A Trip To Southern France

 

I had been contemplating moving from my seat.  I was tired though.  It had been a long, long day of travel with an early evening departure out of CLE, connection at Washington DC, landing at Paris at around 1p, killing four hours on a layover, then a connection on Air France to Toulouse.  A light misty rain fell and I just didn’t WANT to have to move.  Yet I knew this was a bad spot.  To my left, a Roma girl (are you allowed to call her a gypsy or is that like being my grandfather calling black women “those colored gals” in the late 70s?) was doing two things that were annoying.  1.  Playing her mobile phone speaker as if she was alone in her room watching Tik Tok videos.  2.  Coughing repeatedly without any attempt to cover her mouth, filling the train coach with whatever virus she was carrying with total freedom.  I remember thinking “don’t touch your eyes”, but I hadn’t slept in 36 hours and frankly, I forgot.  

The virus hit me about 48 hours later.  This is the sickest I have been since one of my Covid bouts.  It did give me an exciting array of ailments to focus on though.  Across the four main days, I had a different symptom take center stage.  Day one as I traveled from Rivesaltes was “post nasal drip day” which was highlighted by a surprise bloody nose that started in my hotel room at 700am and continued through 500pm with almost no letup.  An African woman that was sitting next to me on a train to Montpellier laughed uproariously as I struggled to prevent blood from flowing down my face, frantically pulling rough toilet paper from a stolen roll that I clandestinely stored in my backpack.  Day 2 started that night with “Fever and Night Sweats”, as I shivered below the covers at Yoann’s mothers house, an old lady that only spoke French that had to wonder why this sick man was going to die in her house.  That dovetailed nicely into Day 3 in bed and “Insane Sinus Pressure Day” where I considered purchasing a power drill to allow some of the massive crushing pressure in my face to escape somehow, someway.  The final day, “Sneezing Day”, was conducted at high end wineries I had driven myself to while fueled up on some weird bio cold med a very concerned Pharmacist sold me after much consultation.  I shall always refer to this portion of my trip to the Languedoc publicly as “The Gypsy’s Revenge”, unless of course I am not allowed to say “gypsy” any longer, in which case I will do so only behind closed doors.  Let’s all be honest, “The Roma’s Revenge” doesn’t have that good a ring to it.  There was no real reason for her to have revenge on me either, as I never did a thing to her.  She definitely fucked over everyone in that train car though.

I had never been to that part of France before.  I had been to Provence and the Southern Rhone, but never to the more wild Roussillon and the slightly wine unfashionable Languedoc, and I was curious.  The excuse was to go to a meeting at Diam to see how they made their closures and get up to speed with the latest in oxygen transfer rates.  It’s sort of crazy to go through all this hassle to go to a cork factory, but that’s what I did.  A quick aside on why anyone should care about a technical cork closure…. For hundreds of years natural cork has been used to close bottles.  This is for two reasons.  Cork has elasticity so it expands to make sure the liquid doesn’t come out (which is the main goal here).  It also is a piece of bark, so there are these natural veins which run through it which allows small amounts of oxygen to pass through the cork and allow the wine to “age”.  The problem is because it is a piece of bark, no two are the same and every single bottle has different results from the “same” cork.  What the Diam company did was figure out how to grind up the corks into small particles, clean the particles to prevent microbial spoilage agents from wrecking the wine, and made each of their closures provide the exact same amount of oxygen to the wine.  Bottle one is the same as bottle 22, totally the opposite of cork.  Why anyone still uses natural cork is beyond me.  At this point you have to put a genuine effort to resist modernization, like someone refusing to buy a car.  “Nope.  This old mule cart was good enough for my grandfather.  It’s good enough for me.”  You can lead the mule to water, but he’s stubborn as a mule?  I think the saying is something like that.  I can’t recall.

The production process is a massive industrial endeavor.  Three giant systems hum along cleaning ground up cork, trucks time deliveries to bring in more, and the line is filled with a small army of people doing assigned assembly line tasks to produce identical closures thudding out into bags for shipment.  It’s quite impressive to see something at scale that works 24/7.  It might be even more impressive to see the commitment of the people in the labs to bring further innovation and improved bio solutions.  They're into it.  Everyone I met was very focused and dedicated to their job.  Sure, I know they were putting on a show for a visitor and as far as I know Pierre in shipping could be a dipshit, but on the surface those guys have their shit together.  I left impressed.    

The Diam people had set up a good regional set of visits for us.  The Banyuls producers presented their priority dry whites (Grenache Blanc blended with Grenache Gris), still reds with Grenache, Syrah, carignan, mourvedre, and occasional Cinsault, with an overwhelming amount of fortified sweet styles.  I don’t see many Banyuls on the shelf now, and if I do it’s the flagship Grenache led blend fortified to 18-19% ABV with around 120 g/l of residual sugar.  They’re usually fruity and delicious, with a layer of chocolate secondary flavor.  At this tasting, they brought it all out.  Dry Banyuls, Rancio style exposed to full oxidation, white Banyuls, off dry, rose, extended barrel aged, amphora aged… you name a combination of techniques and I tried it.  They were all elevated quality with hedonistic muscle.  Really nice, genuine, humble producers that were aware of their sales challenges (“headwinds” is the new cliche term), but actively doing multiple approaches to try to move the needle.  I tend to root for underdog regions, and I am likely to support them with my purchases in the future.  The question is if I will see any of these bottles in the wild.  The wines are so friggen cheap in relation to wines of relatable quality you'd think there would be a market, but nobody knows why they should pick up a $12 bottle of "Collioure".  I don't have the answer to that riddle.

There was a stop in Rivesaltes.  This is a sort of shabby little village with a scrubby landscape that made its name by creating Vin Du Naturals, perhaps the least commercially viable of all the sweet wines of France.  These fortified wines are fruity, sweet and boozy.  Some locals told me that when they were kids that family used to have a small glass before Sunday lunches and dinners but none of them could seem to remember the last time they had done that.  As a result there are still some symbolic jeroboams roasting out in the sun along with co-op owned massive steel tanks filled with pretty good but not exceptional quality fortified sweet wine.  Now it should be said that I tried a couple of AMAZING quality examples, one which was a 1996 and the other from a solera set up with an average age of 33 years.  If you ever have the opportunity to buy the Domaine Vaquer Rivesaltes Ambre Hors d'Age Solera, it's great.  It's also only $27.  Like everyone else in Southern France, the region is trying to figure out how to make appealing white wines while consumers ignore their exceptional value fortifieds and reds.  The real highlight of my visit was the gypsy flu really settling in with a persistent nosebleed that I couldn't seem to stop.  I will always have mixed feelings on Rivesaltes as a result.  

I split from the MW group and I met up with my friend Andrew who lives in a nice village outside Pic St Loup.  He had asked me if I "fancied taking a walk up St Loup", and I said "sure".  I was envisioning a long walk on some cultivated trail, a place where maybe there was a little snack hut at some spot to get a refreshing drink.  Yes, Andrew had pointed out the need for me to have proper footwear, but I'm thinking about walk duration on this, not terrain.  It turned out that about a third of the walk was on loose ankle twisting rocks on a Medievel cart path, another third was on bumpy trail, and the last bit was climbing up rocks on a steep incline.  It was way more intense activity than I needed.  Two days ago I was comatose in bed.  Now I'm sweating my ass off in jeans/t-shirt/Blundstones scrambling up these rocks wheezing as my lungs ask, "Why are you doing this to us?".  It's 2200 feet above sea level.  It's not like I ascended Everest.  There were little French families in their action pants doing it.  Still, it was much more challenging than I needed still in my "sorta sick" phase on a Saturday afternoon.  It was worth it for the fabulous view at the top where gliders whizzed past below our eyeline.  

I took a train to Paris on Sunday.  I had scouted out a small wine bar near my preferred "outgoing" hotel near the train station to CDG and fully committed to an afternoon of pillaging their grower champagne by-the-glass list.  Remy Lequeux-Mercier Blanc de blanc, Champagne Serveaux Fils Pur Meunier, and Champagne Denis Salomon Meunier topped off with a glass of Domaine Pierre Guillemot Premier Cru Aux Serpentieres Savigny-les-Beune 2023 got my mind right.  I stopped off at a nondescript brasserie for a stereotypical menu of oysters, frissee salad, and sausage with potato puree as some LA photographer guy bullshitted a table of French aspiring musicians with his unlikely tales of "working with" every music artist you can think of from Katy Perry to Imagine Dragons.  These tales were lapped up by the crowd despite all evidence pointing to his being a fucking grifter.  A couple junkies shook me down for change as I sat waiting for my check.  It was a true Paris experience.  I've spent a lot of time in France over the last few years, and I gotta say that I enjoy it.  I was physically beat by this point though.  I needed to get out of here.  I walked back to my hotel and prepared to do battle with the Asian tourists in the security lines the next day.