This is more or less
how I remember
this bottle ...
Yes, Christine and I would gladly attend the bbq-party held in Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet in the aftermath of our wine fair, last Saturday. Because such was the invitation.
We realized later on that Carrie and Marcel actually celebrated five years of harmonious common life and, by approximation, the second birthday of its most palpable result: Jordi. Jon Bowen - of Domaine Sainte-Croix fame - made a joint effort with us to empty the bottles and eat up the sausages, in a plenty.
Amongst those bottles, one was intriguing, and not only after I had gulped down so many of its congeners. A rather luminous shade of pale yellow, certainly after the previous wine, a grenache gris which had gone through a phase of pre-fermentary maceration with a good length of skin-contact, I'm still not sure whether it was pure chardonnay or a mix of this variety with chenin blanc, hence the allusion to Limoux style, and a very citrus-like nose. The mouth was full and crisp at the same time. Quite enjoyed it!
But the essence was not there. Here we sat, and ate, and reshaped the design of most things to come and thoughts to be conceived: a Cévennes-born grand-mother of Campanian ancestry, an Englishman (without his charming wife, sick in bed at home, unfortunately) who started a very peculiar (and successful) project in the Corbières, a Swiss who swapped his confortable Germanic existence for the odds of an agricultural adventure in the Fenouillèdes, an adorable Yankee female with extended culinary gifts (would you believe it?) and a tendency to address unexpected challenges, and the modest author of these clumsy lines, engaged himself in the same type of risky business. And evening became night, with the bunch of us still debating this, that and the other, about "zuur en zoet" as Flemish would have it.
I spent a very pleasant evening, thanks to all of you.
Write a comment