Buying "beebs" of wine in Châteauvieux

The village called Châteauvieux ("Old Castle") is just four miles from our house as the crow flies — it's a 10-minute drive. I went over there yesterday morning for a noble purpose: to buy some local wine. I was aware that there were wineries there (wineries are everywhere around here!), but I had never bought wine in Châteauvieux (pop. 500) before. Silly me...

    
These are a few photos I've taken in Châteauvieux over the past 20 years. As you can see, it has a hilltop château and church. The church is older (13th century) than the existing château (16th century), which replaced a medieval fortress. In springtime, as you can see, the area's fields of colza ("rape" for producing rapeseed oil, called canola oil in North America) are covered in bright yellow flowers.

I didn't know what to expect of the winery, which I had read about on the internet. It turned out to be a family home with huge fiberglass vats for storing and fermenting wine in the back yard. The woman I talked to pumped the wine out of the vats into plastic bags that go inside cardboard boxes and are called fontaines à vin or BIBs (bag in box cartons, pronounced [beeb]) — I'll post a picture tomorrow. I wish I had taken my camera with me, but I didn't think to do so. I had never actually seen anyone pumping wine into BIBs before, even though I buy wine in them all the time. So that was a new experience. The woman was very talkative in a good way. I enjoyed talking with her. The whole process took half an hour or more.

    
This wine turns out to be the 2022 vintage. Usually you don't get wine until six months after the grapes are harvested, or much longer. So what I got was vins primeurs or nouveaux, as in Beaujolais nouveau. I bought 30 liters — 10 of Gamay, 10 of Sauvignon Blanc, and 10 of Cabernet Franc rosé. That's the equivalent of 40 bottles and cost me 62 euros ($70 US). Walt and I opened the BIB of Gamay (red) to have some with our lunch yesterday, and we both thought it was good — sort of like grape juice with a little kick to it. Not sweet, not tannic. I hope it ages well. (That's the old village wash-house (le lavoir) in the photo on the right.)