A family affair (1)

One of the things I wanted to do with John and Candy while they were here at Thanksgiving was to go meet and taste wines with Jean-Noël Guerrier, our neighbor. I've written about him before, most extensively here.

Last Thursday, we drove up to the bakery in the vineyard to get some bread for our Thanksgiving dinner of roast lamb and flageolet beans (see Walt's posting about it). On the way back home, I drove down the road where the Guerriers live just to show J & C where it's located. As we drove by, I noticed that the door to their wine cellar was ajar.

Walking on the gravel road through
the Renaudière vineyard, into the sunset

I stopped and asked J & C to wait in the car for a minute while I went in and talked to Jean-Noël. I wanted to set up an appointment for a tasting the next day and figured it would be easier to do it in person than to try to get them on the telephone.

When I pushed the door open and walked into the dark cellar, I saw three people standing there — Jean-Noël, his wife Chantal, and an older man that I assumed was the senior Mr. Guerrier. I knew the old man lived in the house above the cellar but had never met him before. As I talked to his son, the man glared at me with a scowl on his face and didn't say a word. He looked like Abraham Lincoln without the beard — a prominent nose, strong chin and forehead, and that stern look in his eyes.

Jean-Noël seemed surprised to see me and a little addled, but he was friendly as usual. I made the appointment for noon the next day but I felt like I had intruded on some family discussion or dispute. Then I wondered if the whole idea was a big mistake. Had I barged in rather than waiting to be invited? I did just push the door open and yell in, « Il y a quelqu'un ? » Maybe that was rude. Had I offended the old man?

Candy reassured me that I had probably caught them in the middle of a family pow-wow, or row. They might have wondered how long I had been at the door and how much of their discussion I had heard (which was none, actually). Maybe the father was telling the son he was a good-for-nothing, wasn't running the business the way he ought to, or whatever. Or maybe the senior Guerrier thought I had a funny accent and wondered who in the world I might be, barging in like that.

The cellar itself is a sight to see. It's right out of the 19th century, which is when it was built. Jean-Noël said his great grandfather dug it out by hand, with pickaxes and shovels. The debris was loaded onto horse-drawn wagons and hauled away. Once the cellar was excavated, and the big round-arches of the ceiling constructed, a house was built on top. The cellar walls are black with mold, the lights are dim, bare bulbs hanging from wires, and one wall is lined with bottles of red wine. The ceilings are low, and the smell of wine and yeast permeates everything.

The Guerriers' parcel of Chenin Blanc vines
out on the gravel road

Well, we went for the noontime tasting the next day — all four of us. When we got there, the door to the cellar was locked and there was no sign of anybody around. After a minute or two, I thought we would just go back home and forget it all. But then Jean-Noël emerged from his house next door and greeted us with a big smile. The tasting was on, and I was glad because I wanted to buy some red wine.

Jean-Noël looks a little like a young Jean Rochefort (he's a famous French film actor who's made hundreds of movies over the years). They have the same bushy mustache. But Jean-Noël is a farmer, and he dresses in work clothes the way you would expect a farmer to dress. And he usually wears a wool knit hat — a toboggan cap — on his head, covering his ears. Last Thursday, the jacket he was wearing was definitely getting threadbare. His wife, Chantal, dresses in similar fashion, and might remind you of a young Audrey Hepburn playing the role of a street urchin.

Soon Chantal joined us in the cellar. We had probably interrupted their lunch. But they knew we were going to buy some wine, so business took precedence over the noon meal, I'm sure. The atmosphere was relaxed and the talk was lighthearted.

Chenin Blanc vines at La Renaudière

Like many people here in the Loire Valley, Jean-Noël speaks in extraordinarily clear, grammatical, unaccented standard French. He is obviously an educated man, and he certainly knows a lot about the business of growing grapes and making wine. His is a small-scale operation, and his Chenin, Côt, and Gamay wines are excellent. This time, he also wanted to talk to us about Obama and Bush and what is going on in America.

The wines he offered us for tasting included a 2007 white wine made from Chenin Blanc grapes. He grows them on a parcel of land on the gravel road that runs from our house out through the Renaudière vineyard. When I wrote about him in October (click here), I mentioned that the 2008 grapes from that parcel had just been harvested. He and Chantal confirmed that the grapes had indeed been taken in on a Saturday toward the end of October. So I knew exactly which parcel of vines they were talking about.

The Chenin Blanc wine was really nice — fruity but dry, with a nice golden color. He told us he was letting us taste it but he couldn't sell us any of it. It was already sold. In fact, he took a bottle out of a big wire bin and opened it for us. Chantal spoke up and pointed out to him that that batch of wine had already been sold, and that he had no business opening a bottle of wine that no longer belonged to them. "We'll just tell them we broke one bottle," he said, and laughed. We all laughed.

After tasting it, Walt asked him if he would like to "break" a few more of those, but he said he really couldn't. We laughed again. Actually, we know the people who have paid for that batch of 2007 Chenin Blanc — they are some English people who live in Saint-Aignan and sometimes walk their dog, a big white poodle, out in the Renaudière vineyard. Jean-Noël said he had mentioned us to them and they had said yes, they knew us.

The next wine we tasted was a late-stage bernache — that's a wine that hasn't yet finished the fermentation process, and it is an autumn treat here in the Loire Valley. It was a Chenin Blanc bernache, Jean-Noël said, made from the 2008 crop of grapes from that same parcel of land at La Renaudière. It was also delicious, but not for sale. We'll be able to get some of the finished wine next spring, if we act fast.

The third wine we tasted was a 2007 Côt. Côt (called Malbec elsewhere) is the Guerrier wine I like the most and was what I wanted to buy that day. Jean-Noël went to a big stainless steel vat and pumped some of the flowery, spicy red wine into our four glasses. His tastings, by the way, aren't based on sips but on full glasses of each wine. And he has one too — just to be convivial, I'm sure. The 2007 Côt was not a disappointment, even though the 2006 was a hard act to follow.

As we drank and talked, a figure appeared in silhouette at the cellar door. It was old Mr. Guerrier. He called out to his son, who dropped everything and went running toward his father. There was an embarrassed silence for a couple of seconds, but then Chantal started telling us what was going on.

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