Winemaker says it's a "bad year"

Nearly everything is green now, except the wheat. It's ready to be harvested, I'd say.


We had a very informative and delicious wine-tasting and talk with Patricia down at the Domaine de la Renaudie late yesterday afternoon. We all wanted to buy some of every one of the 10 or 12 different white, rosé, red, and sparkling wines they make.

In April, I put this plant outside, on the north side of the house,
thinking it was pretty much dead. It has obviously
enjoyed the recent cool, wet weather.

Patricia said that 2012 has been one of the worst years on record for their vineyards. The year started out mild in January — so mild through December and January that the sap had not descended into the roots of many trees and vines. When the sudden cold snap hit in early February, plants and trees froze and many died.

I'm still waiting for these house leek flowers to pop open.

Then, after a few sunny days in March, the weather turned cold and damp in April. The grape flowers didn't develop as they should, and the grape crop will be very small this year. On top of it all, the deer population exploded and they caused considerable damage to the vines. Now the summer continues to be damp — thus the small crop Patricia is predicting.

Le retour au sous-bois

One of the signs of the advancing season is the lowering of the electric fences around parts of the Renaudière vineyard. The fences are designed to keep deer out of the vines during the spring, when tender new leaves and shoots would tempt them to come do some munching.

Callie checking to see if I'm following along or not

Callie loves the walk down through the woods — en sous-bois, in French, the "under-woods," which means among the trees and through the undergrowth. It's a nice change from walks up and down rows of vines, or along the gravel road, or even along the edges of the vineyard where the woods start.

Looking back up the hill toward daylight

It's a good walk for me too, because the slope makes climbing back up toward the house a good aerobic workout after the easy walk down. Despite all the rain these past few months, the ground isn't very muddy down there at the bottom of the trail through the woods. Maybe it's because the trees and undergrowth are sucking up a lot of water in this season.

Callie making her way through the undergrowth

Speaking of water and the season, there are more of those big orange slugs crawling around all over the place than I've ever seen in my nine years of walking the paths and trails of the area. I saw at least 20 a couple of mornings ago, and yesterday afternoon I saw several too. In past years, they were a rarity, appearing only randomly from time to time. Now it's like an invasion.

The view toward the village as we emerge from the woods

Walt came downstairs this morning, looked out at the windy gray weather, and said: "Another fine October morning!" Trouble is, it's mid-July. We won't be sitting out on the deck this evening with Jean and Nick — it'll be too damp and cold. Things are only supposed to get worse, with showers today and tomorrow, and then heavy rains all day Friday.

A bee in the back yard

I went to the pharmacy yesterday and the woman behind the counter asked me how things were going. I said fine, except for the weather. She looked at me and replied: « Ce temps-là me convient très bien, parce qu'il ne fait pas trop chaud. » — "This weather suits me just fine, because it's not too hot."

Ha. "Not too hot" is just what I was thinking. That would be « Pas terrible ! » in French.

Cooking, walking, and looking

Not to mention taking pictures. Yesterday I posted pictures of cooking. Today, it'll be pictures of walking and looking. I get to do some of that every day, walking with the dog in the vineyard.

I think Callie likes this weather and this life.

This week we have an appointment to go taste and buy wines from our neighbors Patricia and Bruno at the Domaine de la Renaudie. We live in a wine village, and while some local vintners (vignerons) have quit the business over the past seven or eight years, many have continued and a few new ones have planted or acquired vines and starting making and selling wines.

Having the vineyard out back is like having our own private park for our walks. Sometimes I wonder how long we'll keep living here — I've never lived longer in the same house, except when I was growing up — and then I think about the dog and our walks. Where else would be have a long gravel road, hundreds of walkable rows between lines of vines, and no traffic so need for a leash?

Grapes at La Renaudière in early July 2012

Sometimes I dream of living in a city again, but then I wake up and smell the coffee (it's pur arabica).

Tendrils reaching for something to hold onto

As you can see from the pictures, the grapes are developing despite the mediocre 2012 weather. A report on the news this morning featured tourists down on the Mediterranean coast — Provence, Côte d'Azur — thumbing their noses at their compatriots who live in the chilly, damp northern parts of France. That would be us.

Oh well. It's like living in San Francisco, where you watch reports of heat waves, heat stroke, and violent thunderstorms on the TV news and feel like you live in an alternate universe. I don't envy those in eastern parts of the U.S. who've had to endure temperatures in the upper 30s and lower 40s centigrade for a past few weeks. We have just barely hit 30ºC maybe once this year. Mostly, it's been in the low 20s and high teens. That's the 60s and low 70s F.

Poulet à l'estragon

Tarragon chicken would be the English name for this way of cooking poultry. I thought of it because a few weeks ago I bought a pot of tarragon at the plant nursery in Saint-Aignan. It stayed in the little black nursery pot until a few days ago, when I transplanted it into a much bigger container. I hope it will prosper there.

Poulet à l'estragon, a classic French recipe

I can actually remember the first time I ever ate poulet à l'estragon. It was in France, of course — in Rouen, in 1973, in an apartment on the rue du Gros Horloge, one of the city's most famous and picturesque streets. I was working as a teaching assistant in a lycée (secondary school) there that year. A French couple that I and a couple of other American teaching assistants had met served it one evening when they invited us over for dinner. They were planning to go live in New York the next year, so they wanted to practice their English and get to know some Americans.

Tarragon and browned chicken pieces

That chicken was a roasted bird that had been stuffed full of fresh tarragon sprigs before going into the oven. It was served cold or at room temperature on a buffet table, with some salads and bread. Tarragon was a flavor I wasn't really familiar with, and buying such a chicken from a shop in Rouen would have been far beyond the limits of my budget as a part-time TA. In other words, the tarragon chicken was a discovery and a real treat. Thus the memory, all these years later.

Over the past few years, Walt has made tarragon chicken several times. The version he has made is in a cookbook from the Hudson Valley region in New York. It's a good recipe using a cut-up chicken, tarragon, and creme — a kind of sauté or fricassée. That's what I wanted to make this time, with sprigs from my tarragon plant, but I wanted to use a French recipe. As usual, I didn't use just one recipe but I read two or three in my favorite books and then did my own version.

Take the chicken out of the pan and let the onions
and shallots cook down in the butter and fat...

The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia gives a recipe for poulet sauté à l'estragon that it says is just one version of a sautéed chicken using various fresh herbs or a combination of herbs (poulet sauté aux fines herbes). As is often the case with that book, you have to read back three or four pages to get to the "master" recipe that explains the basic technique for sautéing a chicken and then read forward to find the recipe for the fines herbes chicken, which comes alphabetically after the estragon one.

...before adding a teaspoon of flour and then some chicken stock,
white wine, and a squirt of white wine vinegar or lemon juice

So I spent a few hours reading about chickens and tarragon, including dipping into Ginette Mathiot's Je Sais Cuisiner, a home cooking classic in France, as well as Monique Maine's Cuisine Pour Toute L'Année, another standard French kitchen resource. It was good entertainment — the literary equivalent of going to one of the local open-air markets in the morning before lunch. You end up really hungry for something good to eat after you've read about or seen all the delicious-looking foods and dishes you might decide to indulge in.

Onion, shallot, and tarragon go into the sauce.

As usual, Mathiot's and Maine's recipes are much simpler than the LG's. Mathiot's is not so simple though, calling for stuffing a whole chicken with ground pork and veal along with the tarragon and then cooking the whole bird either in the oven or in a big pot on top of the stove. Maine's is the simplest, resembling the Hudson Valley book's version in many ways, but with fewer ingredients. American recipes often have very long ingredient lists compared to French recipes. (Walt had always simplified the Hudson Valley recipe when he made it.)

Decide whether you want to sauté the chicken pieces
à brun (brown) or à blanc (white).

From the LG, I learned that there are two basic ways to make a sauté of chicken, according to French gastonomes. One is to sauté the chicken pieces à brun — brown them — and the other is to sauté them à blanc, which means to "stiffen" the chicken parts in butter, oil, or fat in a pan on top of the stove but without letting them take on any color. Often chicken sautéd à blanc is finished with a cream sauce.

Poulet sauté à brun avec oignons et échalottes

The problem with the LG (for me) is that many of its recipes include ingredients that most people would never have at home. One, for example, is fond de veau — reduced veal stock — which goes into the poulet à l'estragon, along with white wine, to make up the cooking liquid and sauce. You can buy fond de veau powder in a can, and I actually have some in the kitchen, but it's mostly salt, flour, cornstarch, potato starch, flavorings, colorings, and preservatives, along with 1.5% of something called extrait de viande de bœuf. Somehow, all that is not really appetizing.

Monique Maine's recipe, above, says to brown the cut-up chicken in a mixture of oil and butter on medium low heat so that the butter and chicken juices don't burn in the pan. Then she makes a cream sauce. That sounded like a good idea to me. The LG says you can just slightly thicken the sauce with some flour, making a home-cooking style dish if you don't have any veal stock on hand. So I took that advice too.

Maine's recipe, as you see, says to brown the chicken and then use cream int he sauce, which contradicts the LG on the point of sautéing à blanc rather that à brun, but that didn't bother me. But Maine's use of an egg yolk to thicken the cream sauce doesn't appeal to me — egg yolk is added cholesterol, and you have to be very careful that the sauce doesn't boil (« faites chauffer mais ne laissez pas bouillir ») so that egg yolk doesn't curdle. It's too much trouble.

If I had been serving this to company, I would have saved out
a tarragon leaf or two to put on top for color.

I put in more tarragon that any of the recipes called for, because I wanted a highly flavored chicken. Some of the tarragon sprigs went right into the pan after the chicken was browned, and then I stripped the leaves off the other sprigs, chopped them, and added them to the cream that I poured in at the end of the cooking. Those chopped fresh leaves cooked only briefly and enhanced the flavor.

Estragon

The other flavoring ingredients in the sauce were a small onion and a large shallot, some salt and pepper of course, a bay leaf, and a dash of tarragon vinegar (vinaigre à l'estragon) along with the white wine and chicken stock (which I made with the carcass of the bird after I cut it up) that were the cooking liquids. The chicken shouldn't boil in the sauce, according to the LG. After it's browned, add liquid let it simmer for half an hour on very low heat. Take the chicken out of the pan and boil the sauce down at the end to thicken it if you need or want to, and then pour it over the chicken pieces.

We cooked wheat berries instead of rice as an accompaniment to the chicken and sauce. You could have potatoes or quinoa or millet or wild rice or pasta. Then a salad. It's lunch.

For more precise quantities and instructions, here's a recipe from epicurious.com, and here's another from the BBC (James Martin's).

9 x 7 = 63

Nine times seven. Sixty-three. Sixty-three is my age. I've lived in Saint-Aignan (just outside, actually) for nine years now. That means I've spent one-seventh of my life here.

And in fact, this is our 10th summer in Saint-Aignan. Every one has been different from all the others. It's all kind of hard to believe.

Living the life in this house in Saint-Aignan

When we moved here in 2003, I don't believe I had thought too much about what life would be like ten years later. Now the tenth anniversary is not all that far away. Back when, I wasn't even convinced I would live this long. If I hadn't come to live in the French countryside, I might not have.

I'm as happy living here as I've ever been anywhere else. And I've lived here twice as long as I lived in Durham NC, Washington DC, Champaign-Urbana IL, or Paris earlier in my life. (Don't get me wrong — I loved living in Paris when I was younger.)

Flowers, bugs, vegetable gardens, and long walks in the vineyard have
replaced offices, long commutes, traffic jams, and work stress.

Only two other places — my home town in NC and the San Francisco Bay Area in California — have detained me longer. In each case, 18 years — twice as long as the time I've spent now in Saint-Aignan.

In fact, at this point more than half the time I've ever spent in France over the past 63 years has been spent in Saint-Aignan. Wow, reading the list of places I've called home — and I've left a few out — makes me feel like a real gypsy.

When I lived in California, I joked that my feet never actually
touched dirt, only concrete and pavement. That changed...

Yesterday, one of the neighbors came over for a chat. She's the woman who lives most of the year in Blois and just spends the months of July and August here in Saint-Aignan. We wondered if there was something specific she wanted to tell us or ask us, but it was just a social call. We chatted for 30 or 40 minutes out on the terrace.

Le château de Montpoupon

Madame M. is in her late 70s now, and her husband is in his early 80s. They have seven children and more grandchildren that I can count, including some great-grandchildren now. Their life is so different from ours. Unless I'm mistaken, they have never in their lives flown on an airplane. Compare that to my life — I've flown across the Atlantic Ocean nearly 70 times.

Flowers about to pop open in the yard

We had a big thunderstorm last night, with loud thunder and bright flashes of lightning. I had to get up and shut some windows. Wind was driving the rain indoors. As far was I can tell, the gusty wind didn't do any damage out in the yard and garden.

How does the garden grow?

After a rainy April, we had a rainy May. Then we had a rainy June. Now it's rainy again. Everything is behind schedule in the garden and yard.

The vegetable garden in early July 2012

Besides, we were off traveling around New York, New England, and Quebec for the middle two weeks of May, when we should have been here getting the garden planted. So we were late too, and that made sure the garden was late.

The garden from a different angle

We bought seedlings for our tomatoes, bell peppers (poivrons), and eggplant plants (aubergines) this year. Those little plants are growing nicely. Walt planted beans in one garden plot, but they either didn't come up or they were cut down by slugs and snails before they had a chance to grow much.

Callie keeping an eye on Walt to see what he's up to out there

He re-planted them. The recent spell of warmer weather (we're having a mediocre season so far) gave the new beans a chance to grow, and we may get a crop after all. We have both haricots verts (string or bush beans) and cocos plats (Romano i.e. Italian flat green beans) and are hoping both will produce.

Tomates

Walt also planted three kinds of squash: zucchini (courgettes), butternut, and another variety called a patidou in French. Those last are like little green pumpkins, with orange flesh inside. We hope to get a good crop of summer and winter squashes in September, October, and November.

Blackberries (mûres)

There are two garden plots that we haven't even tilled up yet. In those, if I get "a round tooit," I hope to plant some greens and maybe chard for a fall crop too. We'll see.

Two more views of the mûres

Meanwhile, a thornless blackberry plant that a friend in the village gave us a couple of years ago is producing a good number of berries. If the birds don't get them before we do, they might make a good pie.

More Montpoupon photos

When I think about it, quite a few of the châteaus in this area — the east side of Tours — have furnished rooms that visitors can see. Besides Montpoupon, Valençay, and Cheverny, there are the Château du Moulin near the town of Romorantin, which was still lived in a few years ago, and may be now. The Château de Villesavin, near Chambord and Cheverny, is lived in, too, and open to the public for tours.

A bedroom in the Château de Montpoupon

The Château de Saint-Aignan is lived in but it is not open to the public at all. Recently, the Château de Selles-sur-Cher was re-opened to public visits, and the new owners might actually live in the building. I haven't been to see it, but I plan to go there before the end of the summer. It had been closed up for a decade or so until this year.

Walt at Montpoupon

Walt said he liked the photos above, showing him in the courtyard at Montpoupon on Sunday afternoon, July 1, because they give you an idea of how we pretty much had the place to ourselves. There were some other tourists wandering around, but no more than a dozen. There was no pushing and shoving, no shuffling around in a crowd. We could enjoy peace and quiet and beautiful scenery all at the same time, and spend as much time as we wanted in each room of the château and the museum exhibits.

Lawn signs at Montpoupon

There were signs advising visitors to keep off the grass and to prevent their dogs from soiling the place, but they were humorous or at least attractive rather than stern and forbidding. All in all, there was a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere about the place. As far as I could tell, there's no big parking lot at Montpoupon, which might indicate that it doesn't attract big crowds (yet?). Walt just pointed out to me that there is a parking lot, and I can see it on the Google Maps aerial photo. It's not huge.

The Montpoupon gatehouse seen through a window from the main building

The wine cellar at Montpoupon is one of the many
museum exhibits on the property.

Montpoupon is about 12 miles from Saint-Aignan, 20 miles from Amboise, and 10 miles from Chenonceaux.

Montpoupon interiors

The main building in a complex like the one at Montpoupon is called le corps de logis, which you could translate as "the living quarters." The English Wikipedia article says that in France, corps de logis the name for "the principal block of medieval castles and manor houses" — so the term is architectural jargon in English too.

A bedroom at Montpoupon

Logis means "lodgings" or "home" in French, but it's a an archaic and literary term that's used in certain expressions but much not in everyday language. The royal residence at Loches is called the Logis Royal — it's a separate building from the medieval fortress on the other end of the old upper city.

The dining room

Anyway, the corps de logis, or main building, at Montpoupon is only one room deep. Sitting rooms, reception rooms, bedrooms, and a dining room are arranged around a central staircase and they have windows looking out from both sides of the building.

The kitchen at Montpoupon dates from the 1800s.

There's a bedroom reserved for the king, in case he visited, and there's some evidence that François 1er, the king who built the Château de Chambord and a new wing on the Château de Blois, once spent the night in it after a day of hunting in the forests surrounding Montpoupon.

Click on the picture to enlarge it and read some of the
old recipes in these books.

The château's kitchen was added on in the 19th century and was used until about 35 years ago, when the longtime cook retired. All in all, Montpoupon is one of the most interesting châteaus for it's interiors and furnishings, along with Cheverny and Valençay.

A sitting room in the Château de Montpoupon

The entrance fee this summer is eight euros per person for adults, and visitors are free to wander around the grounds (there's a kilometer-long forest walk/nature trail) , the château, and the extensive hunting museum displays housed in outbuildings on the property.

Montpoupon in pictures

I got busy this morning and now it's really late. I had to hang out the laundry I did last night — the washing machine has a timer we set so that it runs at about 2 a.m., when electricity rates are lower. It was supposed to rain today, but so far the sun is shining. I guess putting laundry out on the line is tempting fate, but I did it anyway.

The farm buildings that house the Auberge du Château de Montpoupon,
seen from the courtyard/terrace of the château itself

The farmhouse at Montpoupon where the restaurant is located

The other day (Sunday) at Montpoupon, I somehow got strange options set in my camera's labyrinth of menus (has that ever happened to you?), so I spent a couple of hours this morning trying to correct and improve some of the photos in Photoshop. I'm not sure I was very successful. I still have to figure out the camera's settings. Maybe I'll reset it to factory defaults and start over again.

Montpoupon seen up close from the road below

The courtyard/terrace of the château de Montpoupon, showing
(l. to r.) the Renaissance gatehouse, a medieval tower, and
the main building containing the living quarters

So... I really enjoyed visiting Montpoupon, and I took a lot of pictures — many of them bad. But I'm going to publish a few of the salvageable ones. There are four in this post. That's Walt sitting by the well in the middle of that last picture.