Posts Tagged :

wine journey

640 640 MAHA KIMBERLY AKHTAR

Travelling Through the Loire Valley

Many years ago, driving through the Loire Valley, I was astonished at how many gorgeous buildings seem to appear out of nowhere…the Cathédrale de Chartres was one such building that suddenly appeared as I rounded a bend, towering regally above the tall field of wheat. Another such building appeared on the right bank of the Maine River flowing through the town of Angers as I drove slowly, one eye on a map and the other on careening scooters, trying to find my hotel.

I stopped and got out, staring up in awe at the ecclesiastical grandeur of the Hôpital Saint Jean d’Angers, inside which was the Hôtel-Dieu d’Angers, the town’s infirmary founded in the year 1153 by Etienne de Marsay, Henry II’s treasurer. Henry Plantagenêt, then King of England and Duke of Anjou, commissioned the hospital as atonement for his murder of Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury.

What does this have to do with wine, you may ask?

Well, where medieval healers were concerned, wine was always present. Wine was used for medicinal purposes, which is why so many vineyards were planted around the various Hôtels-Dieu around France during the Middle Ages.

As such, a few years after the Hôpital Saint Jean d’Angers was built and functioning, the monks who ran it established vineyards on the left bank of the Loire and that was the beginning of the Château de Bois-Brinçon in a hamlet known as Blaison-Saint-Sulpice.

The year was 1219, making the vineyard one of the oldest in the Loire Valley if not the oldest.

Six centuries later, as the power of the Church and aristocracy declined, and after the French Revolution of 1789, the property was sold off to the bourgeoisie and came into the hands of the  Cailleau Family in which it remains today.

Xavier Cailleau is the current owner and winemaker who took over from his father in 1991.

“At the beginning, it was a real challenge to return to winemaking and the desire to make wines with a terroir identity,” Xavier acknowledges. “It was a steady evolution, first to organics, then biodynamics. And the vines responded and the grapes began to offer the true face of the soil.”

The wines of Bois-Brinçon are vinified by terroir. “The Anjou region is a mosaic of very varied and rich terroirs,” Xavier explains. “Being at the junction of the Armorican Massif and the Paris Basin, the Bois-Brinçon vineyards offer a rare diversity of soils and landscapes spread over six communes and eight different terroirs.”

Intervention in the cellar is minimal. “We accompany the wines without useless and traumatic interventions,” Xavier says, “like a parent who sees his children grow up and accompanies them so they take the right path.”

I first tasted the wines of Bois-Brinçon at a small bistro not far from Domaine, but I wasn’t a “wine person” back then…just a tourist but they stayed with me.

Five years ago, at a Christmas lunch with two other sommeliers, one of whom brought a bottle of “Les Saules de Montbenault,” one of their cuvées, I was blown away: the chenin blanc was laser sharp and sang from whence it came. And the red…the cabernet franc could not have come from anywhere, but this particular corner of Anjou.

 

1024 510 MAHA KIMBERLY AKHTAR

Château Musar: Singular & Special

The wines of Château Musar are very special to me for several reasons:

Firstly, due to heritage, I am very proud of this wine, a Middle Eastern wine made in a region that has been producing wine since classical times, one that has become the obsession of sommeliers and professionals around the globe, people whose eyes light up when you mention the wine, happy to wax poetic about the wine and why it’s so special.

Secondly, Musar and the Hochars are family. Growing up, there was always a bottle of Musar on the dining table, especially at dinner or Sunday lunch. Additionally, my uncle, the then Lebanese ambassador to the UK, served the wine with great pride at every cocktail and dinner party at the embassy or the residence, telling everyone who would listen about this great Lebanese wine made by his even greater friend, Serge.

And Serge Hochar was indeed great. When he passed away in a tragic swimming accident six years ago, the wine world lost a dynamic, passionate man who brought Musar out of the shadows of the Bekaa Valley and into the conscience of wine professionals in the west, but the family lost a father, a husband, an uncle…a man who loved life and his wine.

I was born in Beirut shortly before the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975. My immediate family stayed on, but by 1982, the situation in Beirut had become ridiculously dangerous and as the bombs dropped and snipers manned the rooftops, I was sent off to boarding school in England. Around the same time, Serge sent his wife and sons to Europe…but he stayed. He was not going to abandon the winery in Ghazir, 25 miles up the coast from Beirut, nor his vineyards in the Bekaa that was by now swarming with Israelis, Palestinians and Syrians.

As his neighbourhood was razed to the ground, Serge sat quietly in an armchair and drank an entire bottle of Musar. “Everytime a bomb hit, I would take a sip,” I heard him say. “Needless to say, I drank the whole bottle pretty quickly!”

Musar made wine every year of the war (1975-1990), missing only one vintage. Those picking the grapes did so at night as rockets and bombs lit up the sky and the trucks carrying grapes took hours to make the short trip from the vineyards to the winery, the truck drivers risking their lives trying to evade the battlegrounds the various factions had carved out in Beirut and its environs.

The wines of Château Musar may not appeal to everyone: made from a combination of cabernet sauvignon, carignan and cinsault, the wines tell stories, they are “living beings” that corral the energy of an entire season in a place that was Serge’s home, and whilst he would never admit it, his spirit and personality.

 

644 794 MAHA KIMBERLY AKHTAR

The Beginning of my Wine Journey… with Anne-Claude Leflaive

About fifteen years ago, my life in New York as I knew it, ended. I had been the chief of staff to Dan Rather at CBS News and I assumed, incorrectly, that it would be easy to find myself another job. It wasn’t.

Disheartened, I decided to go back to Paris, where I grew up, in the hopes that perhaps I could reinvent myself there.

Once I settled back into the Parisian lifestyle, my now aged uncle suggested that perhaps I study wine.

I’d always been around wine. It was a constant presence at lunches, dinners and copious amounts of it were drunk at Sunday lunch, which in my house, was a command performance for the entire family.

My aunt would spend Sunday mornings in the kitchen, usually yelling at the maid, twirling her wooden spoon like a weapon; and my poor uncle would hide downstairs in his cellar to keep out of her way. Mainly, though, he loved to walk up and down the old stone floors, looking at every bottle, doing a mental inventory of everything he had, whilst quietly indulging in a glass or two before lunch. “I had to taste the wine before serving it,” he would always say.

A big fan of Bordeaux, he’d been buying wine since the late ‘40s and as such, had some of the best vintages the region offered from the years after the Second World War and through the 70’s.

I still remember the lunch when I was allowed to have my first sip of wine. I don’t remember much apart from the sensation of red velvet going down my throat. Years later, when I understood and cared a bit more about wine, my uncle told that it was a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.

I took my uncle’s suggestion, but, much to his chagrin, decided to go to Burgundy. I signed up at the CFPPA, the main wine and agricultural institute in Beaune and found myself a small apartment.

Besides academia, my first practical assignment was at Domaine Leflaive. Before starting, I thought I would go over and walk around, take it all in, as it were.

There is a small restaurant on the property that offers flights of wines and I decided to treat myself. Sitting alone, I sipped the wines taking copious notes on my impressions.

Just then, the door opened and a woman walked in. She was dressed in a barbour jacket, muddy wellingtons, but had a gorgeous coral and white silk Hermes scarf billowing around her neck. She stopped in the bar area. “Bonjour,” she said to the staff.

She was the kind of woman whose presence was so magnetic that you couldn’t help but stare. My eyes widened as she walked over to me after one of the sommeliers whispered something in her ear, inclining his head towards the corner where I sat.

I immediately got to my feet, but she indicated I sit.

“Alors?” she said standing next to my table, her arms crossed. “What do you think of the wines?”

“Well…” I stuttered. “They’re…good, I mean, excellent.

“The nose on this Meursault…and the aromas of…” I continued falling all over myself.

I was in mid-sentence when she put her hand up, telling me to be quiet.

“I…”

“Mademoiselle,” she interrupted. “Please don’t analyze the wines. Just tell me if you liked them or not.”

“Yes, Madame,” I muttered.

“You enjoyed them?”

“Of course!” I said enthusiastically.

“Then,” she smiled, her face relaxing, her arms at her side, “I am glad. If you enjoyed the wines, then I have done my job.”

I sighed with relief as she turned dramatically on her heel and walked away.

Half way across, she stopped. “By the way, I’m your new boss…Anne-Claude Leflaive.”

And that was the first time I met one of the most influential women in the winemaking world. I went on to work at Leflaive for several months, learning so much from all of them, never forgetting that ultimately, wine is meant to be enjoyed, not dissected.