le Wine Shop— A New Wine Shop in Pézenas Features Local Domain Wines and stocks English Beers and Ales.

Photos and text © 2015 Steve Meltzer

If you love discovering niche and boutique wines then le Wine Shop in Pézenas, France is the place to go. The proprietor Dominic George has a passion for artisanal wines from small Languedocian domains. For several years he has operated wine tours of many of these wineries and had dreamed one day of having his own wine shop. Then last September he took the plunge and he opened his place. 

We found out about le Wine Shop from an English friend who, ironically, told us about it because it is his favorite place to buy British beers and ales. Intrigued, we hit the road to Pézenas and to give the shop it a look.  Tucked away behind the L'Assiette du boucher, adjacent to the main Pézenas round point-- le Carrefour de la paix-- it’s easily accessible from the D13 and A75 and the Avenue de Verdun.

A large open space the walls of le Wine Shop are lined with wines from several dozen local domains. These are the products of small and medium size producers many of whom, as is often the case in the Languedoc, are a bit off the beaten track or in some cases nearly impossible to find.

That’s one of the things I like about a good wine shop. A wine maven like Dominic does a lot of the hard work of travelling the countryside to find great wines. Now this not to say that I don’t like to visit domains on my own. But I find that one of these visits can turn a bit awkward when none of the wines are to my taste. I end up having to make a very “merci, désolé” retreat. 

Dominic likes to talk about wine and once started you quickly get a feel for the breadth and depth of his knowledge. That he likes to share this enthusiasm is evident. When you enter the shop you immediately see a large gray rural table surrounded by chairs where Dominic conducts his wine and food tastings 

When we arrived at the shop Dominic asked us about our wine preferences and soon had opened six bottles for us to taste. We ended up buying several bottles of a wonderful red --“Domaine de Cadablès (2012)” a niche domain near Gabian. It cost € 8 bottle. After a while our conversation turned to another of Dominic favorite topics, the astonishing landscapes of the Languedoc. He spoke about some of the incredible places he had encountered while travelling to small domains and recommended half a dozen great locations for photography; all the while as he opened bottles for tasting. The wines at le Wine Shop are all ‘domain’ (cellar) priced and start at € 5. There are also special sales.

le Wine Shop offers almost daily wine tastings programs.'s the Wines of the Languedoc--a tasting of eight wines-- The Wines and Food of the Languedoc--6 wines paired with 6 typical regional foods--and a Wine and Cheese Tasting. Dominic told us that he’s also happy to create custom wine and food tastings for groups of six or more people. 

Besides wine, Dominic loves the beer and ales of his native England and has a large selection of them; you are bound to take a few of them home too. 

For something entirely different at the end of the week Dominic offers a most special tasting. Summer Fridays at 17h he has a Wine and Chocolate Tasting (€25). It is a remarkable blending of six great domain wines matched with six amazing chocolates from a local master Chocolatier.  It sounds like the perfect way to end a week and to experience Languedoc living at its best.

le Wine Shop is located at the west end of the Avenue de Verdun (its # 65) adjacent to the restaurant/butcher shop, L'Assiette du boucher about 500 meters west of the McDonalds.

le Wine Shop

65, Avenue de Verdun

34120 Pézenas

04.99.41.11.71

06.50.61.99.03

contact@lewineshop.fr

www.lewineshop.fr

Le Sud de France 6.5: Le Vendage et le Primeur Vin

The grape harvest and the presentation of the “first” wine.

It has been a year since we arrived in France with our jam-packed suitcases and drugged out wild cat, and we managed to celebrate this anniversary with our whole community. We live in a “vigneron” village where most residents either own a vineyard or work on one. The vines are the main source of income and the very existence of Tourbes depends on them.

At the beginning of October, the vendage, the harvest, began and the roads and vineyards were filled with huge harvesters. Unlike the movie version of a wine harvest, with happy peasants taking days to pick the grapes, these monsters harvest a vineyard in a few hours. The harvested grapes are loaded onto trucks that deliver the tons of fresh grapes to the wineries co-ops where they will be pressed.  

However, viniculture has had a particularly tough grind for the last few years. The Languedoc-Roussillon has had a drought with rainfall in some areas down by 80%. Water tables are precariously low; and you need water to make wine and for the mundane tasks of cleaning vats, trucks and other equipment. In the last few years, the drought reduced vineyard production around our village to the point that our cave stopped producing wine and the vignerons elected to merge their operation with that of another co-op. 

The arrangement is that while grapes would continue to be pressed at our co-op, the juice would be transported by tanker the dozen kilometers to a cave in the town of  Montagnac for fermentation and bottling. The wines would then be sold under their “Montagnac” label.

Once the vendage was over, wineries around the region celebrated by opening their “primeur” wines. Most wineries produce many different wines and the primeur is simply the first drinkable red, white or rosé, from the previous year’s harvest. These openings are part celebration and part marketing event with speeches, food and music.

Although le Sud de France had had an exceptionally hot and long Indian summer, by mid-October, autumn arrived, gray and wet and we ended up walking to the cave in a cold rain. As we neared it we heard music and people singing, and it turned out to be a guy was playing accordion with a bunch of people performing old French songs. Diane and I joined in, although knowing neither the words or the music, the best I could do was to hum and scat along.                                                 

After about half an hour of music making, the official program began. The president of the regional winemakers association got up and spoke about how hard it was to market wine, especially with competition from the well know wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. He spoke of the irony that these famous wines were actually made largely from Languedoc grape juice that those wineries quietly bought from us.  Next the mayor spoke, reminding everyone that wine making was the very life of the village. He is a vigneron himself and happily announced that the vendage had gone well. It had been a good harvest and this year they were getting good prices for their grapes. The mayor was followed by the director of the co-op, who spoke about the new wine. 

When he finished the vignerons and their wives began to bring out tray after tray of slices of paté, cheeses, hors d’oeuvres and of course, bottle upon bottle of the new wine.

The mayor came over to me, filled our glasses with the new wine and we tasted it together. He sipped and I sipped, we sipped again and then agreed that this “sauvignon nouveau,” as it was called, is a damn fine wine. 

The trays of food and the bottles of wine kept coming out. When I looked around me, I realized that this was a rather private gathering of our village. In an atmosphere of “Bonheur,” it seemed that we were reinforcing community bonds as well as celebrating a good harvest. This was a crowd of no nonsense, tough vignerons, who were relieved as people refilled their glasses again and again, visibly enjoying the new wine. Oddly, this means that once again, like so many great Languedoc wines, all of it would be sold locally before it had a chance to reach a larger, worldwide audience.

After a while, one of our friends pulled us aside and led us out of a side door where we found ourselves in front of a fire pit of burning grapevine stems, the glowing embers swirling up in the currents of hot air like fireworks, exploding in the darkness. Sitting over the fire pit was a steel wheelbarrow contraption filled to overflowing with mussels. Several men stood stirring the mussels with long ladles that were also used to scoop up the cooked mussels and pile them onto paper plates. Soaked in olive oil and garlic before barbequing, the hot barbequed mussels were delicious and despite the quantity of hors d’oeuvres everyone had consumed earlier, the wheelbarrow quickly emptied. 

 

We sat eating with a group of friends, mostly Parisian émigrés, on an old stone wall, struggling to balance the plates of hot mussels on our laps. We had no silverware so we ate with our fingers and ended up laughing at ourselves. Here we were a bunch of big city sophisticates, sitting around a blazing campfire, eating mussels with our fingers like children, happy as clams. No one even minded the persistent, cold drizzle anymore.  

Le Sud de France 6.2 : The Dance of the Vignerons, Part 1-The Fête Begins

Our village is a quiet place surrounded by hectares of hushed vineyards. The only sounds that disturb the peace are from the morning boulangerie traffic, the children playing in the schoolyard and the occasional karaoke night at the café. Two thousand years ago, Tourbes was settled by Romans who built houses and roads, planted olive trees and grapevines and prayed to the god Bacchus.

We moved here in January and over time learned about the various village festivals and in particular the big “fête locale” in late July. At first I thought  it would be like a “Renaissance Faire” with villagers dressed as quaint peasants and whole lambs roasting on spits over smoky open fire-pits. These images were quickly dispelled by one of our English friends.

“Actually, mate, it's four nights of show bands with strobe lights playing until two every morning. And here’s the part you’ll like best,” he added with a gleam in his eye. “the show's right under your front windows.”

With these words, our storybook French village of good-natured eccentrics and happy-go-lucky locals turned upside down. At the end of July, we were going to have ringside seats for four nights of Las Vegas, baby. 

“Don’t worry, mate,” my pal went on, “this too shall pass.”

July arrived hot and damp. By late in the month, the autoroutes were bumper to bumper with vacationers heading to already crowded, Mediterranean beaches. Several days before the fête, metal barriers sprouted on our streets, closing the village center to traffic and in front of our house, village workers erected a stage. Large white vans slipped silently into town like a caravan of circus elephants and camped around our 13^th century church.

The fête was to begin Friday night and that morning, the vans disgorged an entire amusement park, complete with carousels, bumper cars, games of chance and a stand that sold “Barbe de Pape,” cotton candy. In the center of this newly planted forest of fun, on a high pillar, was our statue of the Virgin Mary, hands raised in supplication to God, and now staring down in wonder at the chaos below. However, I’m sure she was pleased because each  night, kids and parents would ride the rides, play the games and enjoy themselves a lot.

In the late afternoon, the women of the “Comité des fêtes” set up huge paella pans on a long table near our front door. They filled them with sausage and chicken, and, humming merrily, crushed huge cloves of garlic into the simmering platters. They were making “macarrronade,” a paella like dish with pasta instead of rice. It would be the base of the village meal, the repas, that kicks off the fête. The Comité is group of hard working volunteers who labor year round to produce events and this was their biggest weekend.

A "fête locale' is a big happening in a small village. Each night the population triples or quadruples with foreign tourists and visitors from nearby villages. They come to drink and dance and drink.

And, let me be frank. There was a lot of drinking at the fête. We are a vigneron village, grape growing and winemaking is our business. Our vignerons produce a superb rosé from cinsault grapes grown in our vineyards. It is a civic duty to drink this rosé, and, of course, to help others enjoy it too. The fête is paid, for in part, through the sale of rosé, beer and pastis. However, in the whole weekend of fête, there was no public drunkenness or fistfights and surprisingly, the peace was kept without a single cop or security guard. Everyone just behaved well and watched out for each other.

Around seven, people drifted into the square. They bought their first drinks, and milled about saying hello to each other. By 8:30, they began to line up at the big paella pans, and the repas commenced. Everyone got a large portion of macarrronade, and in no time at all three hundred people were having dinner on our doorstep.  

The stage lights came on at ten and two singers began singing. Several showgirls joined them and soon everyone on stage was dancing and singing energetically. 

The Herault makes its money in the summertime and there are dozens of show bands, karaoke singers and DJs working the region. They play endless one-night stands at restaurants and hotels entertaining vacationers. The bands usually consist of a few singers and dancers, and half a dozen musicians. They all play “Nonstop,” that is without a break, intermission, or change of key or tempo for four hours straight.

The opening band for our fête was typical with several large banks of powerful amplifiers and a spider web structure packed with lights. There were even huge klieg lights like the kind normally used against enemy aircraft or to light up the Empire State building. For four hours, the band turned our cozy French town into Studio 54 and consumed more electricity in a night than the entire village in a month.

And what they played was disco. Remember disco? ABBA, the BeeGees, the Village People, mirrored balls, bell-bottom pants, and John Travolta’s white suit? Well, it may be 2011, but show bands play forty year old, American disco.

Worse yet, most of the songs were sung in English, a language that neither the performers nor the audience, understood. It made for some bizarre moments, as when one singer shouted to the crowd, “Shakes you booties” and in bewilderment, people raised their hands and clapped.

On the stage, the singers every song rapidly and at maximum volume. The dancers repeated the few routines they had learned watching MTV, and they had changed costume for every song. The band played nonstop and then abruptly at two, like sleepwalkers awakening from a dream, they stopped, packed up, and moved on.

People began to go home. I envied them going home. We couldn’t go home, we were home, put under some kind of disco house arrest by our own village.


Saturday morning the village workers hosed down the quai and the streets. The mayor and some of the Comité sat at a table eating bread and cheese and drinking rosé before they got up and put on plastic gloves to clean the public bathrooms.

The events for Saturday included a decorated bike and scooter competition and the election of the best “Mamies” or grandmothers in the village. Low keyed and sweet, they felt oddly out of place in our neon Las Vegas.

In the evening, the village filled with several hundred ados, what the French call teenagers. It was Saturday night and the kids needed to get out of their historic, old villages and party.

At ten, the show began. A singer started a song and half a dozen “showgirls” began to dance. I stared in disbelief. I had seen this all before, the night before. It was the same disco show. The ados seemed oblivious to this, they were there to dance and did their version of moshing and, dare I call it, break dancing. Mostly they stood in place, shaking their shoulders, hopping up and down and occasionally lifting one of their own into the air amidst a lot of laughter.

I watched the ados from the café bar with a friend. Shaking his  head in amazement he said. “It’s really weird, these kids aren’t pissed.”

Yup, these kids weren’t pissed. They had come for a good time, to dance and have fun. In spite of drinking a good deal of beer and wine, they remained polite and mostly sober.

Around midnight, the tech guys set off “snow” cannons. You couldn’t hear them because of the music, you’d just see them belch little puffs of “snow.” The kids laughed at the snow and at 2 AM, the band stopped and went home.

The ados began to disperse and we walked the few meters to our house. As we were crawling into bed, Diane heard a noise and we went downstairs to investigate. We found a couple of ados sitting on our doorstep. The girl jumped up in embarrassment but her boyfriend looked up at us and said in awkward English, “Excuse us, we meant nothing bad. We were just romancing.”

We smiled at that, the “romancing” on our doorstep and wished them a good night. We closed the door and went upstairs to try to get some sleep.  

To Be Continued in Le Sud de France 6.3: The Dance of the Vignerons, Part 2, below, scroll down to read more.

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Le Sud de France 5.5 : The Chateau Abbaye de Cassan.

Goats

It is Spring in the Herault and the grapes are growing, the goats are kidding and the karaokes are singing. On the bright side of life, Carla Bruni is complaining that Sarko is ruining her "career" but on the downside of things, it was a rainy Easter weekend. We were determined to get out of the house and since it was a dark and stormy day, we had to look for something to do indoors. 

Fresh Ginger root at the foire

Turns out that just up the road from us, in a very old chateau, there was a “foire de saveurs et odeurs.” That is French for a “flavors and smells fair” which sounds much tastier to my ears than the American “food fair.” It was held at the Chateau Abbaye de Cassan near the town of Roujan and we decided that it’s just the thing we needed to brighten up a gray day.

Charlemagne

History envelops and embraces you in the Herault and the Chateau-Abbaye is a good example of that. Back in the first to fourth centuries the Languedoc was called “Septimania,” which does not refer to an XXX rated movie “Seven Maniacs,” but rather to veterans of the Roman VIIth Legion who conquered most of this area and settled here. They took possession of the Languedoc from Narbonne to the Rhone. The Chateau site was originally a  Gallo-Roman outpost dating from about the 4^th century  and then in 805 A.D Charlemagne built a priory on the site. A Romanesque church was added in the 12^th century and in the 18^th century, years before the American revolution, a grand chateau was constructed. For a thousand years, the Abbaye priory was one of the most celebrated church structures in the region and a stopping off place for travelers making the long and arduous pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques de Compestelle in northern Spain.

The Abbaye de Cassan today is a huge estate set amidst vineyards and a working winery. The Chateau has rooms available for meetings, concerts and events like weddings, and there are  plans for creating a full scale corporate retreat and conference center that are still several million Euros in the future. 

Arriving at the Abbaye, there wasn’t much to see from the parking lot, just an old wall and an sign with an arrow marked “Visitors” that led to a gift shop. Eek, a gift shop before you’ve even seen the place, that's very American. Slipping through the gift shop, avoiding the tourist ware, we ended up in a large tree shaded courtyard and a path to the Chateau.

The outer corridor

So far, this didn’t seem like much but entering the Chateau you suddenly feel as though you have stepped into the unfinished set for a Three Musketeers movie. What we hadn’t realized was that the parking lot and the gift shop were tucked into the backside of the building. Seen from the front the chateau’s a different story. It is a huge building with long, curtained corridors stretching its entire length. Nestled within the corridors are several large rooms that were the living quarters.

The dining room

In the wide corridor that the path led there were a dozen or more stalls selling artisanal food products. This was the heart of the “saveurs and odeurs” and in the middle of the corridor we found the stall of “Roses et Délices.”

Created by a couple from Massac Hautes-Corbières named, Bernard and Marie-Laurence Million (honestly), "Roses et Délices" is a line of handcrafted confits (jellies) and syrups made from flower petals--the petals of thyme, rosemary, mint, violets and roses. These are the most delicately flavored jellies and syrups imaginable. Just a tiny spoonful on a piece of chévre or some ice cream, explodes with the flavor of the flowers. M Million suggested with obvious pride that the rose confit when sprinkled on foie gras or duck breast is simply spectacular. Marie-Laurence added that a few drops of the syrup added white wine makes a heavenly “kir” and mixed with champagne produces the most “royal” of all “royal kirs.” To learn more about the Million’s petal jellies and syrups take a look at their website at www.RosesetDelices.fr.

These handmade chocolate was sold at the foire!

Flower petal jelly and syrup are just one of the incredible culinary treats that keep popping around the Herault. Producing artisanal food in this part of France reminds me of home beer brewers in the States. They are passionate and committed; and only a little crazy.

The Romanesque church

Walking on we came to the crafts fair. It was set-up in the Abbaye’s 12^th century church. As you can see from the photo, with it’s high arched, Romanesque ceiling, it was the most extraordinary venue for a crafts show imaginable.

A 12th century fresco in the abbey

Finally, we got to the table set up with a display of the Chateau’s own wine named fittingly enough, "Chateau-Abbaye de Cassan." 

This fortified tower looks like a chess "rook"

The Chateau winery produces several wines that are blends of different grapes, like syrah, Grenache, cabernet. Their least expensive wine is named “Le Jardin des Simples.” This name refers to a medieval herb garden. A more complex wine is called “Le Jardin de Labyrinthe" or the Garden of the Labryinth and above it in price (15 euros) and complexity is “Le Jardin de Songes” or “the Garden of Dreams.” I just love these wines' names, they are a lot classier than “Yellow Tail” or “Two Buck Chuck.”

And then there was a lovely rosé called “La Rosé de Madame de Brimont” which was made entirely of cinsault grapes--one of the most important local grape varieties in the Languedoc.

After tasting the rosé, one of the winemakers pulled us aside to tell us the story behind the wine's name. Madame de Brimont, was the beautiful mistress of the Prince de Conti who was the King's administrator for the l'Herault. His palace was in Pezenas some ten miles away and with a little string pulling he obtained the Chateau for his lover in the middle of the 18th century. Over the years she visited the Chateau and her prince often and, the wine guy went on, it is said that years after her death, Chateau servants would see her ghostly figure playing the piano in the Chateau salon.

At that moment, after rose petal jellies and rosé wine, standing in a haunted castle at a flavors and smells fair, it seemed to me that we could not have found a more perfect way to spend a rainy day in the Sud de France.

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Sud de France 4.0: St.Martin’s Dead and Gone Left Me Here to Sing This Song.

Some St.Martin's Day Singers

It is one in the afternoon and I’m already two glasses of wine over my limit and to make things worse, I am being followed home by a band of crazy musicians.  Today the village is celebrating Armistice Day soberly and it's patron saint’s day, --St. Martin--with a lot of local wine. 

So after a brief ceremony at the cemetery everyone gathers at the Mayor’s office for wine and, well, more wine. Mayor George is a charming man who keeps refilling my wine glass as he tells stories about the village. 

After several stories and a lot of wine I feel the need to excuse myself. This provides a lot of laughs especially from members of for the ceremonial band. It a 'fanfare' and calls itself “100 Grams a Head” (100 G de Tete) which should give you an idea of their musical tastes. They decide that in my condition they should escort me  to my front door, about 100 or so yards away. They also get me to promise to join them later at the bar at five for more music and some beer and well more wine.

100 G de Tete

Now a fanfare is made up of amateur musicians who get together to play music and perform at local events. It’s a brass band that typically consists of a tuba, trumpet, trombone, drums and tambourine and they play whatever they like. Today our own Puimisson fanfare starts their day with a rousing and surprisingly on key rendition of that old French? favorite “Cieto Lindo” and follows it up with a tolerable “Saints Go Marching In.” Take a listen for yourself.

While I headed straight home the fanfare took off to continue to perform around the village. Going door to door, they will play a tune or two for a few coins and for, you guessed it, a glass of wine. 
Beside the fanfare, the day was celebrated with rides for the kids and a little amusement area--set up next to but touching at any point the boules field.

For the older folks there were activities like a "Loto Nite" and an Oldies Dance.

For some reason Mayor George had closed the village's large parking area at the Place de la Mairie, for ten days around St. Martin's day. An annoyance for everyone, especially since you’d think you’d want more parking not less for a village event.

Like so many other things French, this is one of those unknowable mysteries that one just has to learn to accept.

Puimisson, St.Martin's Day 11.11.2010