France is at its best when it manages to combine this old school adherence to tradition and standards with open-mindedness and energy. I thought of this a few weeks ago when Anne-Victoire Monrozier, aka Miss Vicky, stormed our shores with bottles of her father’s fresh, elegant Fleurie in hand.

I enjoyed the wine, but what really struck me was her aptitude for “le marketing” — not something that comes easily to a lot of smaller French winemakers. She traveled from Walla to Napa to the Lower East Side to promote the wine and deployed a truly impressive social media blitz. (Plus come on, how cute is this label?)

So Miss Vicky, I salute your embodiment of all my favorite French traits–and hope more and more of your compatriots follow your lead.

Santé!

Most of us are probably familiar with Chapoutier from his great value Belleruche Côtes-du-Rhône, both red and white. Usually available for around $10-$12, these are some of the best bang-for-your-buck wines available on the market. You could do worse than to stock up on a few bottles of these for your summer BBQ needs. Chapoutier makes a staggeringly wide variety of wines from the Rhône, Provence, and Languedoc-Roussillon — with some side projects in Australia and Portugal for good measure — and somehow manages to keep the overall quality level high. (Chapoutier might attribute this success, at least in part, to his commitment to biodynamic winemaking.) Chapoutier seems like a bit of a live wire, and I love reading interviews with him.

I’ve had many of Chapoutier’s wines over the years, and tonight Paul and I cracked open this Les Vignes de Bila-Haut. This wine hails from the Roussillon, the hot, sun-drenched region along France’s eastern border with Spain that produces big, ripe wines. This wine is a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and Carignan, all grapes that flourish in the heat. The wine is inky, lip-staining purple, and the aromas are deep, dark, and earthy: blackberries,cocoa, smoke, and dried thyme. On the palate, the Carignan is a little too front-and-center for me: traditionally a low-quality variety used for bulk wines, Carignan can produce good wines when it comes from old vines, as it does here. But even when Carignan rises to the occasion, it still has this rough, rustic edge to it that reminds me of the mediocre, cheap Côtes-du-Rhône that I used to drink way too much of in my misspent youth, to hangover-inducing effect.

Nonetheless, this is really enjoyable wine for a mere $14. On his site, Chapoutier recommends drinking the wine with a “nice piece of beef” or grilled meat, which we interpreted to mean bacon cheeseburgers from the grill. It was a pretty fortuitous match. I think Michel would approve.

Not since my brother Lee gave me a ticket to the Beastie Boys Hello Nasty show at MSG (3 rows in front of Mike D’s parents, FYI) has so much awesomeness fallen in my lap. This is a 1997 La Landonne Côte Rôtie from Etienne Guigal, one of the greatest wines of the northern Rhône, my hands-down favorite wine region. It’s 100% Syrah and can stand up to many, many years in the cellar. It’s also far north of my usual price range, even when I’m feeling spendy: the going rate for this guy is about $400.

These wines are terrific with deep, earthy, gamey flavors, and in a perfect world I would have whipped up a salmis of squab or venison sausage, but this is not a perfect world and instead we threw some delicious rib eyes on the grill. We decanted the wine 90 minutes before drinking to separate it from its sediment and to open it up a bit. (Again, in a perfect world, this probably should have been closer to 2-3 hours, but the wine, and my guests, were forgiving.)

The wine. Well, it started off on a distinctly musty, grandmother’s basement/Miss Havisham note that was actually much more pleasant than it sounds. Slowly, more conventionally attractive aromas and flavors came to the fore: black cherry, coffee, mocha. The texture was seductive and velvety, the finish was almost sweet. Then, something funny happened. All of the wine’s distinct elements – tannins, alcohol, fruit, acidity — somehow became one, like old friends who have known each other so long they finish each other’s sentences. Without getting too Zen about it, the wine didn’t taste or smell like anything except…itself. It had its own unique scent, like the smell of your 6th grade homeroom or your first bad boyfriend.

Thankfully, the wine was much, much better than 6th grade or bad boyfriends. Unlike both of those destabilizing experiences, the La Landonne is deeply reassuring. Somewhere in the world, this wine will have you know, people still care about quality, longevity, and doing things correctly — without sacrificing excitement. Perfectly balanced and harmonious, the La Landonne still offered an intensity and richness that showier wines aspire to, but rarely attain.

At the end of the meal, Gary stuck his nose into the empty decanter. “I’m so sorry it’s gone!” Me too, Gary. Me too.

Many of these wines are, like sherry, made with deliberate oxidation. That means the winemaker intentionally, and very carefully, exposes them to oxygen during the winemaking/aging process. (Too much oxygen is usually the enemy of wine–think of how a cut apple browns when it’s exposed to air and you get the idea.) But if you carefully manage the wine’s exposure to oxygen, you get a nutty, tangy, almost salty quality to them. The fanciest and most expensive Jura wine from the Savagnin grape is called vin jaune — literally, “yellow wine.” From reputation, I know that these wines are incredibly long-lived and oddly spicy. Sadly, I have never had the opportunity to try one (although if anyone out there has a bottle in their cellar they’d like to share, don’t be afraid to drop me a line). Happily, though, I did have a chance to try this Côtes du Jura Les Chassagnes Ouillé ($28) from Phiippe Bornard, a biodynamic producer. A few things to know about this wine before you dig in: first, it has this very cool wax seal, which you can easily cut through with the little knife attachment on your corkscrew.

Second, the wine is not crystal clear. There’s definitely some cloudiness, here but it’s nothing to worry about — it’s typical of the wine style and this producer’s non-interventionist wine making approach.

The wine itself is tangy and saline, like the aftertaste of spending the day at the beach. There’s some citrus and stone fruit and honey here too, but it’s really the sherry-like twanginess that stays with you. It’s a terrific match for cheeses, particularly one of its mountain compatriots, such as Comté, or an aged Gouda.

It was kind of a tale of two cities. Paris had a few highlights — this very simple fig and mozzarella salad at Autour d’un Verre, a little wine bar in the 9th arrondisement, was awesome. The mozzarella was insanely creamy (I have a theory it was actually burrata, which is mozzarella enhanced — as if it needed any help – by cream in the center), the figs were perfect, and a drizzle of olive oil brought the whole thing together.

The restaurant itself, however, was kind of my worst nightmare. The crowd was somehow hipster-y and yet uncool – as if they had all just stepped off a Lucky magazine photo shoot.  The tables were lined up tightly against both walls and you couldn’t help but jostle your neighbor. Between that and the dingy yellow lighting, it felt like dining on the R Train at rush hour.

Despite the “wine bar” tag, the waiter was absolutely zero help when I asked him to compare and contrast two bottles on the list. He said the equivalent of “they’re both fine” and left it at that. I ended up going with La Treille Muscate, from Corbières in the Languedoc, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

It delivered a nice smoky, herbal, blackberry kick, and for about $30, the price was right. Our mains were fine, we both ordered a kind of Scandanavian meatball concoction. OK, yeah, I know, so that was kind of a misorder on our part, but it was either that, fish in creamy sauce — my nemesis — or confit de canard, and at that point we were thoroughly duck-ed out. One of the few other upsides of the place was that we bonded a bit with our neighbors about the surly waiter. Nonetheless, we left feeling harried and unsatisfied.

Bandol, on the other hand, was dreamy. We stayed Les Quatres Saisons, this bed & breakfast near Le Castellet, a slightly Disneyfied fortified medieval village a few minutes away from Bandol. The Web site truly does not do it justice — this is the first time I’ve ever been to  a hotel that looked much more beautiful in person than it did online. Our little duplex suite, which had a spacious deck looking out onto the vineyards of Bandol, was beyond charming, and the setting was incredibly peaceful.

However, the highlight of staying at Les Quatres Saisons was the nightly dinner 3-course dinner. No choices, just whatever happened to look good that day at the market. Always a gamble, but luckily, the market highlights during our stay included pretty mainstream selections — no snails or liver or sea urchin. There were some welcome stylish touches — a very cool “tapas de volaille” starter that was a variation on a theme of poultry: smoked duck over spicy couscous, a tiny, zesty chicken wing, duck sausage over deliciously olive oil drenched vegetables, a chicken and duck terrine with a chunk of foie gras in the center — but nothing was overworked. Desserts were exceptional, and I managed to get a shot of Paul’s moelleux au chocolat before he devoured it.

Extra props to Didier and Patrice for making such an effort with the food when, as you can see from the lead photo of this post, they really could have phoned it in. The could have relied on the beautiful setting to justify the 40-euro per person price tag and left it at that. Instead, they put forth a million elegant little touches — the very aromatherapeutic logs of pine burning in their outdoor oven, the apéritif of local vin d’orange (orange-scented fortified wine) and Muscat to open the meal — that made the dinners so memorable. My dream for my 40th birthday is come back here with Paul and a few of our besties. Presumably at that point I’ll have even less tolerance for BS, and Didier and Patrice’s no-fuss elegance will be that much more welcome.

11 or under: mediocre wines–Three faults make a wine mediocre: a lack of concentration, a lack of maturity, or a lack of balance.

from 11.5 to 13: correct wines–Correct wines are technically sound, without faults, and have adequate concentration and balance. They provide a minimum of pleasure upon tasting.

from 13.5 to 15: good wines–Wines that comes from a well-executed vinification, along with a good terroir, a high-quality grape variety, and usually from good vintage. They are pleasant to drink.

From 15.5 to 17: great wines–Great wines are for special occasions. Their personality comes from a great match of terroir, grape varietal, vinification technique, vintage, and winemaker.

From 17.5 to 19.5: exceptional wines–With their strong personality, exceptional wines are distinguished by their elegance, their complexity, and their strength. Only a few of these wines appear each year, and only in great vintages.

20: dream wines–Excellence itself. These are wines that one comes across but rarely. They provide an unparalleled expression of terroir. They are the ultimate benchmarks of quality for their complexity and their elegance. They are distinguished by their ability to age.

What I love about this system is its rigor and its emphasis on complexity, balance, and terroir. In my classes, a lot of times people will ask me “what makes a wine great?” It’s one of the best questions I get, and these descriptions really get at some answers. First, complexity — a great wine (or even a very good one) should be about more than one thing. If it just smells like, say, strawberries, and tastes the same, it might be a decent wine, but not much more than that. However, if it smells like strawberries, cherries, earth, and maybe a little bit like black pepper, and then tastes like all of those things, plus some licorice too…well, then, we’re getting somewhere. Then, balance. You could have a wine that tastes and smells like all those things, but if the wine is out of balance, then you won’t be able to enjoy those aromas or flavors because the acidity or the alcohol or tannins will stick out like a sore thumb. Next is terroir. Strictly speaking, terroir is the happy marriage between a climate, soil, and grape that are made from each other. It’s tough to explain what terroir tastes like, but the best word I can think of is “specificity.” So back to the strawberries–the wine won’t just taste like any old strawberries, but those really ripe strawberries you got from the green market that one time, and the cherries remind you of the sour cherry jam your friend brought you back from Michigan, and the licorice is like that crazy-intense Swedish licorice. I know that sounds a little out there, but it’s amazing to see even the most analytical, taciturn people in my classes come up with these kind of associations after a little bit of prodding. (And, OK, after a glass of wine.) The final piece of the puzzle is aging. So a wine that today tastes like strawberries ten years from now might taste like some incredible combination of leather and mushrooms and smoke and burning leaves…I know, I know, not things you usually think of in wine, or things that sounds particularly appealing, but you’ll have to trust me on this one. I rarely taste wines with a lot of age on them, although we did get to try one in Bandol. More on that in my next post.

I’ve visited a bunch of wine regions (Alsace, Bordeaux, Loire, Sonoma, Napa, and, of course, Long Island) but I’ve never had the opportunity to check out a winery during harvest. I’m not sure what to expect, beyond lots of frenetic activity and harried-looking winemakers. (I’m also having visions of being stuck behind poky, grape-laden trucks on dusty, narrow country roads, but as my husband does the driving, I’m going to let him stress about that.) I’ve already emailed a few of the vineyards I’d like to visit — more on those in an upcoming post — asking if I need to make an appointment in advance as it will be such a busy time of year.  Many wineries in France, which aren’t as tourist-friendly as those in the US, require you to make a reservation, and I think it’s always a good idea to call ahead if you’re visiting a winery — you can ask about special events and find out what time of day is least crowded. (Word to the wise: wherever you are, do everything you can to avoid visiting a vineyard on a summer Saturday afternoon. )

I’ve already received some kind responses, including from one courtly winemaker (seriously — his dad is a Count) who thanked me for my “délicatesse.” Say what you want about the French, they certainly have a way with words…and wine, of course. Stay tuned for more on my vineyard trip planning, including tips to help you get more out of your own wine travels.