Of Le Art du Vin

To close off my postings about the Loire Valley (you can see how much I adored the region on how many postings I dedicated to it). I would like to dedicate a short posting to the art of wine tasting and wine making. France and wine have become synonymous with each other, with the French perfecting wine making down to an art. They invented the study of viticulture for goodness sakes so they do know a thing or two about wine.

The Loire Valley where I visited are known for their white wine, especially the sparkling variety. The best way to get a wine tour is to sign up with a tour company who will take you to a number of different wineries and allow you to get a tasting at each one. All in the course of one afternoon.

I found myself on a very private tour with just me, a French tour guide, and 2 Canadian ladies (who knew less about wine than I did, which was to some relief).

Wine tasting is a delicate affair, full of unspoken rules.



1) The wine tasting is never free. There is always a fee and if you request a tasting, they are going to expect you to buy a bottle of wine, out of courtesy. Thankfully, as part of the tour group, we were not under any such obligations.

2) When the wine is poured, swill it around the glass to let it breathe. Smell it, take in the aroma of the wine in order to pinpoint all of the notes it contains. Like a perfume, let each layer reach shyly towards you.

3) Swish the wine in your mouth to better savor the many flavors within. Take your time, this is not an event to rush but a privilege to be enjoy. A wine is going to taste different every year since the amount of rainfall or the quality of the dirt will change the flavor of the grapes, give it different qualities that it may lack from previous years. Different flavors of grapes will equal a unique wine that can only be found within that particular year.

4) When you are done savoring the wine, spit (that's what the silver bucket is for). Swallowing is fine if you are not driving and you are only tasting a couple of wines. Swallowing is not fine when you have 10 different wines to taste and prone to getting light-headed from the beverage. I speak from personal (and shameful) experience, though in my defense, the only people who spit out the wine was our French tour guide.

Lastly, the coolest thing that I saw were the storage units for the wines. No warehouses and electric refrigerators in France. Here, nature is the master, and only her own refrigerator will do. The quarries underneath the hillsides are deep, rocky, and absolutely frigid. Perfect for storing that 1873 Chinon Blanc (a real wine too, worth 200 euros, which I saw in person, as well as other 100+ year old wines).



I also found my favorite type of white wine: sparkling. Like champagne but sweeter, it is heaven in a flute glass. A wine so complicated that it takes a month to prepare the newly fermented wine for transport to wine shops (a process that includes tipping the bottle, freezing it, then leaving it for an additional couple of weeks for the shock to settle). The result is the only wine bottle I purchased that day, which I cannot wait to drink.