Buying wine in France

Today we went to a wine merchant to but some wine to take back to Britain with us. Buying wine in France poses a few dilemmas for us – all wine in France is much less expensive than in the UK because there is far less tax, we are staying in a wine growing region where we could taste wines at the chateaus on the vineyards, our car can accommodate about 100 bottles, but what wine should we buy that will take best advantage of our situation?

When we came to France two years ago we came equipped with extensive wine gazetteers with virtually all the major vineyards marked on them and some extensive volumes describing French wines. However when we came to use them we found that we couldn’t integrate the information in them with our vacation, there was a completely overwhelming amount of information. We could visit a vineyard each morning and afternoon and taste their wine but that would only be only two wines a day and wouldn’t leave any time to have a holiday. We noted the wines that we enjoyed at restaurants and asked them where they sourced those but they were usually only obtainable direct from small vineyards that were some distance from where we were staying. We then went to a wine merchant and asked their opinion about wines we might like but we found it very difficult to describe the wines that we like using our rudimentary French and their much more comprehensive English because the vocabulary used for describing wines is so specialised. We like the Alsace Gewurztraminer wine and have tasted a particular, and rather uncommon, variety that was dry with a pleasant peppery element to its flavour – but trying to convey that in hybrid French-English conversations proved unproductive. We did buy a quantity of wine from that merchant without the opportunity to taste it but we have been disappointed by quite a number of our purchases. In fact many of the wines that we have enjoyed most from that trip were bought from little supermarkets to drink whilst we were in France.

On this trip we are following a different method that appears to be working well. We happened across a wine merchant in the hilltop village of Montcuq, a little West of Cahors, mainly because they were still open for business at 12.30 on a Sunday after the market. The proprietor seems very knowledgeable about his stock and does speak very good English including many wine tasting terms so that has been very helpful (Vins et Saveurs on the main street if ever you are there). We have then asked him to suggest examples in his stock of grape types or regional varieties that we like and we have been drinking these with our evening meals. We have now identified a few wines that we really like and have bought larger quantities to take back with us.

The region that we are staying in produces almost exclusively red wine, the very dark, almost black, vin nobile de Cahors. This is a very robust wine with a lot of tannins which isn’t really to our taste or, more pertinently, to our migraine-precipitating sensors. This means that we are looking outside the region for the white wines that we might like. On our last visit we developed a liking for Saint Véran after reading about it in Susan Loomis’s excellent Rue Tartin book. It is made from the chardonnay grape grown in the Bourgogne region close to Burgundy and produces a fruity wine with a buttery finish on the palate. The Montcuq wine merchant stocks a very good version of this made by J J Vincent at the Château de Fuissé. Another wine that he has provided us with we would never have found if left to our own devices. It is a single grape Viognier wine that has just started production so it has not passed any accreditation and remains in the Vin de Pays classification.