Sancerre

The reason I am motivated to write this is our arrival in Sancerre.

As you may remember Sancerre is the place we fell in love with back in 1994, when we happened upon it by chance. We had been driving on fairly boring roads and had decided to use a road that our map showed as a scenic route, just for a change. We came over the hill to see magically appear in front of us a mediaeval city perched on top of a conical hill, in the middle of the wide and picturesque Loire Valley. Every slope of the hill was covered in vines and we just had to go in to the town to discover more about it. That was the moment of discovering sauvignon blanc wine at its finest.

We currently live at a small commune (read village) just 14 km North of Sancerre. We have a lovely 17th century cottage, complete with exposed beams and an enormous slate roof. Chickens, ducks and sheep roam the gardens around us when we have breakfast on the lawn outside our kitchen. It is wonderful. The village has a butcher, baker, small supermarket and a number of wine merchants. That's all, if you don't count the church and the town hall.

Our first safari in the direction of Sancerre was with some trepidation,, as we knew our memories would be inaccurate and we were reluctant to shatter the memories and replace them with reality. Well, our first arrival was a huge disappointment. The town seemed to be a huge, overpopulated, touristic place with parking restrictions and no real attractiveness apart from its position on the hill. It seemed much bigger and far more modern than we remembered. We left, disappointed but philosophical about long memories and dream places.

The other day, we decided to repeat our journey of 1994, and approach the town via the scenic route and re-live the experience properly. It was astonishing! The view of the town of Sancerre from up on the hill was even more spectacular than we remembered, the drive down into it was enjoyable, and our arrival at a wine merchant we had visited back in 1994, was like a dream. We tasted the sauvignon blanc and the red wines and chatted to the owner for over an hour, while large, sweaty English tourists rushed in and out, buying cases without even a thank you.

The owner revealed a number of revelations: the town had not grown one millimetre since our last visit, the vineyards had not changed although some of the ownership had, it was he whom had served us back in 1994, the tourism had multiplied by thousands and, in 1994, we had discovered the town just before the whole world had discovered it and tried to buy it. House prices had since soared as Parisians had bought run down mediaeval cottages for doing up on weekends and British owners had moved in en masse. The wine, however was unchanged. This is largely due to the fact that the wine here is a complex mix of grape varieties, vine ages, soil types, winemaker skills and tradition. The wine tourist season is just a few weeks a year, and people like us come only then, while the general tourists came for longer because of the views, the mediaeval city and the chateau, but had no interest in the wine. Amazing.

And now to the wine and why I am sharing this with you. Sancerre sauvignon blanc is variable. Some of it can have a suppressed nose and an austere palate, with residual acid. Others are absolutely sensational. They are everything the Marlborough Region of New Zealand is famous for, and more. They have the wonderful tropical fruit salad nose, the bountiful tropical fruits and greengage plum flavours, and the dry finish, but they go on and on and on. They are not a competitor to the New Zealand sauvignons, because they are different. They stand alone as the pinnacle of wine made with this grape variety. They are astonishingly good. Our return has been justified. This is heaven on earth. Interestingly, the prices locally are quite reasonable, say about eight to nine euro or fourteen Aussie dollars. If you go to Dan Murphy's, expect to pay 50 to 100 dollars for a good one!

But, there is more. We also revisited the area known as Pouilly Fume. My recollections were of a region renown for its fume blanc (heavily wooded) style of wine. How wrong you can be. Pouilly makes wine from sauvignon and raisin grape varieties and the "fume" name comes from the rare soil minerals, including flint. Pouilly Fume wines are therefore even better than those with the Sancerre appellation. How about that? This evening, we cooked fresh sardine fillets with ratatouille and rice and accompanied it with a Pouilly Fume. Words cannot do it justice. Sancerre sauvignon is spectacular, this is astonishing!

By the way, our wine maker friend revealed to us that many of the vineyards of the Marlborough Valley are owned and operated by French owners. Am I surprised? No!

A session of enjoyable research is really only valid if the results can be independently repeated in a statistically significant way. That's another way of saying that I wanted to go back, so we took Richard, Denise and Cecily back via the same road and up the same observation tower. Cecily accompanied us for a guided degustation of four reds and seven whites from both Sancerre and Pouilly. We didn't always agree with each other on the individual wines but I heard her say "and now we are in heaven" a number of times. Needless to say we purchased a selection for further research. The man who did the degustation was a great entertainer and told jokes and ribald anecdotes while striking pieces of flint together to show how it makes a smell like that of burning wood. He took a shine to our Australian attitudes and dished up a few wines that had peach and almond aromas and he even went searching in his stock for a cabernet so that we do a comparison. We had fun. His French customers alternated between joining in and not knowing where to look as I mangled their language.

Overall, Sancerre has lived up to our memories and the romantic image we have retained over the years. Further it has enhanced and furthered our knowledge and appreciation of the area and its wine. Now we know why it was so attractive all those years ago. It was once a Roman stronghold, because of its commanding position, it has been the home of Frances most famous finance minister, Jaques Coeur (Paul Keating on steroids), it has a chateau, now in private ownership, and is a mediaeval town in amazingly good condition. We now know so much more about the wines and some of my old misinterpretations have been corrected.

The area around Sancerre as not much more than vineyards and farms. We are looking at what we will be doing while living here and it will be quiet and peaceful compared with Montpellier. There will be randonee's, music concerts and the occasional cathedral. I think I will improve my cooking skills too.

I hope that my story has not been to boring or too annoying due to the difficulty and expense of getting these wines where you are. Your appreciation of a fine sauvignon means that you deserve the knowledge and the experience we have had. You would love it.