Mini vacation

             

                   

 

Yes, it's true, we left our new wine for a few days on it's own so that we could relax a bit and enjoy a few hours of sunshine before the days grow short and the temperatures start to dip. We decided to go to a town called Arbois which is in the Jura region, about half way in between Burgundy and Switzerland. Is it a wine region? But of course! One of the more complicated and obscure in France. They make white, red, and rosé from 5 different grape varieties. The whites are made from Chardonnay and Savignin (no, that is not a typo) the reds from Poulsard, (or Ploussard, they have two ways of spelling it!) Trousseau and Pinot Noir. You definitely have to have an open mind when you start to consider these wines, they are unlike anything I have ever tasted, but the more you drink them the better you understand them, they are amazingly complex and well worth the time it takes to comprehend. We visited one of the most talked about producers in the area at their shop in the center of Arbois. Stéphane Tissot is the man that is making wine lovers talk about Arbois these days, so we went to check out his wines. Little did we know, he's a fellow organic and biodynamic wine man! One of the wines we were most interested in is a cuvée that he makes with no sulfur added at all. There is quite a movement here in France to produce a small quantity of wine without sulfur, you can get some pretty interesting wines and some pretty awful ones too. Sulfur dioxide is what we add to wine protect the grapes from spoiling during vinification and to protect the wine from oxidizing when it's finished fermenting, basically it's a natural preservative. I say natural because it is a natural compound, but also because it is allowed in Organic wine making in low amounts, and we do use it. Wines that are made without sulfur can be wonderful, they just have to be handled carefully as they can easily oxidize, spoil, or even re-ferment if the wine is not completely dry. Many people have low tolerance for added sulfur in wines, so if the amount of sulfur can be lowered or even eliminated, why not? It is necessary to be reasonable though, it's hard to imagine large quantities of unsulfured wine ever being shipped long distances since the risk of spoilage is so great. Anyway... back to Arbois: They didn't have any of this particular bottling at the shop in the center of town, so the saleswoman called up to the winery to see if we could run up to get some. Luckily Mme Tissot, Stéphane's mother, was there even though it was a holiday weekend. She very graciously gave us a tour of the winery and sold us our bottles of the unsulfured cuvée. More about Arbois next time, it was such fun, I'll have to split it into two posts....maybe three!