How to Shop for Wine in the South of France
This image of a field of lavender and all other wonderful photos in this article courtesy of Sheral Schowe.
See Part 1 of Clarice’s travel series: How I Learned to Bake French Bread in the South of France
One of the most fun things to do on a trip to Southern France is shop for wine. This visit my husband Howard, my friend Richard Perle, and I were lucky to be accompanied on this joyous task by Sheral Schowe, a wine educator from Park City, Utah, who is a certified French wine scholar and teacher at Wasatch Academy of Wine.
In my opinion, the lovely wines of the southern Rhone were long undervalued, though now more people are acquainted with some of the fine offerings of the region: Beaumes de Venise, Vacqueyras, Gigondas, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Rasteau, Cairanne, and Seguret.
But even if you’ve grown to appreciate these wines, you may not be as familiar with the wines actually consumed here in the summer. You won’t want to miss out should you visit or if you care to experience these at home in warm weather — so please, let me take a minute to tell you about them.
It gets quite hot here and people tend to eat lighter food in summer than they do elsewhere in France — lots of fruits and vegetables, cold soups, the famous salad nicoise, and goat cheeses. Wine, which complements these foods, is rosé. It’s not the rosé of my youth — a sweet, unpleasant plonk. Rather, it is a light wine, served chilled. There are basically two kinds of it produced here. Vat pressed is a light wine produced much as champagne is in that the grapes are lightly pressed and then the skin and seeds are separated out before fermentation. Gigondas produces this kind using cinsault and grenache grapes. The second type is saignee, which is treated more like a traditional red wine in that the stems and skins are also crushed before fermentation, but the resulting juice is bled off before the skins turn the wine red. Domaine du Gour de Chaulé makes this type.
There is a certain bottle with a very tapered neck called a “skittle” in which much, but not all, of this wine is sold.
Lovely article. We were in Normandy last year and for me, admittedly not much of a food-and-wine connoisseur, it was heaven. I don’t think it’s possible to imbibe badly there- just too much!
Here’s how I shop for wine in France:
1. Go to the grocery store. Any one will do.
2. Go to the wine department.
3. Buy wine where you can clearly see the locals have already taken a bottle or two of that brand off the shelf.
4. I do draw the line at pumping my wine into my own container (like gasoline), but I like the novelty of it.
5. Enjoy!
avoid supermarkets wines, we don’t know how they were stocked
the best is to buy it direct from the productors’s caves (less expensive), otherwise, there are special stores, where a connaisseur can advise you
Of course supermarket wines may be not the best, but if you compare with supermarket wine from other countries (Italy, for instance) the French supermarket wines are a lot better. Not that I dislike wine from Italy, they have very good ones too, but only comparing the “Supermarket” wine, French are the best in that one.
Why does the baloney persist about wine? Like anything, you tend to get what you pay for. The ludicrous poseurs, often but not always French, rarely survive a blind tasting but on they go, yadda yadda yadda, arrogant, ignorant and ludicrous.
The ‘best’ supermarkets everywhere in Europe rarely stock anything costlier than non-vintage and young vintages. Certainly, the wine receives nothing like the care Costco gives to its older vintages. You simply need to watch how the shelves are stocked in Europe to know how true that is — and to be sure that what you can’t see (shipment, warehousing) can hurt you. It usually doesn’t, though, since non-vintage wines neither need nor receive careful cellar treatment, especially the whites — just temperature control. And a bulk buyer, and sometimes a specialized shipper, will almost always undercut the vineyard price.
How to find the best buys in the most civilized environment, with a min. of attitude, if you find yourself in SW France? Head on S through the Pais Vasco, then on to La Rioja.
Yes, Dana. It’s great fun and you can find good wine at good prices almost everywhere there.
There is a typo in the final caption. It should read Domaine du Mourchon,
I lived near Avignon nearly 15 years ago. I’m no wine afficianado, but simply went along with the locals I knew there. I never bought wine in a bottle. We took jugs to big places(?) and filled up for a few francs (ah, those were the days) from big, gleaming tanks of some kind. Is this another instance of the-truck-drivers-know-the-best-places-to-eat story being bogus?
Jacobite,Had I had time I wanted to go to one of those big wine coops nearby where the growers bring their grapes which are tossed into a press and fermented in giant tanks to be sold in plastic jugs (dirt cheap ) for table wine. I’m sorry time didn’t permit.I know pictures of that would have been fun to see.
Brava, Mme. Feldman! Superb article.
Provence travel tip: Never buy any wine sold like gasoline or in a plastic box. The local coop wines are the French equivalent of Coke and just as sophisticated. We found a good correlation between price and quality, starting around EUR 20.
Alas! A long article too short. A lovely writer and a magnificent subject.