ITaly

Abruzzo

I want to visit Abruzzo in warm months, to buy live Dover sole from fishermen who sell the night’s catch from their small boats on the beach at Francavilla al Mare in the morning. And then I want to cook and eat that fish, in a small house with doors facing east, smelling salt and feeling the dull rumble of waves. And then I want to travel slowly away from the coast, along the narrow stone streets of Tortoreto, through the verdant, hot Abruzzo, past palm trees, up steep sunny hills toward the Apennines. Winding away from people and coast into farmland, ending up among patchwork houses with roosters and goats in scrubby fields, down tractor paths with no cell phone reception, almost lost, with only a vague knowledge of where to procure dinner.

My travel in Abruzzo has been limited to winter. I feel a dominance of mountains and cold: inland Abruzzo in winter can be a hard place. Down narrow roads away from civilization I feel isolated. Restaurants are empty. The kinetic energy of the topography suggests earthquakes. Broken, uneasy. In January the coast looks built-up and abandoned, giving the weird pleasure of loneliness.

A warm counterweight to all that is bleak about winter in Abruzzo is the blatant, tangible generosity: such friendly people!  On my final evening in the region’s northern corner, the proprietor of Pizzorante Zio Mamo (such an awesome name!) presented the gift of a little jar of spicy fat, clearly locally made. It made me feel accepted. After only a couple of meals together he offered me something very specific and real. It felt like recognition of like-mindedness. Or acknowledgement that we both really like drinking good Abruzzese wines and eating big meals. But damn! No pizza that night. Instead he made goat slow-cooked with peppers, which is a specialty of Neretto. Far from home and completely wrung out/exhausted by travel I felt comforted by friendly restaurant people in a small town, locals that embrace outsiders like new regulars. It is a view of the best of Abruzzo, its uncommon kindness.

Abruzzo feels like a compressed version of my native North Carolina. Mountains and sea are often in sight of each other. The hills close to the Adriatic are full of small farms that grow kiwis, apricots, plums, olives, grapes, dozens of appealing edible things. The fertility and abundance of their agriculture is remarkable in a region of dizzyingly uneven topography, land at points barren and hard. I feel close to farming in Abruzzo. Agriculture is relevant and alive in the communities I visit, a source of intermittent abundance if not material prosperity.

Ensconced in happy isolation in the small hill towns of northern Abruzzo, I was in communities on the border with Le Marche. It’s a normal agricultural part of Abruzzo, not a bucolic idyll, not so much rural as remote. Tasting at good estates in this hilly area you find products reminiscent of the better wines grown in Umbria, Marche, even Tuscany. Valid, distinct wines are made in hearteningly quality-oriented ways in Abruzzo’s mountainous northern corners. In the provinces of Teramo (particularly), Pescara and l’Aquila very good wines are in decent supply. But the global reputation of wines from Abruzzo is battered by the sea of very ordinary wine made far to the south, mostly in the province of Chieti.

Our relationship with Abruzzo is young. We’ll be back, many times. Maybe even in summer. Many people are making good wine on the hillsides of Abruzzo. They make possible a different future for a region that needs to escape bulk wine practices and the dominance of a few huge cooperatives to achieve real prosperity.

So we picked out a few small-estate wines to sell in America. Eventually we will add more, because these are a part of our dream: to import sanely priced and diligently farmed wine from small estates, to eat with pizza. I always forget to emphasize the pizza.

Friuli

It’s a bad habit. Why do wine people shoehorn everything into French molds? It’s an intellectual shortcut. We lose nuance in the process.

Still… a few days into my last trip through Friuli, tangible shape emerged. The hilly, marl-rich areas of Collio and Colli Orientali contain all the “grand Cru” sites, at least for white wine, and the more alluvial, lower elevation areas (Isonzo, Grave) are littered with “premier cru” equivalent fields. Special places, for sure. Like all gross generalizations, this lobs off outliers and quirky exceptions, but the short-hand worked for me. Friuli stopped being a blob on the map and became structured. I’d bent it to fit within the confines of my limited human understanding.

More importantly,  Friuli is one of the very best white wine growing regions in the world. In the very top small handful. Why? Definitely Ponca plays a part. It’s calcareous marl, a porous and character-laden soil type that limits yields and enhances the tertiary hard-to-define specialness of Friuli’s top whites. Also, elevation: Friuli is hilly, the nights on these slopes are cool enough for wines to remain vibrant. Recently, Friuli has been suffering the heat-excesses of climate change, a crisis of character for the region’s lower-elevation areas.

Like Alto Adige, cool air flows through the region and allows for a longer, slower ripening season. From the border alps to the Adriatic across Friuli, wind minimizes rot, mitigates temperature extremes, makes farmers happy.

Many of the conditions that shape the best wines of bordering Austria and Slovenia are present in Friuli. Contact with these winemaking communities is a key element of Friuli’s appeal. Friuli is a cultural crossroads, the character of its wines as shaped by Austro-Hungarian and Slovenian traditions as by Italian archetypes. Exposure to the people, cuisine and wine passing along trade routes for generations gives a complexity to Friuli and its wines. Awareness of the world beyond the borders, ambition to create wine of global appeal.

And of course, grapes. There is no shortage of excellent raw materials in Friuli’s fields. Some are intensely local: Friulano, Schioppettino,Verduzzo, others absurdly international: Pinot Grigio, Merlot, Sauvignon. In some corners of Friuli, these and a dozen more distinct and worthwhile varieties thrive. Friuli makes each its own. The imprint of a special, great wine growing region is clear.

EMILIA-ROMAGNA

As the name implies, Emilia-Romagna is not geographically uniform. It’s actually broken into at least four distinct and important wine-growing areas, two of which are appended to form its moniker. Grapes like the white Albana and ubiquitous red grape Sangiovese make amiable accompaniment to local fare, and in Emilia, Lambrusco reaches a greatness currently only understood by locals and a small band of international wine intelligentsia (also known as wine nerds.) At the same time,
many of Romagna’s leading estates are pushing ahead with an increasing amount of quality French varietal bottlings. A familiar pattern as exists across much of the 21st century wine landscape.

Bordered by Tuscany to the south and Veneto to the north, this region is basically surrounded by producers of many of the world’s greatest red and white wines. Bologna is Emilia- Romagna’s food culture center of gravity and defining point for the culture of the surrounding land, similar in role and stature to Genoa, Verona, Naples, even Rome. In terms of gastronomy Emilia-Romagna is to the Italian landscape as Burgundy is
to France. It is the belly of Italy, a land that may rank first in importance among twenty fiercely local and quality-obsessed regions of this great peninsula. To an outsider, the raw materials of Emilia-Romagna make it a primary destination for hungry tourists planning Italian holidays. The raw materials of the region deserve the sort of diligent protection one would grant a UNESCO world heritage cultural site.

Campania

Tourists stick to the Amalfi coast like flies on a blob of spilled lemoncello gelato melting in the July sun. In high season it can be a crowded, sweaty, vividly beautiful place. Citrus, turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea, Capri. The appeal is easy to understand. I prefer the warren of neighborhoods in places like Gragnano and Pozzuoli, the not-so-pretty mirror image of Amalfi. But hey, I’m here for the anarchy, fizzy red wine, and pizza. 

Once shunned, Naples is now the trendiest of holiday destinations. Irrepressible energy and complete resistance to the homogenizing forces transforming much of even Italy into dull interchangeable prefab city components make this chaos of a metropolis refuge for seekers of authenticity, and pizza.

But we’re not concerned with these places. Vines thrive high on the dormant volcanoes of Campania’s interior, a land of rich soil and history, fiercely protected and world-renowned food traditions, and pockets of endemic poverty. Places where your cell phone still won’t work.  A land less changed than the region’s western coast. Medieval stone hilltop villages, native grapes, mozzarella di bufala seemingly for sale in shops at every crossroads. And pizza.

Come to inland Campania for the Falanghina and Aglianico, but stay long enough to explore Fiano and Piedirosso, and Barbera di Sannio. It takes time on remote mountain roads to realize this is often a cool-climate vine growing region, that elevation and coastal breezes make it necessary to pick grapes for the best wines of Campania pretty late in the season. Low pH soils add lift to vino designed to make better local specialties like mortadella panini, penne pasta in marinara made spicy by chunks of tiny red peppers cut fresh atop it a tavola with kitchen shears. And pizza.

AUSTRIA

Some of the oldest vine-growing artifacts have been discovered in Austria. Celts and Romans farmed vines here.
In Austria (like in Italy, France, and Germany) monks tended the vines and developed the winemaking traditions. Austria had a history of fine wines, but when the Austro-Hungarian empire fell with the Treaty of Saint Germain in 1919 their wine traditions began a steady decline, hitting rock bottom with a wine scandal in 1985. But the modern era of quality viticulture across the nation really began in 1985, after a scandal involving the adulteration of cheap, bulk juice through the addition of diethylene glycol to make the wines taste sweeter. This incident caused the total collapse, and subsequent reorganization and radical reform of the industry from top to bottom. Today’s exceptional quality standards across the Austrian wine community are directly related to this reformation. Austria has become a shining light for what is possible through change and devotion to the land and the vines.

Austria is about the size of Maine and twice the size
of neighbor Switzerland. Situated between Germany, Italy,
and Hungary, the country is pear-shaped and landlocked. It
is very mountainous, with only 28% of the land being flat.
There are four seasons with quite cold winters and sunny warm summers. In many of the top wine growing areas average summer temperatures can be in the high 80’s Fahrenheit.

Austria grows 33 varieties of wine grapes. Over 80% of the
wine made from these grapes is white. The wines are higher in alcohol than the wines of Germany and dry, with the exception of dessert wines made with the assistance of botrytis (noble rot) or through drying on straw mats, a practice still relatively common in Neusiedlersee. Austrians make wine from many of the same grapes used in Germany.

Riesling is considered by many to be the white grape most capable of conveying the innate qualities of the land in which it grows.
It has the ability to make wine of character and class at all points along the sweetness continuum, and is also prized for its ability to make some of the world’s most age-worthy white wines.

Gruner Veltliner was a footnote in most Austrian regions as recently as 150 years ago. The first identifiable mention of the name Gruner Veltliner is in a document from 1855. In the 1930’s this varietal really began to take over Austria’s vineyards, due largely to its suitability to the high vine-training system developed in the 1930s by Lenz Moser. This eponymous system allowed farmers to work vineyards without continually bending over, and made mechanization of more routine vineyard tasks

Burgundy

The details of Burgundy cannot be summarized here. On the surface the region is simple, but every thing in Burgundy comes with an asterisk, a sub-division, a layer not seen at first glance that peels away to reveal greater and greater complexity. Burgundy is the ultimate moving target, it's appeal ephemeral, woven around the edges of flavor and fragrance in a way that is very real but not very solid and quantifiable. When wine people talk about Burgundy the shorthand term is often meant to imply the stretch of hills that run roughly north-south from Marsannay at the northern edge of the Cote de Nuits to Santanay, where the Cote de Beaune peters out into an arable patchwork of rolling hills, vines and farmland. But discontiguous Chablis in the cold north is a part of Burgundy, to, is the Cote Chalonnaise, the Macon: technically even Gamay-riddled Beaujolais in the far south (politically a part of the Rhone) belongs to viticultural Burgundy. Long historical explanations link these lands, but we are not writing a history of the Dutchy of Burgundy, one of the richest areas of France and a major player in the ultimate shape that the modern nation of France would take. We are also not about to launch into a retelling of the history of the Cistercians, a monastic order that contributed greatly to the landscape of modern Burgundy with their tireless trial-and-error mapping of the land into a deliciously fragmented blanket of (mostly) Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines. These monks' legendary pursuit of quality made for incredible wine, created the current character of the two grapes that were their raw materials, and cemented the future prosperity of this wealthiest of wine lands.

So what is it? Why are otherwise sane men and women willing to pay exponentially more for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir farmed in this cool corner of eastern France? To provoke an argument, and because it may be true, I would suggest that Burgundy's best fields allow for the creation of as close to the true, pure expression of these noble varietals as a drinker can experience from anywhere in the world. Champagne may come close, but a greater transformation occurs in the cellars of that region, perhaps to a degree muting the transparency of varietal character in the wines it produces. Maybe not... an argument for another day. The converse is true in Burgundy as well: varietal character often cedes primacy to  terroir in the region's best sites, particularly so when they are farmed by growers willing to keep intervention and ego to a minimum, to let their unique and evocative place take center stage. The courage to do less in the cellar is often needed, along with the wisdom to understand that nature may provide something latently more beautiful than man can attempt to craft using his own intellect. 

Burgundy is greater because it is not graspable. The characteristics its critics and imitators decry as flaws are often actually the virtues that make Burgundy desirable. It is variable. Your experiences with Burgundy will rarely fall precisely in line with expectations. The bottom 90% of Burgundy producers are barely worth your time, and generally the wines of these estates are still expensive. To the outsider, the pathway to the real Burgundy is a minefield of the expensive and the banal, a frustrating way to waste a lot of bucks on indifferent juice. And even the top 10% of producers miss the mark occasionally, OK a decent amount of the time. Everyone in the region seems to make a dozen different wines from tiny slices of atrociously expensive land that trickled down to them in-ever winnowing rows via the Napoleonic code. But the elusive great Burgundy is like a spark that blows up into a lifelong wine obsession. The perfect, passing, ungraspable moment of pure enjoyment is to many Burgundy drinkers (and inveterate seekers of other sensory enjoyments) so much more valuable than reliable, dependable, repeatable types of experience. This hits squarely at the center of the human experience, of human nature: we crave what we cannot fully understand. And even most wine pros need a translator to navigate Burgundy labels, with their numerous lieu dits, village names, premier crus and grand crus to the desired "flavor profile." Burgundy will remain a benchmark until another region can plausibly claim to bring forth from its soil so many different faces of the same grape, so much heterogenous charm. Enjoyment of Burgundy is often described as being among the most sensual, corporeal, forms of wine enjoyment, but I think the opposite is also true. Burgundy exerts gravitational force on people unhappy with the black-and-white, with drinkers possessing enough intellectual curiosity to desire an understanding of how nature speaks to us through wine, why the secondary and tertiary notes of these subtle wines keep changing, why the margins of Burgundian character are so much more laden with expression than Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from elsewhere. There's a fortune to be spent and lifetime's worth of hairs to be split in attempting to answer these questions about Burgundy. We'd better get started....      

Regions

Wine people share a fetish for maps. I love maps. That said, if you are knee-deep in a website like this one, you probably know where Tuscany is, and what it looks like. So we’ve decided to have fun with it, to share our “mental maps” and various drawings of the places our wines come from instead of the typical topographic/appellation-laden cartography that graces the pages of many a fine importer’s website.

This is a leap for us. It feels weird. Our instinct was to bog down in the details: we are wine nerds, too. Help us out by cutting a little slack at first: this part of the site will grow and change, and I dream of it becoming a beautiful little corner populated with imagery from your minds as well as ours. Which leads to my other point. Send us your renderings of favorite wine lands in Europe. We’ll post them (as appropriate to our product catalog) and I think will grow a more compelling view of where wine comes from in the process.

In summary: need a detailed map? Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson have you covered, or even Michelin. Need a weird, bordering-on inept sketch of what it feels like to be on the ground in these vineyards to us, including rough approximations of where our farms are landed? Perfect! Here you go.

Piemonte

Can arguably the greatest of all Italian wine regions also be somewhat undiscovered by tourists? We are there in the off-season. During the heady days of harvest and fresh white truffle season our producers are far too busy.

Incredible landscapes, architecture, food that is distinct and still incredibly Italian: the place is amazing. The history is perhaps Italy’s most fascinating, the culinary history even more compelling. Elements from at least three modern nations are knit into its fabric.

Border regions, like wines made at the threshold of where grapes are a viable crop, these are the most interesting. It’s not just diversity at the margins, it’s cross-pollination and creation, the possibility of something completely new.

An obsession with the Italian Piedmont begins with its depth. There are an overwhelming number of outstanding producers, legendary and obscure, making wines to take home and drink right away or in a decade on the perfect day. After multiple visits and decades as a fan from afar we still find new grapes in the Piedmont that are compelling in new ways.  And there are of course margins to the Piedmont, areas away from Alba that for centuries have made valid, authentic expressions of Piedmontese wine.

In some ways Piedmont itself isenough for a lifetime, if it wasn’t attached to 19 other fascinating regions to dream about.

Tuscany

It is the heart of Italy. It looks so Italian. That’s a dumb thing to write, but I think it’s also kinda undeniable. I may be one of a billion people dreaming of a future in a house on a remote Tuscan hillside, surrounded by silver-green olives and wild, gnarled old bush vines. Tomatoes and persimmons, Sangiovese and cinta Senese pigs, maybe a rooster or two….

Anyway, where were we? It just stays so perfect. Centuries of tourism, (intra and inter)national conflicts, changes in climate, economy, society: after all this Tuscany looks like you should ditch everything and paint it.

Safer than biking through it, narrow roads that dip and climb and bend with the topography, fearless jet-fueled truck drivers that blur past by at a distance of centimeter, thumping bursts of adrenaline that will get you to your destination… but unscathed?

It is still an adventure, at the center of the universe and wild, farmland and the heart of western civilization in a tangle. I love it, I totally buy into it 100%. This is a place for me. The real food of the region when you find it is solid and refined, seemingly simple things like beans or beef elevated to a pure form, the kind of unflashy food that doesn’t read well but that your body totally craves after an encounter. The elevation of the basic to profound through centuries of thought and diligence. Taking nature and honing a thing until it becomes the ideal. Sangiovese is the same. In some fields in Chianti worked by the right hands it has an undeniable resonance. It resists adjectives, a pure form that causes fumbling use of descriptors like classic or archetype as futile place holders.

The thing I like about the best Tuscan wines (and all other great wines) is that whether you and I like them makes no difference. They exist outside of our petty observations.

Puglia

It hooked into my heart pretty quickly. Puglia resonated and within a day I felt affinity for all of it. I like it more because it is flawed, scrappy and proud and ugly. The baroque hillside town of Mottola, ringed and woven with stone roads worn smooth. Exotic, rustic, Alberobello, an otherworldly architectural wonderland. Even Foggia, a dirty anarchic small agricultural metropolis. The energy of the place is amazing, its blatant fertility. It reminds me of why I feel at home in the heart of the American south.

Arriving from the north Puglia is at first flat and green, verdant blankets with dark brown earth underneath and a hilly rocky coastline. Olive trees appear, then stones, then stonewalls, then huts, until you are lost in a blanket of vines and trees. The land rolls, big bland tourist cities pop up in coves and disappear quickly enough. Ruined stone buildings are everywhere, places to stay…. Antennae jut from a crest of piled up buildings, a very third-world skyline. Hidden in the jumble there is an ornate church and beautifully ruined sprawling aristocratic home, incongruous, unexpected. Orange groves, clusters of modern industrial ugliness and unfortunate abandoned construction, all saved by the beautiful light. Puglia has lots of stray dogs. There is an irresistible quality to the region. It is a place on earth where you can feel more alive just being there.

500-year-old olive trees. I think we do not value this enough. Farmers in Puglia agree, feel out-of-step with our low-cost at-all-costs world. But really a lot of them persist, willing to make a pure, beautiful, and timeless thing in spite of little-to-no economic reward. The great old bush vine Primitivo and oil from an ancient tree is this region’s unparalleled contribution to life on earth. We will one day create a different name and a different category which untethers these foods from their bland commercial equivalents, cheap industrial facsimilies also called wine and olive oil. There is no equivalence, and the imposters only deplete the value of the authentic fruits of nature.

A linguistic separation could elevate esteem for the work of Puglia’s real long-term residents, standing mute and gnarled and imposing across hearteningly vast stretches of Puglia. These fields of old vines recede, yield to machines and wires and half-thoughts of buildings. Puglia is vast and fertile, and decades of neglect can’t kill it. I think we will turn the corner to appreciation of its unique virtue and greatness very soon.

Veneto

Truthfully, I’ve yet to get a handle on the Veneto. I’ve been there, kicked around, even bought some wine. I have indelible memories. Numbingly cold snaking stone alleys of Venice, wandering long past midnight to rid myself of jet lag and excess calories, wondering what small clusters of Venetians retreating along separate paths could be discussing as they faded away in an eerie watery maze. Late winter snow on low mountain roads, frigid air from the Dolomites stinging my ears, cotton white clouds rolling over black, sheer stone cliff faces dimly outlined by moonlight. Lime green pastures approaching the Colli Eugenei. It’s a place for which I’m still building framework, context.

The Veneto makes more wine than any other region of Italy. And by extension, most countries. Sneakily. Not every year, Puglia and Sicily make it sporting. Everything exists in the Veneto: plenty of the very bad, also many of Italy’s absolute best. Industrial farming for junk wine, and the small, special, distinct and memorable wine that makes Italy compelling. Several of Italy’s most vocal and well-respected natural wine advocates make wine in the Veneto. True as well for the largest co-ops and a handful of staggeringly enormous privately held wine producing entities.

Veneto is a big and diverse region, meaning terrain suitable for scads of grapes varieties can be found. Along its southern border, the Po valley is remarkably flat and looks unpromising for wine… except for little clusters of volcanic hills like the colli Euganei. At least three mountain ranges cover a third of the region. To the far east, capital city Venice is surrounded by lagoons, swamps, ponds, coastal delta. Not a surprise that basically every type of wine you can imagine is made, and usually made well, in the Veneto. Rich reds (Amarone, the Bordeaux blends of the colli Euganei), light reds (Bardolino, Valpolicella), every conceivable style of white (Soave, Lugana, Bianco di Custoza), funky tasty pink wines (Marzemino), viscous dessert bottles (recioto, passito).

That barely scratches it. It’s a lot to take in. You’ll have to travel there, multiple visits. You’ll have to venture from the oenotecas of Verona and crowded restaurants of Venice to explore high hillside fields in the shadow of mountains, cool steep locations growing Glera for Prosecco. You’ll need to do some homework. It’s a big dizzying pile of wine and you only get one liver: consult a reliable guide! And have fun. The Veneto was its own kingdom for more than a millennia. It resists homogenization admirably, and stands out as an essentially Italian, yet fiercely local and clearly defined part of the nation.

ALTO ADIGE

Trentino-Alto Adige is a fabrication, an awkward collision of two areas (Trentino to the south, Alto Adige to the north) with completely different cultures and histories.

Alto Adige produces barely 1% of the nation’s wine, but it bottles the highest percentage of DOC wine in Italy. These are often mountain wines, benefiting from cool temperatures and dizzyingly-sloped vineyard sites. One look at the terraced low mountains surrounding Merano, Appiano, or Terlano and
a wine grower can see the region has potential to make really exceptional wine. Words like precise, expressive, and well- balanced are appropriate to describe the region’s best wines.

Within the overall appellation of Alto Adige there
are seven sub zones, areas that produce wines of varying characteristics but generally above-average quality. The most famous of these sub zones is called Santa Maddalena.Traditionally made from Schiava, Santa Maddalena’s reds may also contain up to 15% of Pinot Noir or Lagrein. Santa Maddalena accounts for about 5% of Alto Adige’s production today. For much of the 20th century, the Alto Adige’s best growers looked north for export markets, a place where they found appreciation for the light
and aromatic wine style that accentuates the strengths of their terroir. For this reason, the wines of the region are not well- known in the U.S., a contributing factor to the relatively low cost of decent Santa Maddalena.

The Saar, Germany

The Saar is a small valley of a river that is essentially a tributary of the Mosel River in southwestern Germany. The region has been in the shadow of the much larger Mosel wine growing area for much of its history. The Saar’s wines are notably different, sometimes brighter and more mineral. The area has several truly great and justifiably revered sites for Riesling cultivation. In short the Saar deserves more respect than it currently gets, and certainly doesn’t deserve to be simply lumped into the Mosel: it is a distinct and special place.

france

Languedoc

What does Languedoc mean? It’s the largest vineyard in the world. How can something so large possibly have an identity? For the Languedoc, the heart of this struggle is to extricate a positive identity based on real potential (and achievement) from a banal, workmanlike past. Languedoc today is (in terms of regional “brand”) not too far removed from the commercial position and reputation of Chianti at the end of the 20th century.  

As one of France's most prolific wine regions, the Languedoc has experienced the pitfalls of overproduction, low quality and subsequent sinking brand value. Despite this, by the end of last century the region’s standards and reputation were ascendant. Talented farmers had signaled the way forward for Languedoc. In a region blessed with fertile soil and close-to-ideal growing conditions for grapevines, it is imperative to plant in rockier sites, with elevation, away from flat, machine-harvestable plains. Languedoc has fantastic terroir. With care and attention, meticulous growers are shining a spotlight on the region’s truly special places. 

Warm, arid and sunny. The Languedoc-Rousillon is a wide swath of land along the southern coast of France, from Spain to the Rhone River at Arles. There are similarities between this region and eastern neighbors Provence and the southern Rhone. It’s an easy place to grow grapes, and there are many people doing so, winemakers as well as fruit growers selling off their harvest in bulk to the area’s large co-ops and negociants. The hills bordering the Languedoc protect it from the extremes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic climate, therefore much of the vast Languedoc enjoys a micro-climate particularly suitable for making quality wine. The bulk of the cultivation is on a flat plain facing the Mediterranean, but the best vineyards are higher on the cooler plateaus and foothills of the Pyrenees. The landscape is full of low bushes and wild herbs called garrigue, wild scrubland growth which characterizes the wines of the Mediterranean. There is an earthiness and wildness in the naturally-made wines of the Languedoc-Rousillon, and garrigue, described as a potpourri of wild lavender, rosemary and thyme, plays a crucial role. 

The Languedoc's coastline along the Mediterranean Sea is a stretch of about 120 miles, viticulturally extending inland about 50 miles at most. The growing areas of this region are divided into a number of appellations, the most famous being Coteaux du Languedoc, Corbières, Minervois and St-Chinian. Besides these areas, which produce mainly red wine often at great bargain prices, there's the town of Limoux, which makes a delicious sparkling wine from the native Mauzac grape, called Blanquette di Limoux. 

Speaking generally, the Langedoc’s terroir is shaped by being sandwiched between mountains and sea. Summers are warm and dry. Weather in autumn is turbulent. Wind is a constant, called le Mistral, Tramontane, le Cers, le Marin, depending on where you go. Generally it is drying, but the wind also introduces sea mist to vineyards.  

Many grapes are planted but Syrah, Mourvedre, Grenache, Carignan, and Cinsault are the ubiquitous and iconic ones. Cabernet, Merlot, and Pinot Noir (in cooler areas) are prominent in vin de pays wines. Red overshadows white in in terms of volume of production. Chardonnay, Viognier, Mauzac, Chenin, Colombard are common. 

The Loire

Are the disconnected vine growing areas that roughly follow the path of the Loire River from its source in Ardeche to its endpoint in the Atlantic in any way a "wine region?" It's a valid question. Cultural and culinary bonds stretch between the disparate appellations of the Loire, uniting communities that distance might otherwise keep separate. Cultural forces make the Loire into a region with a common purpose, and a shared story to tell. Its growers may toil apart in divergent terroir, but the prevailing douceur, the sweetness to life along France's greatest river unites vignerons of the Loire. They live in the garden of France, and their life's work adds to the abundance of this land. As the wide, slow Loire flows past innumerable Renaissance chateaux, monastaries, pretty churches and historic towns with roots in the wine trade, the details may change, but let's face it: life is good, and you are without a doubt in the Loire.

Let's pretend you were able to travel back in time a couple of decades to a visit an assortment of typical American wine shops. The purpose of your trip: to bring Loire wines back with you, to the future. The yield from this time travel would be shockingly paltry. (certainly not worth the investment and effort necessary to convert your Delorean.) And now you're stuck driving that silly-looking car to work, to the grocery store....ed. In the recent past, the wines of famous wine-growing regions of the Loire were present in the U.S. mostly in the form of bottles from large-scale negociant shippers. They were low-ish price-point bottlings that only hinted at the character of the regions whose recognizable names on their labels pushed sales. In most instances these bulk wines sold short the quality possible from places like Vouvray, Chinon, and Sancerre. Wines from lesser-known but often still very deserving AOCs along the Loire simply did not exist in American stores at that time.

By the 1980's a revolution in quality was well underway in the Loire, and a small group of American wine importers were struggling to bring higher-quality (but generally lower-yield) fruits of that revolution to our stores. Today a good specialty wine shop can fill its shelves entirely with wines from the Loire, bottlings from a diverse collection of small farmers making red, white, rose and sparkling wines in every conceivable style. Across its 50+ appellations and 200,000 acres of vines, the Loire now offers perhaps the finest Chenin Blanc, Cabernet Franc, and Sauvignon Blanc in the world. Add to that list of credentials estimable versions of Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon (to name but a few) and the Loire begins to sound like what it is, a hotbed of vinous innovation and achievement, maybe the most exciting wine-growing region in the world. It is a place on the leading edge of winemaking thought in France, whose growers paradoxically have gotten to the forefront by taking a step back from "modern" equipment and chemical-intensive methods practiced in large-scale commecrical viticulture. They are refocusing the image of Loire wine around wines that can be very low-tech, the result of old school, honest farming and traditional wine making, practices that are completely woven into the region's storied past, an era when the area was known as a supplier of great wine to the restaurants of Paris and beyond. These are the wines that create lifelong converts to the greatness of the Loire.  

The Nantais is Muscadet country. On the edge of the Atlantic, surrounding the city of Nantes in a grand arc to the south are vineyards primarily used for the production of Muscadet, a dry white made of the Melon de Bourgogne grape. The best examples of Muscadet are bottled directly off the fine lees, or dead yeast cells that settle to the bottom of tanks after alcoholic fermentation. The sur lie bottling process creates texture, depth and occasionally a faint carbonic fizz in wines that otherwise could be a touch neutral in character. The process also ensures minimal handling of this easily-damaged type of white wine. Across France, Muscadet is the traditional accompanyment to mussels or oysters.

While Anjou-Saumur makes wines of every color and almost every style, it is more than anything else a region of great Chenin Blanc. Coteaux du Layon, Bonnezeaux, Quarts de Chaume and the singular, amazing dry whites of Savennieres have kept this ancient royal province at the center of exceptional Chenin Blanc production in France, only truly rivalled by neighboring Touraine. Very good reds are made here, too, particularly in Saumur and Saumur-Champigny, a western region whose structured reds are generally a notch above the typical fresh-and-fruity Anjou Rouge.  

The Touraine is the heart of the Loire. The varietals most central to the character and reputation of the Loire find their greatest range and quality of expression here. Cabernet Franc rarely exceeds in quality the top bottlings of growers in the Chinon, Bourgueil and St. Nicolas de Bourgueil appellations along the region's western boundary. To the east, the climate cools and Chenin Blanc dominates. To many wine lovers Vouvray is Chenin Blanc. The grape may be grown around the world, but the aromas of quince, honey and flowers that are found in many great Vouvrays create the archetype for Chenin. Across the river from Vouvray sits Montlouis, a region whose nervy, mineral-laden Chenins rest for now in the shadow of Vouvray but show the capacity to eclipse the wines of their neighbor-rival should Vouvray lose the plot. Away from these centers of quality, many, many cases of simple Sauvignon Blanc and other varietally-correct but generally innocuous red and white wine are also made in the Touraine.   

In the upper Loire, to the easternmost extreme at which exceptional wine is made in the region, lie the appellations of Sancerre and Pouilly Fume. Like Vouvray and Montlouis, the two appellations are separated by the Loire, and while Pouilly-sur-Loire may be faintly behind its neighbor in terms of popularity, both areas are capable of making Sauvignon Blanc of the absolute highest quality. Sancerre has a particularly large amount of Kimmeridgean limestone and marl in its soils, great geology if you are a white wine maker as these soils impart distinct and abundant mineral character in the finished wines. Pinot Noir does well in these soils, too, hence its supporting role in Sancerre (in the 19th century Pinot was of more primary importance in the fields of Sancerre.) For the quality and bargain conscious, the vineyards of "satellite" appellations Quincy and Menetou-Salon often offer very enjoyable Sauvignon and Pinot Noir at a fraction of Sancerre/Pouilly Fume prices.