lunchtime are the most deserted places on earth, but inside, L’Estaminet is packed, blue berets everywhere.
As we tuck into huge portions of garbure (a delicious Basque bean soup) and roast duck on the front terrace, Turin’s mind is still on the wine. “Absurdly,” he says, “people drink sweet whites with foie gras. A dreadful and very petit bourgeois tradition of having all the expensive things together. It’s a very naïve idea of luxury. In fact, foie gras goes well with Jack Daniel’s. One should have expensive things as often as one can afford them, but preferably separately so you can actually taste them, and also so you don’t drop dead from a heart attack.” He sips a glass of wine and adds, “Another mistake: drinking moelleux as dessert wines. At the end of a meal your nose is shot to hell anyway. This includes for perfumes.”
I note that turin, author of the legendary perfume guide, perfume critic par excellence, never once critiques these wines as he does perfumes (“Like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hair spray”). “Never thought about it,” he says. He mulls it over for a moment. “I couldn’t. Perfumes are made by humans. They are works of art, and art is communication between humans. These wines are made, ultimately, by nature, and you can’t critique nature.”
He sips from his glass, a local moelleux we’ve ordered, and has another thought. “But,” he says, “it is becoming quite clear to me that there is a cognate in perfumery for the Jurançons. It comes from their unusual crème de marron note, a signature they all share. What makes the great Caron perfumes—I’m thinking of the old ones, Nuit de Noël and En Avion—quintessentially Caron is an interesting creamy marron glacé fragrance that the perfumer Daltroff invented in the 1930s and used in every Caron fragrance. It’s the equivalent of Guerlain’s house recipe, a vanillic, powdery scent that Jacques Guerlain created in the same era and carefully kept secret.
“In a way, Sauternes is Guerlain and Jurançon is Caron. The great Sauternes do this delicious, fruity, big bouquet de fleurs thing, the style of Guerlain. These Jurançons, on the other hand, really do belong to a different school of perfumery. Caron’s signature was a chypre base with a soft, creamy sandalwood that gave you marron glacé, a smell lying between the slightly sour note of fresh cream and the warm note of burnt dark sugar. Rum and cream together. That is the note I find in these Jurançons. I absolutely smell that.”
That night, we dine happily under the grapevines in the Fer à Cheval’s exquisite garden restaurant. I’m having perfectly prepared lamb chops and local vegetables.
As we taste the wine (a Jurançon dry), Turin surprises me by saying, “The best place in the world to buy wine for sheer range and value is America. The choice is incredible and the quality is fantastic. The only thing I’d complain about concerning the United States is flavored coffee. May they rot in hell. This ‘hazelnut’—just a bunch of thiazines and pyrazines.” He rolls his eyes.
The next morning we’re off again. All at once Turin exclaims, “Clos Thou!” The wine by which he discovered Jurançon. He’s excited. Everything we’ve had thus far is quite good, but will this kick it up a level?
The inevitable dog barks up to the car in the dusty drive. The owner’s father, an elderly, delightful Frenchman named Raoul, leads us into a stone building to taste. He and the son tell us about the fabled year of 1995, when the weather was heavenly and the grapes were Bacchus’s morsels, and they made a moelleux that was suddenly as good as anything the $200-a-bottle guys were putting out. “Un accident de nature,” says Raoul.
Turin sips. Whoa. Yep, we’ve risen to another floor. They’re just getting better. He buys a case. You breathe stale cigarette smell every time one of the cheerful Frenchmen walks by. The dogs bark in the hot yellow sun under the azure sky.
Next stop is Clos Lapeyre, and the barking dog leads to a flower-filled garden. Jean-Bernard Larrieu, a third-generation winemaker, looks like a Berkeley dude in his baggy T-shirt and shorts, and talks an astonishing southern French: “Les ans” is “lez ankhs” and “la main” is “la maéin.” He opens his most expensive moelleux for us, the very smoky Vent Balaguèr. We’re now at six times the prices we started with. Turin sips. “Crème brûlée plus woody,” says Turin. (“Worth the price?” I murmur at him. “Oh, yeah!” says Turin. “Damn!”)
We have one last vineyard: Domaine Cauhapé. The late afternoon light is becoming increasingly golden. There is still snow on some of the Pyrenees peaks. I drive through a centuries-old arch into a perfectly kept courtyard. I park out of the sun and we wander into the large, spotless tasting room. Bottle upon beautiful bottle. “Everything is perfect,” whispers Turin, “Whoever the owner is, he’s a maniac.” He means this in the French sense: crazy for quality.
Henri Ramonteu, the owner-maniac, arrives, 55 years old, fit, good-looking. Intense. Shakes our hands. The least expensive moelleux is Symphonie de Novembre 2001, 14 percent alcohol. Lovely. We taste a Noblesse du Temps 2000 and a 1995, prices going up rapidly. Turin is walking around the tasting room, murmuring into his glass. I watch his reverie as Ramonteu says, “I absolutely agree, you should drink moelleux before and with a meal, but not with dessert.”
He pours a liquid so golden it looks like honey. Sets down the bottle: Quintessence du Petit Manseng 1998. Fifteen percent alcohol. And 138 euros. He hands us the glasses.
Turin: “I have to sit down.” He staggers outside and sits. “Gesù, Maria, e Giuseppe,” he says. “This is beyond good. And it damn well better be; you’re getting to where one plant gives you maybe two glasses. I mean …” Sips. Thinks. Decides definitively: “This is as good as any Sauternes. Apricot and apple, flowers, rich honey, utterly perfect balance, all the harmonies. You taste how optimistic that is?” He’s grinning.
Ramonteu puts us in the back of his truck and we grumble up an almost vertical slope to stop under three huge oaks. The sun, pouring in from Spain like the ocean, runs down the perfectly manicured green plants as we look out over the vineyard, the emerald valley below it, the Pyrenees beyond them. We’re high from the Quintessence du Petit Manseng.
The Details
Staying There
In the 19th century, Pau, known as the Balcony of the Pyrenees, was a stylish spa town. Today, the pleasant little city makes an ideal base from which to tour the Jurançon vineyards. The Hôtel Continental (011-33-5-59-27-69-31; bestwestern.com; from $80) has a winsome Belle Epoque charm and more character than the other chain hotels in the city. The Hôtel Roncevaux (011-33-5-59-27-08-44; hotel-roncevaux.com; from $84) occupies an amusingly grandiose 19th-century manor house overlooking a private courtyard. If you don’t want to be based in town, stay at the charming Château Lamothe (011-33-5-59-21-20-80; chateau-lamothe.fr; from $100), in Monein, which was created out of a 15th-century farmhouse and has a swimming pool and beautiful gardens.
Eeating There
For dining in Pau, Au Fin Gourmet (24 Ave. Gaston-Lacoste; 05-59-27-47-71) serves contemporary French dishes like terrine of foie gras with peppers. Le Viking (33 Blvd. Tourasse; 05-59-84-02-91) is a popular new bistro with rustic food, including cabbage stuffed with crayfish, while Le Fer à Cheval (1 Ave. des Martyrs du Pont Long; 05-59-32-17-40) is pleasant for dining outside under the lime trees on country dishes like lamb braised with white beans. For an old-fashioned take on the hearty cooking of the region, try Hôtel L’Estaminet (17 Place Lacabanne; 05-59-21-30-18), in Monein. If you are planning a picnic, there are wonderful places in Pau not to miss: Camdeborde (2 R. Gachet; 05-59-27-41-02) has irresistible charcuterie, and Gabriel Bachelet (24 R. du Maréchal-Joffre; 05-59-27-79-60) is a fromager par excellence. One of France’s best sheep’s-milk cheeses—Ossau-Iraty—is made in the foothills of the Pyrenees, just south of Pau, and Gabriel Bachelet carries it. The city’s best patisserie is Artigarrède (3 R. Gassion; 05-59-27-47-40). Francis Miot (48 R. du Maréchal-Joffre; 05-59-27-69-51) is one of the most famous jam makers in France.The ultimate address for anyone discovering Jurançon wines is the Cave des Producteurs de Jurançon (53 Ave. Henri IV; 05-59-21-57-03), in the little town of Gan. This cooperative produces 70 percent of the region’s annual output and has 20 producers as members. There are tastings and a great variety of wines on sale.