Wine

It's time I wrote about wine on this blog. It's one of the reasons we are in France, and a continual interest and pleasure. There is plenty about it on our website too but this adds another dimension.
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Living in England we enjoyed the benefits of an international wine market - plenty of choice from Europe, but also from the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Also the supermarkets took (still do take I think) their wine buying seriously, employing reputable experts to select their wines, and we could always select with the aid of tasting columns in the weekend papers and of websites like Tom Cannavan's excellent Wine Pages. And in Wirksworth we had a wine tasting circle which met regularly over many years, a group of friends who enjoyed evenings together but also explored different kinds of wines - grape varieties, countries, supermarket favourites and so on.

All the time (since the early 1990s) we'd been coming to France and visiting vineyards. The photo shows me recently in one of the first I ever visited, Cave Didier Cornillon in Wirksworth's twinned area of the Diois (a group of communes around the town of Die in the Drôme départment). The pictures in the background are by our artist friend Ali Benyahya who lives nearby and is building his gallery next to Didier's caveau.
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To begin with on holidays we explored the Die area and its delicious sparkling Clairette de Die, and so met Didier soon after he had branched out on his own from the cave coopérative in the area (now known as Jaillance, with an output of 6 million bottles of bubbly a year and an impressive website - take a look). Didier has also prospered, making an impressive range of still wines as well as Clairette and, for a few years now, also running a good winery in Tunisia. Then we branched out down the nearby Rhône Valley, into Provence and the Languedoc, and of course we could not resist calling in on Bourgogne, Beaujolais, the Loire Valley and indeed Champagne on our journeys to and from England.
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The contrasts with the UK are striking. Although wine is much more part of everyday life for many French people, most only know the wines of their own region. Exclude Champagne from that - everyone drinks it on festive occasions. Maybe people buy Bordeaux reds on special occasions. But to find people in the Languedoc who know or drink Beaujolais, Bourgogne, Alsace or Loire wines or even Côtes du Rhône, still less know which grapes are used for what, is fairly rare. And as for overseas wines, you find very few on sale and fewer French people who know anything at all about them. It was a real surprise to find a local vigneron who had been a consultant in Uruguay and was full of praise for South American wines - but admitted that the experiment of importing them to sell here had failed.

So I've had the pleasure of being accepted quite quickly as someone who 'knows about wine' among French friends, and as a result have extended my researches through introductions to some of the fairly numerous family members and friends of friends who are in the wine business. We have so much to explore still in France - the south-west, the Jura and Alsace, and the whole of Bordeaux - and within driving distance into Spain and Italy too, although we have started to discover the diverse wines and unusual grape varieties of north-east Italy near to the Slovenian border, which are hardly known in England let alone here in France! And we're hoping to develop a regular wine tasting circle here too.