A Sense of Place

Last night KT pungled together a delicious dinner of spicy sausages, slivered red peppers, chopped kale and corn penne pasta, all sauteed together in garlic, olive oil and a pinch of red pepper. Yum!

To accompany, I chose a 2004 Breton Bourgueil called "Trinch".  The Bretons, Catherine and Pierre, were in Portland at a trade tasting and KT and I were blessed to meet this lovely and very gracious couple.  At the time of our meeting, the Breton's were importing through Louis Dressner but now bring their wine in through Kermit Lynch.  I asked Kermit about this, when I met him at E&R wines last spring, but he offered little to explain and in the end what does it matter anyway, except to say that both importers represent a guaranteed trek into superb wines.

But back to the wine, Trinch is a word that is supposed to represent in french the sound of two glasses clinking in a toast.  I wasn't sure what we would find with the six year old cab franc; in the press you always read about this "early drinking" wine, full of blackberry and mulberry flavors (has anyone really tasted a mulberry?), hints of smoke and spice.  What would six years do?  Well, I'm happy to report that this was just a gorgeous wine and it tasted EXACTLY like the Chinon area that we remembered from our time there: cedar, violets, beet greens and simply place. This wine spoke directly of where it was from. Not all wines do that, do they?  We talked about that, as we drank, how a good rioja - like the 2001 from Lopez de Heredia that we had Sunday night with an incredible spanish lamb stew (let me know if you want the recipe: it is divine) tasted exactly like rioja Spain, how a good cote du rhone tastes exactly like the rhone and on. We've had great wines that you can pin point to a geographical region, but they don't always bring the "place" to bear; I adore good burgundian chardonnay but I'd be hard pressed to say it is from "here" on a map. Perhaps it's the soil in the expression of wine (can this be the elusive and oft cited terroir?).  We've had great cab francs from around the wine world but none have tasted liked this from the Loire and the remembrance of our time there is vivid now, a muggy, humid early summer in 2000 and a crisp fall in 2009; the one constant: the place in the wine as it was so delightfully displayed and replayed last night.