10.13.09
Route du Vin in Jura and Alsace
Same procedure as last year? Same procedure as every year, James!
Just after the wine guide “Guide Hachette” came out in the shops Anthony read it in detail, together with another guide “Gault Millau” and some older versions of guides, and then composed a schedule for our yearly wine trip.
This year the selected regions were Jura and Alsace. We met up Philippe and Gaelle in the train station in Lyon where they arrived with the train from Paris, Friday noon, and then we warmed up with a first wine producer in the afternoon. In the evening Elodie, a friend living in Geneve, met up to spend the weekend in Jura with us.
Jura is a beautiful region, we didn’t know it before so it was a true pleasure to discover it together.
The previous years I have enjoyed our wine trips (Bourgogne, Bourgogne, Bourdeaux), but it’s first now that I really can start to enjoy and understand more the wines. So, what’s special then for the wines of Jura. First of all, they have a specific variety of grapes called Savagnin. With these raisins they make white dry wine a with smell of nuts (valnöt). They have several different ways to make the wine, giving different kinds of wine.
The most spectacular preparation is for the ‘Vin Jaune’, the yellow wine, which is kept in wooden barrels for 6 years and 3 months and they don’t add any wine to compensate for the evaporation. When the wine is ready to drink it rests 62% of the original volume (we know that because they chose the size of the bottle to represent what’s left of one liter). What keeps the wine from oxidation is a kind of mushroom which forms a layer on top, this also gives the yellow wine a very special taste and smell. Not everyone likes it. We found it all five quite difficult to like in the beginning, but then after some days one after the other started to get used to it and some started to even like it a lot.
They also do ‘vin de paille’: ‘Straw Wine’ where the grapes are dried to concentrate the juice. The result is a very sweet wine. miam miam.
For the red wines of Jura the specific types are Pulsar and Trosseau. Light wines in both color and taste. I didn’t find them exceptional, but it’s always interesting to try new things.
The two first nights we stayed in a bed&breakfast in a farm. An enormous building, built up from scratch, new and fresh inside. The old house had burnt down, but they kept a bit the style with the big roof, sometimes nearly bigger than the house itself. We got a room with a mezzanine, and above the bed it’s 7 meters up to the ceiling. Saturday evening we ate at the farm with the owners and some other guests. They had prepared a famous dish called ‘poulet au vin jaune’, it’s chicken cooked with the yellow wine.
Sunday we had a day off, moving from Jura to Alsace. The weatherforcast for each day was showing bad weather coming up, but even if there was some drops of rain some days, all days turned out to be really nice and we could even have a picnic in the grass.
Specialities from Jura. Of course we opened a bottle of wine as well!
Vacation!
We moved on to Alsace and spent the following three nights in a bed&breakfast close to Kaysersberg. The nights there was a engagement present from Anthonys parents and a more charming house is hard to find. Decorated to perfection.
Relaxing in front of the house with view on the hills and forests.
I rarley slept in a room as beautiful as this one. The sheets were ‘Lin du Voges’ and so
soft that I didn’t want to leave the bed in the morning.
Even common room and kitchen followed the same standard. The paintings were real, and
the table decoration were different each of the three mornings we ate there.
After the restaurants in the evenings we stopped on the way home in the forest or on a
hill to feel the nature and the moonlight.
Have a look at those pictures taken in almost complete darkness. Amazing that the camera rebuilt the green of the grass and the blue in the sky!
One afternoon Sophie made us company, a childhood friend of Anthony and Vincent, her boyfriend.
We visited 7 wine producers in Alsace. I think I’ll skip the details here, I can just say that there was so much good wine there! Two of the producers who will stay most in my memory was Mr Pierre Frick, using biodynamism, planning the harvest after the moon, and using no additions to the wine other than a very restricted quantity of sulfur for the white wine. It’s a bit in to produce ecological wine, but this man did not follow any trends, he’s been doing it for 15 years.
The second place I’ll remember is the one on the photo above. The owner who also made the degustation for us opened bottels for us to taste for nearly 200 euros! They will use them also for other groups, but it’s a good thing to be there when the bottle is just opened. At some places we tasted wine opened four days ago, and it changes it’s smell and taste a lot in that time. Anthony said that the wines he tasted in this place were some of the best wines he’s ever tasted in his life!
I’ll finish off my story with some pictures with a true alsacian feeling:
