Sancerre

Last Thursday we took a day trip to the Sancerre region, for two reasons: to buy some Sancerre wine from a winery that we’ve visited and bought from since we started our long stays here, and to have lunch with friends who have a second house near Sancerre and were staying there. This was our first ramble of this trip and it was a good one.

Sancerre is about an hour and a half south, an easy day trip. We went with Mary and Gilles, who put their lives in my hands and asked me to drive. It’s really a lovely drive through rural France.

Sancerre produces a red wine and a rosé, but it’s famous for its white wine, made from the sauvignon blanc grape. The soil in Sancerre is flinty and the wine takes on some of that characteristic: very dry and with a touch of mineral taste. We’ve heard several people who don’t like that and who have said they had drunk Sancerre whites that had a “cat piss” flavor. (They are always quick to point out they’ve never actually drunk cat piss…) Maybe so, but we haven’t run into that at all. Sancerre is our favorite white wine in the world.

There are a few grapes grown here:

Lots o’ grapes

We bought our wine at the winery, in a small town with maybe a hundred people and ten or fifteen wineries. I might point out that, as in many French wineries, the “tasting room” is a counter in the warehouse with the equipment that corks and labels the bottles and stores the finished product. No tasting charge, no ball caps for sale, just “Have a taste and buy what you want.” We did just that.

Ready for at least a couple months. I should point out that only three of these cartons (six bottles per) were for us.

Sancerre, as with the rest of France, suffered badly this year from the worst weather in decades. A killing frost early in the season, hail storms and then way too much rain (it still is raining here, in August, when the grapes need constant sunshine). The winemaker here said they usually get 12-15 clumps of grapes from each plant and this year it will be one clump per plant, and that clump will be of low quality. Really, it’s been a disastrous year, here in Sancerre and in almost all wine-producing regions of France.

Then it was off to the town of Sancerre for lunch. Now, Sancerre the town exists for one thing: people coming to the area to taste and buy Sancerre wine. The town sits on top of a hill, affording a beautiful view of the area. Sancerre itself is a nice walking town, and has spruced up a bit recently.

There are also some excellent restaurants here and Mary had reserved at one that turned out to be a great choice. On the menu were ten or twelve planches: platters; each featuring food from a different area. Almost all of us chose the platter of the south-west, a region in France famous for duck being served at every meal and most between-meal snacks. We could not believe how much duck was on that platter: a brochette with four large pieces, and about half a roast duck. It was just great; we walked out waddling and quacking.

We also had a wonderful visit with our friends Yves and Valerie, who met us at the restaurant. Over the years here we’ve gathered what we call our “French family,” and this first week, back for the first time in over three years, we have totally enjoyed re-uniting with that family. Here’s part of that family:

From left: Laurie and me, Valerie, Gilles, Mary and Yves.

We headed back to Bois-le-Roi after a quick stop to buy the local cheese. This is called “Crottin de Chauvignol“, crottin being the French word for sheep droppings. That’s right; it’s so named because this cheese comes in a form that looks, well, like sheep droppings. Here is what we bought:

These are arranged by age; the youngest on the left, the oldest is on the right in the picture. As Crottin de Chauvignol ages, it get a bit smaller and drier and the flavor intensifies. We like them all, and in this case we bought one crottin of each age they were selling, but if I’m buying just a couple in a cheese store I get the oldest available.

After a stop at the cheese store, it was back to home base. A very nice day, indeed.