There are a couple countries/regions that have been swaying me away from my usual Italian pour lately. While I’ve been learning about and enjoying South American wines, I received an invitation to attend the Spring to Loire tasting and seminar event hosted by Loire Valley Wines. Having never dabbled in this French region, I jumped at the chance to attend and even took time off work (day job) to do so. Wine is a continual journey and I humbly have much more to drink learn.
I attended two seminars and enjoyed a walk-around tasting in between. I was introduced to Muscadet by a representative from Perle de Mer and appreciated the clever oyster label designed for not-so-clever American wine drinkers such as myself. I smiled and nodded as I was told the perfect pairing is oysters, which I would never eat and didn’t have the heart to say so. So I enjoyed the wine by itself tremendously, and promptly sent my husband a picture of the label (below) so he can pair it with oysters. I’ll share the wine with him, but he’s on his own with those slimy things.
The first seminar that I attended was Exploring Fines Bulles from Loire Valley led by Master Sommelier David Keck. We learned about France’s most diverse wine region, Loire Valley, and that it is also the second producer of sparkling wine in France (after the Champagne region, of course). While the production terms flew over my head like angry birds, I did appreciated the general geology of the region, which is the longest river in France and dominated by large river geology and rock fragments from surrounding metamorphic (schist) and sedimentary (limestone and chalk) uplands.
The four sparkling wines that we tasted during this seminar, which I thought were all divine, were:
- Saumur, NV, Chateau Breze
- Cremant-de-loire, 206, Bouvet-Ladubay
- Vouvray, “T”, 2012, Domaine Vincent Careme
- Cremant-de-loire rose, NV, Langlois Chateau
The second seminar that I attended was Save Me Some Sauvignon! (Sancerre and More!) also led by Master Sommelier David Keck. The seminar started much like the other, with revisiting the diversity of the Loire Valley, also known as the Garden of France, and led into the specificity of the wines we were about to taste.
The four sauvignons that we tasted during this seminar, which were all spring-summer glasses of drinking bliss, were:
- IGP Val de Loire, TYDY, 2016, Delaunay
- Touraine, 2017, Vignoble Gibault
- Sancerre, 2017, Pascal Jolivet
- Pouilly-fume, La Moynerie, 2016, Michel Redde
I didn’t bother with jotting down tasting notes, because that would sound like fake jargon coming from me. I’m not a sommelier or a connoisseur. I am a wine lover with a bad nose, meaning I’m not going to pick up subtleties in wine, nor would I pretend to claim to understand them. Since wine is my hobby, I have the luxury of enjoying it as I please, and it pleases me to drink it as the winemakers intended. When I drink wine, I am reminded of trips I have taken through wine country, here and abroad, and on this day the travel bug in me now wants to visit the Loire Valley care-free and unpretentiously.
Everything was wonderful, and I appreciate Loire Valley Wines (and Please the Palate) for inviting me to attend the wine seminars and Walk Around Tasting. And to Wooster’s Garden in Midtown Houston for hosting the event. Although I am not “in the industry”, as an every day traveler and wine lover, I have and promote an extreme appreciation for wine tourism. Each sip invokes a sense of place, an appreciation for climate, soil geology, geography, and cultural setting. If drinking wine doesn’t make you want to visit the place it comes from, or at least learn about it, it should.
More information can be found at Loire Valley Wines. The area can be visited via tours out of Paris to Orleans and beyond, and accessed by train. This destination has been added to my bucket list.