My Chenin Blanc Adventure

 

I’m in Angers France, located in the Anjou of the Loire.  It’s a university town which means you need to keep your head on a swivel.  At any moment some motherfucker on a scooter ripping on a vape pen can slam into you at 30 mph.  On the upside, the French appear to have stopped smoking tobacco and driving mopeds.  The downside of that is the scooters are way faster, silent, and most of the guys I see driving them are high as fuck.  I am trying to find a reception for the Chenin Celebration, a wine conference focusing on the undervalued chenin blanc grape.  Chenin is essentially grown in two places, here in the Loire and in South Africa.  Sure, there are plantings in California and Argentina, but those are basically vinified by hipsters trying to buck the current market trends and find a way to market.  Chenin is pretty much exclusively a Loire and South African thing.  

I walk to the address and there is no indication of an “Opening Night Celebration”.  Two German guys with remarkably big asses that must be named Hans and Karl are also confused as well because we have simultaneously walked to the spot that Google triumphantly announced as “Welcome to your destination!”.  The problem is that it’s a locked door with no signage.  The German guys walk to an official looking building next door and much conversation is launched until a security guard ushers us past a bunch of office space and into a chamber which is like the end of a wedding reception.  This must be the event.  No one seems to be in charge and I grab an open bottle of chenin on the table and pour myself a glass.  Everyone is looking around the room to see if they know anyone better, and if they can potentially upgrade their current conversation with a stranger.  This is really lame, so I bail out and go to a wine bar I found online.

The Red Circle wine bar is pretty good, and the bartender is a chilled out hipster guy that is equally annoyed by the table of Americans (or maybe Canadians?) directly behind me that is carrying on like this entire town has been built for their pleasure.  The conversation has this “been there done that” one upmanship pretense that is difficult to zone out of.  I can tell right away that these are people attending the conference and they don’t seem like “my people”.  I get a good tip on a place for dinner from the bartender who calls his buddy at the place to get me in.  There are sometimes advantages in traveling alone.  Miller, table for 1?  It’s a good meal, shockingly inexpensive and I see the Big Ass German Guys eating from multiple plates on my way out.  If these guys are eating here, this must be a legit spot.

I wake up on Sunday morning and walk to the conference with some trepidation.  I am hoping it is better organized than last night.  The conference is laid out with a couple of panel sessions each morning, a 90 minute lunch, and then winery/vineyard tours/tasting events.  The advance materials had noted that this conference would be in both English and French with some sort of state-of-the-art AI translation software that would be making it easy to follow along in real time if the presenter was speaking in a non-native tongue.  I was skeptical when I read that, and my cynicism was right on the money.  In the first session a French winemaker spoke for about three minutes about his adaption to climate struggles, and the large screen showing the translation tells us that he said, “For certain.  It is most work for one to vine and sunshine.”  All the text is like going to a Chinese restaurant with dodgy translations where the food items are called things like “Golden Flower of Dragon”.  I try to make sense of what the French guy is saying and hope the South African on the panel will talk soon.

A lot of discussion is had about climate change and sustainability, which is interesting as the event has people that have flown here from the United States and Africa on their Premier Gold Airline Frequent Flier accounts before jetting off to another buzzy conference in Australia in a few weeks.  I spot a wine personality here that has the carbon footprint of a foreign diplomat.  I swear he’s in a different continent every other week based on his social media posts.  The French producers are mostly farmers that make wine, doing things with a bigger emphasis on quality than their fathers.  Climate change has helped the Loire, though no one says it out loud.  Whereas they could only get 2-3 vintages ripe per decade in the past, now they can count on 8 or 9 with bolder more assertive fruit.  Their wine quality has never been better.  South Africa has some challenges as the official stance is that it’s “hot and dry as fuck” inland.  They are really pushing to be considered a premium wine region, but their checkered past of apartheid and state-run iffy wine quality is always a shadow.  There are artisan producers doing undeniably good wine now, but we rarely see it in North American retail.  The South Africans have a lot of focus on being “green”.  A South African winery representative makes sure to note how “sustainability” also means to pay the farm workers a living wage as the screen shows multiple images of exclusively black laborers toiling for the exclusively white winery owners.  Hmmm.       

At lunch I sit at a table with some German wine journalists.  They are very closed to conversation, so I just get right in there and start asking questions. They work for magazines I’ve never heard of and have little time for my nonsense.  One of the guys is a total prick and spends the entire conference only engaging with two of the four Germans refusing to make eye contact with anyone else.  He must write for the “important” magazine as he blasts out an air of superiority over the others.  A nice woman from Belgium sits to my right, and we engage in some small talk about her upcoming attempt at the WSET Diploma.  The organization of the conference is super haphazard, and a rumor circulates that we have to get on a bus located in a vague direction towards the street.  I saunter off to see what’s going on.

We head to a castle in Saumur for a pair of presentations.  The first is supposed to be about the sensory texture of chenin and I assume will focus on fermentation style and aging vessel.  What it turns out to be is a guy who speaks almost no English who explains he was called at the last minute to replace the scheduled speaker who, I think he said, went on vacation in the south of France. He tries to explain these weird fabric parcels that are being handed out to us are a method for us to measure the mouthfeel of the wines.  “Does Wine #1 feel like denim or burlap in your mouth?”  I think we are then supposed to enter our reactions onto an app, but his explanation is murky at best and he never provides us with the access code we need to input the data.  Imagine a poor presenter speaking in a language he doesn’t know very well to people that have no idea what the point of the presentation is.  Another Belgian woman is sitting next to me and neither of us have any idea what’s going on, so we just talk about the wines between ourselves.  The wines are pretty good.  Suddenly, it’s just sort of over and no one tells us where to go or what to do.  The guy just stops talking and wanders off.  It’s a bit of a shit show.  

I walk over to where signage indicates a presentation on the Loire market is going to be given.  It’s a chapel with an impressive high vaulted ceiling and limestone walls.  This is a straight up trade show presentation where they put up colorful graphs explaining where the market share is and sales trends.  Here’s what I took out of it.  They sell 70% of their wines in France.  They try to find a bright spot in the Gen Z low consumption data, and point out that their wines match up to many of the alleged traits Gen Z wants in a wine.  I don’t think French Gen Z knows they should like Loire wines, and there doesn’t appear to be any money to tell them via media.  Like most wine producing areas, they have a rapidly aging out key customer base with much less new consumers coming into the funnel.  On top of that, with 70% of their market in France , a global aversion to some of their sweet wine styles, and faster youth alcohol abstinence levels across their key French market, and they are in a very bad position.  There are some difficult decisions approaching, but why spoil a nice afternoon today?  

The final activity is an open tasting of 300 chenin blancs inside the old monastery.  There are probably about 100 people here, so this is a LOT of wine.  It’s a self-serve model, and most people are pros doing the “sip and swirl and spit” routine.  The “serious” journalists for wine magazines and websites maniacally type tasting notes into laptops.  It seems like they are focusing on reviewing producers that they already know, so it’s a tough break for people with little or no reputation who have open bottles being largely ignored.  Producers like Domaine Huet and Baumard get manhandled quickly, and in a surprise, all the French producers stampede over to the South African and “Global” table to try these wines.  I’m looking for regional typicity here, so I try to sample any benchmark wineries and make notes about what separates a Savenierres from a Vouvray from an Anjou from a Saumur.  I tasted a shit ton of chenins, and one thing I can tell you… They range from “pretty good” on the bottom tier to “that’s really good” at the top.  In a Parker world the still wines are 86-92 points, the sweet wines 91-94 points with maybe only a few clunkers in the absolute sea of Loire sparkling being offered.  These are very good wines at extremely approachable price points.  If normal people knew what these were, they'd drive up the prices for sure. 

The evening is supposed to be a dinner celebration.  What happens instead is two small food stations try to churn out individually cooked small apps for 125 hungry and increasingly desperate people.  I got one small morsel of grilled fish, one steamed bun, and a shrimp.  I’m fucking starving.  The worst part is we are in this remote castle and can’t leave until the bus loads up at 10pm.  There's nowhere else to go.  It’s not like I can just leave and get something to eat.  I see the college girls that were pouring the wines at the morning session hitting the samples in full party mode.  I can’t blame them.  I ask them who is in charge of this event, and they give me a variation of that scene at the bridge in Apocalypse Now.  “Ain’t you?”  This event is like a house party where you thought it was a dinner party, but it’s just a few snacks.  I hit the tasting area and drink a bunch of Quarts de Chaume and Coteau du Layon figuring that at least there is sugar in those so it’s kind of a dinner.  At last we walk in the dark back to where the buses were parked.  The bus drops us off at the building where the presentations were held, and I walk the 20 minutes back to my hotel scanning for a kebap joint in a sort of seedy side street.  A Syrian man running the shop makes sense of my broken French and I get a kebap with “Algerian Sauce” (whatever that is) with a pile of fries.  Not why one comes to France, but it was better than the tiny fish morsel I had earlier.

The second day is a bit more organized.  The speakers tend to come in two groups… winemakers, who are generally self-effacing and answer most questions with an “it depends” shrug and scientists who make presentations with long winding preambles about data collection instead of reading their audience and just hitting the headlines.  There was a guy talking about clonal comparisons from South African chenin grapes and Loire chenin grapes.  I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the South African ones handle heat and drought better than the Loire ones do.  We look at lots of graphs and data sets.  In the end he says, “It seems like over the last 30 years these grapes have adapted to the environment”.  Well, who would have guessed?  

We taste Thibaud Boudignon's wines.  He was holding court yesterday, a brick shithouse of a guy with a shaved head and a burly beard.  He had a loud party shirt on, fitted dress casual pants and flip flops in that Cali tech bro manner that announced “Yeah, I’m the fucking man”.  I wanted to hate on his wine, but dammit… it was really fucking good.  Linear and pure and intense.  They stand above the crowd in that style, that’s for sure.  He discussed his methods, and I have to hand it to him, he’s watching every detail in that vineyard to get the absolute best possible fruit into the winery.  He made an allusion to an earlier speaker from South Africa talking about nutritional additions to must and said, “With all due respect, if my grapes came in and I needed to add something for the fermentation, we did something wrong in the field.”.  Bam.

We take a bus to go visit an “Old Vine Vineyard” in Saumur.  As I walk on someone says, “Greg, is that you?”.  It’s a woman from the MW program, someone that attended one of the same seminars I did.  I sit behind her and we start breaking down the exam.  She’s an academic, teaches at a University, and admits to being shell shocked after the test.  We start bitching about some of the universal things like the new question formats, cultural bias in the essays, and lack of consistency in what we are being told in prep and feedback.  We are really getting into it, and shovel the shit with unedited criticism for a good 20 minutes or so.  It's a real cathartic bitch session.  She turned back around, cognizant of ignoring her husband seated next to her, and we continued the drive.  A few minutes pass, and a perky blonde with a posh English accent with a Cali lilt seated in front of her turned around.  “Excuse me?  Did I hear you say something about the Master of Wine?  I am an MW!  I’m So and So!”  Ouch.

We had been shit talking the IMW, the culture of the existing MWs, the Brits and the overall snobby English wine trade.  Meanwhile, that MW woman was just sitting there and taking it all in.  I can tell you with great certainty that unless she has massive hearing damage from playing in a metal band, she recounted that story to her MW friends with a “…and so I let them prattle on and on and finally I turned around and said “Darling, I’m an MW!”  HAHAHAHAHAHA!”.  Personally, I didn’t give a shit as I will stand by what I said if given the opportunity, but my fellow student was mortified.  She lost some sleep that night over that, I’ll tell you.

We visit a crazy old vineyard with vines growing through walls that make astoundingly overpriced chenin thanks to the historical nature of the vineyard.  After that we head to Domaine du Rocheville and have a good Saumur tasting with Phillipe who seems to be The Man About Town of these growers.  If I’m having a party, I’m inviting this guy.  Tied back mini ponytail, mutton chops/mustache, and a quick easy loud laugh.  I’m sort of getting tired of hanging with this group of people I got randomly assigned with as there is a combo of aloof superiority from the English speaking journalists, dorky social lack of awareness from the big nerd contingency, and the chilly French/German journalists.  There isn’t really anyone to hang with in this breakout group.  I'm ready to go.   

It should be noted that the one journalist that is a great guy is Andrew Jefford.  Unfortunately he was on one of the other side trips.  We had a good hang at lunch where we discussed the Wine Establishment, failed conservationism, and the impending mutual doom of Far Right Politics globally.  It didn’t even hit me until Melissa brought it to my attention when I got home that I had just read his recent book “Tasting With Valkyries” and I had greatly admired his writing.  I need to send him an email and let him know.  He lives outside Montpellier, so maybe I’ll bring him some good USA wine and Reggie if I go see Yoann out there.

The bus drops everyone off at the Saumur train station, a small station without any real concessions.  One of the German writers and I confer that it would be a good time for a beer.  I introduce the concept of cheetahs and gazelle to him, and invite him to walk to a pizza joint I see across the street to grab a beer before our train to Tours arrives.  He gets cold feet, so I walk over and buy a couple of cans of pilsner and walk one back to him.  He seems genuinely surprised that I bought him a beer.  I have never met a German that will turn down a beer, and I figure maybe I’ll break the ice with this guy at last.  We wait for the train and knock back a cold beer that is as refreshing as any you’ve ever had after cutting the grass in August.

When we get to Tours, I split from the group.  They were staying at a business hotel about four miles out of town, but I wanted to see what Tours was like.  I stay at this fucked up hotel that doesn’t have a reception desk and requires you to log into a link they text you to buzz yourself into your room.  My challenge is the link doesn’t arrive to my phone and I can’t get in.  On top of that I am almost out of phone battery.  I text their 24 hour chat link and it tells me no one is there. WTF.  It’s 615pm.  How can no one be there?  I call a help desk with no answer.  About 20 minutes later, I get someone to answer the phone who then asks me to go through the unsuccessful stuff I just did to confirm it was unsuccessful.  Yep.  She eventually just buzzes me in and sends me an email link.  Why they didn’t do that to start with, I really can’t say.  Once again, the buzz of exciting new technology failing to deliver the basic function it was supposed to do.

Tours has a great old exposed wood timbers medieval city center that is mostly inhabited by tattooed neck guys and “look at me I’m loud” punk metal chicks.  The main square appears to be where the nice families eat, but I went a little further down to something that looked traditional.  The downside is I’m across the street from a loud table of neck tattoo guys and their “please notice me I’m outrageous” female companion.  The upside is I have a really good three plate meal and two glasses of Baudry for 20 euros.  I hope I can get back into my hotel with my stupid link.  There are more motherfuckers blasting by me on scooters ripping vape pens.  The link, shockingly, works.  I crash out immediately and somehow pull my neck while dreaming.  How is that even possible?

The last day is in Vouvray.   I like Vouvray because the wines have a unique recognizable off dry style.  The event is held at another estate and it is very well done.  Delicious looking pastries, good coffee, and crisp white tablecloths show the impact of true hospitality professionals getting involved.  This is very well executed.  I’m sort of done hanging out around most of these people with the exception of Andrew Jefford and maybe this quirky wine searcher guy that is like a skinny Toby Radloff.  I make a big mistake and sit facing the wrong way at a round table for the presentations.  On top of that, everyone is French.  They don’t even introduce themselves when they sit down, so I get right the fuck in there like I’m sitting at a wedding reception.  “Put ‘er there pal!”.  It doesn’t go especially well. There is a real "who the fuck is this guy?" sense to the strangers.

The first presentation is about the history of Vouvray, which I’m interested in, and a discussion of the styles, which I’m even more interested in.  The trouble is it’s ALL French and the Translator 3000 is telling me that the head of the appellation is saying things like “As we shall see, the past future is.  The vignerons do what they do as the harvest is what.  Two hundred six, five hundred nine,  eleven.”  It’s no help whatsoever.  We do get to taste some aged examples across all of their styles with a very good sparkling, excellent demi sec, and a botrytis moulleaux that was very interesting.  I wish I knew what the hell any of those producers were saying.

There was a marketing presentation that is pure academia.  Some terms are tossed around like “Craftsmanship specificity” and “casual ambiguity” and “processing traditionalism” which seems to impress everyone, but it's pointlessly complicated for these vignorons.  It's like I'm at a streaming webinar where simple truths are being shrouded by terminology made to elevate the implied complexity of the topic.  I feel like I could do all these Vouvray guys a favor and just tell them “keep telling strangers what makes you unique, and you all need to stay on the same page like they do in Champagne”.  They stare at all those global declining sales stats, but someone should just tell them, “You don’t have to lift global wine sales.  Just get people to buy one more bottle of your stuff than they do now every year.”

All the playas are in on the afternoon group trip I weaseled into, a tour and tasting at Domaine Huet.  The gang is all here.  Domaine Huet is the undisputed leader of the pack and they do some interesting things.  Sarah Hwang and her family bought into the estate, and she’s front and center at the winery.  Sarah handles the English part of the comments and the vineyard manager/tech director speaks in French.  I like how she is no-nonsense East Coast and will say “It always depends with us.  We just do whatever the vineyard is giving us.”.  Then, when what is supposed to be a French version of that is delivered, it lasts about seven minutes from the guy speaking in French.  

Sarah:  "We try to harvest the best fruit we can and then make the wine style that makes sense with the fruit we have."  

French guy:  "Un producteur de Chenin Blanc en biodynamie cultive ses vignes en mettant l’accent sur la santé du sol et de la vigne, grâce à des pratiques holistiques et régénératrices, en accord avec les rythmes lunaires et cosmiques. Les raisins sont cultivés sans produits chimiques de synthèse ; à la place, on utilise des composts, des préparations biodynamiques comme la bouse de corne (500) et la silice de corne (501), ainsi que des cultures de couverture pour favoriser la vie microbienne et la fertilité des sols. Le vignoble est considéré comme un écosystème autonome, souvent enrichi par la présence d’animaux et de plantes diverses pour renforcer la biodiversité. La gestion de la canopée est soigneusement adaptée afin d’optimiser la circulation de l’air et l’exposition au soleil, réduisant ainsi les risques de maladies tout en préservant l’acidité. La date de récolte est choisie avec précision : les raisins sont généralement vendangés à la main à maturité optimale pour capturer la vivacité et la complexité aromatique du Chenin Blanc. Le résultat est un vin qui reflète pleinement son terroir et son millésime, avec pureté, énergie et profondeur de texture.  On sent la vie dans ces raisins ! Nous cultivons en biodynamie parce que nous sommes convaincus que le grand vin commence par un sol vivant — plein d’énergie, d’équilibre et de vitalité. Chaque décision que nous prenons, que ce soit le moment d’appliquer nos préparations biodynamiques ou celui de vendanger, suit les rythmes naturels de la terre et du ciel. Nous ne faisons pas que cultiver de la vigne — nous prenons soin d’un écosystème tout entier. Cela signifie des sols en bonne santé, des insectes partout, des engrais verts, et même des moutons qui broutent entre les rangs. Nos raisins de Chenin Blanc sont vibrants, équilibrés, et pleins de caractère parce qu’ils proviennent d’un vignoble véritablement vivant. Quand vous buvez notre vin, vous ne goûtez pas seulement du fruit — vous goûtez l’âme de la terre."  

It's pretty groovy and biodynamic there, and it’s hard to find fault with the results.  It’s all about trying to get healthy fruit that represents the vintage into the winery.  If it’s a cold year, they might produce sparkling and sec.  A hot year might have demi sec and sweet only.  Maybe they’ll make all four styles depending on what the vineyard is giving them.  They aren’t trying to hit product quotas.  They want to make the best wine they can that represents that particular year and that vineyard.  

It's very low intervention winemaking,  They press and make the cut when it feels right.  The still wines all ferment in barrel, but maybe sometimes they’ll do lots in steel.  It depends.  It always depends.  They’ll rack them off the gross lees, hit ‘em with a little sulfur and then put them back in the barrel until they feel like they’re ready to bottle.  I like it.  They generously poured us a sparkling (which they hand riddle), two different sec, two demi sec, two molleaux, and two very sweet ‘dessert” style from magnum.  The wines all showed personality, purity, and length.  It was interesting when Sarah noted they have wines all the time that might be in “dumb” stages, shut down or appear to be past it, but then bloom in bottle again at a later date.  When you try that wine, you’re just getting what that wine is at that moment.  The high yet balanced acid with different levels of RS point to very long lifespans ahead on these.  Very impressive visit.  

I head back to Tours on a local bus.  Sarah thankfully clued me into the protocol, but unfortunately I had no cash.  The annoyed bus driver looked at me jabbering English at her “look, I can pay ya when I get to Tours…. I can get some cash… I just need a ride to a machine” and shrugged me on without paying.  At least I think that’s what happened.  I just got on and sat down.  I hopped out close to the fucked up digital hotel and went in search of a beer.  I was done with my Loire visit and the Chenin Celebration.  I had an early train back to Paris and needed to find a good meal.