Sancerre

Grape harvester

Harvesting by hand

Following the tourist line

Beautiful storefront

Jake's favorite French wine has long been white Sancerre, and today we visited the city of Sancerre and drove through several of the villages where Sancerre is produced.   The city is on the top of a hill with a lovely view of the Loire River to the east and of the vineyards and farms on all the other sides.  Wine has been grown in the area since at least the 500s.  Parts of the city date back to the 1300s. 

It was a rainy morning and being Monday out of tourist season lots of shops and wineries were closed.  The tourism office was open though with the usual lovely selection of maps and brochures (so far there have been great tourism offices in most towns).  We followed the red line painted on the cobblestone streets through town to visit the major sites (there was a blue line to follow in Nevers).  The wine cooperative's museum was open and out of the rain, so we stopped in.  They have a very interesting and thorough exhibit (with English translations on signs and subtitles on videos) that covers the history of wine making in the area, the different soil types, the harvesting techniques, wine making techniques, pests, and marketing of Sancerre as an appellation.  Out in the little garden there is a tractor with a video game console where you drive the tractor through a vineyard and get points for speed and accuracy.  Jake drove slowly and was timed out before he finished even trimming the vines.  I drove fast but ended up flipping the tractor on a sharp turn, game over.  The museum ticket ends with a tasting, but it turns out you just taste one wine and get the glasses as a souvenir. 

So the wine we tasted wasn't bad, but it did not meet up to Jake's expectations.  And in fact, little of the Sancerre we've had here has matched what he thinks of as a typical sancerre that you might get in the US.  I would say that we have now tried at least 10 sancerres.  The problem is explaining what you expect in a wine.  But after lunch (where I had a sancerre  that I thought was pretty nice, but minerally; lunch was an omlette with a side of green beans and a baked potato topped with a goat cheese sauce), we stopped in at a winery's store that offers tastings.  The saleslady poured 5 tastings of sancerres explaining that each was from grapes grown in different soil types/villages.  And sure enough, they also tasted notably different.  Still, none were quite up to Jake's remembrances from sancerres he'd had before.  I however really liked one and bought a bottle.  It was from grapes grown near Chavignol in clay and limestone marl soils (called Cuvee Silex on the bottle).  Chavignol also happens to be famous for its goat cheese, Crottin du Chavignol.

After exploring the rest of town we headed back down the hill to see Chavignol and other little towns.  The grapes are all grown on the steep hillsides, and any flatter land is devoted to cereal crops and pastures.  This is grape harvest season so there were lots of little tractors hauling wagons filled with grapes and cars of workers parked at the wineries.  Some grapes were being harvested by machines hooked to tractors, and others were being harvested by hand (see photos).  The vines were lovely with the dark purple grapes (pinot noir) hanging in tight clusters under leaves just turning yellow.  The sauvignon blanc grapes that make the sancerre must have been harvested a little earlier or they are just harder to see.