Spring Forward

I have never been a big fan of Chenin Blanc. If grapes were people, this variety would be your alcoholic uncle, all hail-fellow-well-met as he comes through the door, but a bit bland, short on attention span and interesting conversation, and liable to leave behind him a sensation somewhat different from the initial affable salute.

A memorable 1961 Vouvray comes to mind, the pride of the cellar at a place where I used to work (such was the state of the academic job market in the Reagan-Thatcher years that I was in six establishments in seven years before the U of M snapped me up). Vouvray is always one hundred percent Chenin Blanc. It is a pale yellow wine from near Tours in the Loire valley, south of Paris, and is known for its keeping qualities. 1961 was a year with a fine reputation. Those in the know spoke in subdued tones of this treasure—it amounted to several dozen bottles. Quite enough, thought some, for one to be tested. The experiment was a revelation. Over the two decades these bottles had sat in the cellar, the contents had developed a flavor which combined the vapid nastiness of a Macintosh apple with the heady aroma of dry-cleaning fluid.

The solution adopted to the problem of their disposal was not particularly kind. It followed the gospel principle that “every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse” (John 2:10). Some people at that particular staff farewell party may have been surprised at the lavish provision of liquids, but there were no complaints, which goes to show that even thinking people do not always think when they drink.

Imagine then the pleasure of finding recently not one but two Vouvrays tasting as good as their mellifluous name (thrill to the delicious labiodental fricatives). Both are from the 2002 vintage, a year with a long sunny autumn—important if grapes are to ripen and become sweet in an area which is both inland and quite far north. Both may be had locally for about $10.

The drier of the two is from the well-known domaine of Sauvion. It is a clear pale yellow. Its initial sweetness is followed by bright acid, but what lingers long after you have swallowed each mouthful is a delicious bitterness, like that of fresh grapefruit. I detected one note in it which would pick up the taste of gouda cheese. This would go down very nicely before dinner on a sunny evening, a pleasant variation from fashionable Sauvignon Blanc. Nor is it any dispraise to say that it would be an ideal wine to drink with potato salad, or one of those cold amalgams people put together for graduation parties that involve multicolored rigatoni, turmeric, and yogurt (or is it cottage cheese or mayonnaise—surely not Miracle Whip). It went well with a pasta sauce I make out of eggplants, browned onions, ricotta, and tinned tomatoes. It is surely no mistake that it comes from the region where the 16th-century French queen Catherine de Medicis had several chateaux, for it is she who is said to have introduced white sauce into French cooking from her native Italy—an Italy whose cuisine had in her day not yet integrated the tomato, a New World vegetable (or fruit—I am not getting into that one).

Our other Vouvray is a similar pleasing pale yellow, but tastes somewhat sweeter. It is from the caves of Jean-Paul Poussin; caves not only in the French sense of “cellars” but also in the English sense, for M. Poussin’s bottles age in grottos cut out of the creamy local tufa limestone, caves which in the Middle Ages were used for disposing of bodies in times of plague. The wine gives the mouth a sense of fullness, in much the same way that champagne does (though this wine is not in the least fizzy).

These are jolly good value, if you ask me, fine and fresh for spring. This is what wine might have tasted like in Eden, before the accumulated misdeeds of mankind made us sad and bland and boring. Drink them young.