Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 21

The Loire Valley is not, technically, a region, for the Loire River begins far to the south, winds all the way up through central France and across, to empty out into the Atlantic at the southern border of Brittany. The finest wines come from four distinctly different regions, and it follows that certain of them have little in common apart from their proximity to the same river. They are predominantly white.

Beginning at the mouth of the river, Muscadet (the Nantais region), made from the Muscadet grape (transplanted from Burgundy where it is known as “Melon”), is a light and very dry wine, best when drunk very young—one of the best with raw oysters. Its slight acidity renders it a useful and refreshing thirst quencher, but may perhaps proscribe it for certain stomachs. The same region produces a slight little wine from the Gros Plant grape which is a favorite among collectors of the little known.

Savennières (Anjou) makes good white wines from the Pineau grape (spelled differently to distinguish it from the Burgundy Pinots), the best known of which comes from a tiny vineyard, the Coulée de Serrant. Formerly a sweet wine, it has, for the last ten years, been vinified as a dry wine; the grapes are picked before being attacked by the pourriture noble. A suave, delicate wine with a slightly “peppery” taste, it improves greatly with age and is probably best, depending on the year, when five or six years old. It is splendid with smoked salmon, fish in sauce, and such dishes.

Vouvray (Touraine) now vinifies much of its production “dry” also, with less success, it seems to me. The Vouvrays are also made from the Pineau grape. The 1921s are still remembered with reverence. When made in the traditional way, they are perfect apéritif and dessert wines. A certain part of the production is treated like champagne to make a sparkling wine.

Farther along the Loire, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé are made from the Sauvignon grape, known in that part of the country as Blanc Fumé because of the wines’ delicate, smoky taste, partly a result of the grape variety and partly of the earth in which it is grown. The Pouilly-Fumés (from Pouilly-sur-Loire–unrelated to Pouilly-Fuissé) have the more pronounced fumé taste of the two. The same vineyards make a wine from the Chasselas grape, which takes the name of the village (Pouilly-sur-Loire)—delicious when drunk very young, but of little interest once it is a year old. Sancerre produces also a small amount of rosé wine, which, like Bouzy and Gros Plant, is much cherished by curiosity seekers.

Close neighbors, but on the banks of the Cher, Quincy and Reuilly (not to be confused with Rully) are light and lovely mid-morning thirst quenchers (Sauvignon).

Three beautiful red wines come from the Loire Valley: Bourgueuil (of which the best is Saint-Nicholas de Bourgueuil), Chinon and Saumur-Champigny (the first two are from the Touraine, the third, from the Anjou). All are made from the Cabernet-Franc grape and experts claim to discern in them the odor of violets and the flavor of raspberry. When young, they have an astonishing deep purple-red “robe” and an exhilarating fruit. They share with the wines of Beaujolais the beauty of youth (and, like them, should be drunk slightly cool), but they age with more grace and eventually come to resemble certain old Bordeaux.