I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday lunchtime at Le Gavroche selecting the wines for our forthcoming Spring lunch. I took the opportunity to buttonhole the head sommelier David Galetti, who presides over a list of biblical proportions, about his personal recommendations of wines to accompany asparagus.

David Galetti - Le Gavroche

When English asparagus is in season, as it is now, it can’t be beaten and my personal philosophy is to enjoy it as frequently as possible so I was keen to hear David’s recommendations. His first observation was that if asparagus is properly cooked it should still have a little bit of a ‘croquant’ bite and that you must therefore select a wine that is ‘fresh’ and isn’t heavily marked with oak. Although Sauvignon Blanc is widely acknowledged as being the classic accompaniment  (and they list our Pouilly Fumé ‘Les Loges’ from Dominique Guyot in bottles and halves at Le Gavroche – which would be  a good match) David said that it probably wouldn’t be his first choice. He looks for a wine with ‘a hint of citrus’ and averred that it is important to have some savoury herb notes too. Pinot Blanc and dry Chenin  Blanc ‘can work very well’ apparently – so I look forward to experimenting with some of those forthwith. David dis-recommended Chardonnay as a general rule “you don’t want anything too heavy, oaky or buttery” and surprised me with the revelation that his personal preference is for a Corsican Vermentino!

So what are you waiting for? Get the green spears of goodness on the stove and start experimenting with some fresh, clean Spring whites in the newly shipped 2010 vintage.

Last month we received the sad news that Isabelle Barantin had finally succumbed to the circling sharks and sold the iconic monopole vineyard of Château Grillet to François Pinault of Château Latour. I spoke to Isabelle on the phone shortly afterwards and made the mistake of congratulating her on the sale – the property had been discreetly on the market for quite some time. ‘Ne dis jamais ça’ was her terse response. Isabelle made it very clear to me that she had been a reluctant vendor – still a few million Euros in the current account must sugar the pill to some extent. While it is a shame that this unique 3.8 hectare site is passing out of a family ownership that dates back to the French Revolution at least Isabelle can leave with her head held high having restored the vineyard and wine to their full, outstanding potential during her 17 year stewardship.

Chateau Grillet estate by Jason Yapp.

I speak from direct experience as Yapp Brothers have shipped straight from the Château since the early 1970′s and I cannot think of a wine that has been more commercially controversial. Robert Parker described Château Grillet as being ‘overpriced and overrated’ in his 1997 book wines of the Rhône, which is not what you want to read when you are sitting on pallets of the stuff. For years I had a running dialogue with Jancis Robinson who doggedly catalogued its short-comings (there was even a derogatory comparison to Harrogate springs!) before she was finally won-over by the 2004 vintage: “France’s most idiosyncratic appellation, devoted to one producer with one amphitheatre of Viognier vines has been difficult to love for many vintages but in 2004 white Bordeaux wizard Denis Dubourdieu was brought in to give the wine a good scrub and here at last we have real freshness even at three years old. There’s a deeply mineral nose and then dense fruit and a wonderfully creamy finish. Even the most jaded wine enthusiast would be fascinated by this evidence of a new era at this famous white Rhône landmark.” Which, if you are trying to sell it, is much more uplifting.

Once, after a tasting in the Crown Hotel in Southwold when a room full of Masters of Wine had roundly berated the 1990 vintage, I did consider throwing in the towel but the great Rhône guru John Livingstone-Learmonth (www.drinkrhone.com) persuaded me to keep the faith on the grounds that the terroir at Château Grillet is unique and capable of producing outstanding wines.  Happily he was right (as gurus often are) and the vintage run from 2003 onwards, under Monsieur Dubourdieu’s influence has been fantastic. I tasted the 2005 last week with Farr Vintners boss Stephen Browett at Chabrot Bistro d’Amis  (www.chabrot.co.uk). It’s a bargain there, in London restaurant terms, at £95 a bottle and is drinking beautifully now. It is still a little closed on the nose and merits decanting but it has great vigour, length and minerality and is the perfect foil for classic French cuisine. I think it has a least a decade’s happy drinking ahead of it – as does the 2006 which is also stupendous. We are about to ship the keenly anticipated 2007 which will, I suppose, mark the end of an era. If the rumours of what M. Pinault paid for the property are even half accurate it may well also be the last ever vintage of Château Grillet that is remotely affordable, so my (highly partial) advice is to fill your boots before the Bordelais ramp up the prices – it’s unquestionably a buyers’ market!

The start of our trade event season for 2011 began this week with our hosting a stand at The Specialist Importers Trade Tasting event (SITT) 2011 in Manchester (Monday) and London (Wednesday). We have worked at this event for the past couple of years and watched it grow into an already much talked about interesting show for the smaller, specialist merchants in the UK wine trade.

The SITT acronym is an ironic one as a long day is spent on one’s feet tasting, chatting and advising a steady flow of guests including Sommeliers, Journalists, fellow wine merchants and consultants. There was certainly precious little time to sit!

Michael and Tom attended the Manchester event, which as a rule is a little quieter than the London one. Tom the hot footed it back to help Jason and I look after things in London at Vinopolis in the historic Borough market near London Bridge.

We always try to keep our wine selection fairly small and snappy, but equally try to reflect as much of our varied and wide-ranging portfolio as possible. This tasting provided a good opportunity to look at some of our 2009 vintages that are going to be firmly at the forefront of our 2011 list. The white wines were all particularly well received on the day (which may partly reflect the ambient temperature of a packed hall)!

I thought that our Condrieu Terroirs 2009 (100% Viognier) from Francis Merlin was an excellent wine; good body, with lots of that AC typical minerality that makes Viognier from this area so interesting and different. One of the comments from a journalist who tasted it on the day was that it was refreshing to try a Condrieu that actually tasted like Condrieu is meant to, which is something very different from Viognier found elsewhere in the wine world. A third of the assemblage is put into oak and this helps carry the complex flavours through to a long and satisfying finish. This is a great early showing for the 2009 Rhône that we have been telling you about for the past couple of months.

Domaine Saparale Vin de Corse Sartène Rosé 2009 (Nielluccio, Sciacarello and Vermentino) is a stand out rosé wine. From sun-blessed Corsica, it has a lovely pale Salmon colour with lots of mouth-filling summer fruit flavours as well as crisp, slightly savoury tinge. This is Spring/Summer drinking out on the terrace with a salad or some seafood.

All of the reds that we had on show are firm favourites of mine and I am really pleased that our Pascal Frères Gigondas 1999 was well received by people on the day. Gigondas is generally a younger, more rustic cousin to the refined, maturity of good Châteauneuf du Pape and it is not often that you can find it available with any decent age. We are fortunate to have a long standing working relationship with Yves Cheron and he continually delights with his late release of these great value wines. Don’t get me wrong, this Gigondas does not have the rich complexity of good Châteauneuf, but to be fair it also does not have the price tag! Beautiful autumnal flavours expand on the palate, the rusticity of youth has been mellowed with age into a smooth, warming wine. Plenty of classic cigar box aromas and long finish, make this a wine for slow, relaxed contemplation. A great value wine in my opinion.

Overall, it was another successful event, lots of interesting wines on show and a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and new. When the doors finally closed after a busy day dispensing wine, we continued the long standing wine trade tradition and swapped the grape for the grain with a quick refreshing beer from the nearest market tavern, albeit though, still no seat to be had.

Cows at Chaintres

On our recent Yapp sortie to see our French vignerons in Burgundy and the Loire, I became very aware of the huge range of weird and wonderful creatures that we encountered along our travels. Normally, of course, vineyard domaines are essentially agricultural places therefore one would expect to see cats and dogs and the occasional chicken wandering freely around. A few of our growers still practice polyculture, so we were fairly certain to come across the local bovine breed of Charolais, and plenty of sheep. Polyculture is historically a simple way of insurance for a small domaine – a way of spreading ones risks as a safety measure just in case any of the harvests fail totally due to adverse weather conditions. Ideally one would have a few hectares of vines, a small cereal crop maybe, some vegetables as well as livestock. It’s the perfect way not to have all your eggs in one basket – although if you had a lot of chickens…

However, there were several other creatures that featured. Firstly, when visiting the tufa chalk cellars of Vouvray and Montlouis; painstakingly hewn out by hand and ideal for keeping an ambient temperature of 12ºC; one had to be very aware of low flying missiles in the shape of swifts and swallows which were constantly arriving and departing to feed their nesting young.  Others were the pigeons that we dissuaded from roosting on our window ledge in Tours, the cockerel at Menetou-Salon that seemed to have mistaken twelve noon for dawn and the wonderfully realistic home-made “birds of prey” that were dotted all around the cereal fields of Oiron (Thouarsais) that acted as very effective scarecrows while fluttering menacingly in the wind.

But now the creatures started to get a little more bizarre. At Chateau de Ligre, (Chinon) during our vineyard tour, where one could clearly see the effect of the soil on different parcels of vines (the sandier soils producing a lighter, earlier drinking style, while those vines grown on the heavier clay-based soils give a much fuller, richer and more tannic style); we were treated to an amazing early evening orchestra of sound by countless numbers of crickets in the nearby long grass. I was immediately reminded of a similar experience in the Dentelles de Montmirail in Gigondas some five years ago, when the Provencale crickets (cicadas) were also fully on song.

Le Crocodile

Still at Chateau de Ligre, after a comprehensive and detailed tasting of their range conducted by Pierre Ferrand in their pristine and stylishly modern on-site shop premises, we walked the short distance back to our vehicle, and we heard the most amazing symphonic clamour emanating from what seemed to be the next field. Pierre said the racket was the croaking made by hundreds of bull frogs in a lake some half a mile away. I couldn’t believe the decibel level of the cacophony of amorous amphibians with their arsenal of mating calls.

Probably the strangest creature was found inside the collegiate church of Saint-Maurice in the picturesque town of Oiron where, as previously mentioned in past Yapp catalogues, we found an eight foot stuffed crocodile mounted on to one of the walls. The explanation for this is that the jaw of the crocodile, a reptile which at that time was deemed to hold mystical powers, was ground up to form a paste (hopefully the croc was dead at this stage) to make a magical potion which would cure the townsfolk of the dreaded plague. Certainly different! As we left the sacred church we noticed, in Latin, an inscription on top of the arched entrance which read, ‘Here is the End’!

A bon taing bon vin

I’m not sure about the biology or psychology of the weird male collecting gene but I definitely possess it and can’t remember a time when I didn’t. Interestingly it has very little to do with material value (although that can creep into it) and more to do with bringing order out of chaos and creating sets of things that belong together. While I’ve always dismissed train spotters as a bunch of sad losers (but somehow not as sad as bus spotters) I do (sort of) understand where they’re coming from. In my youth I collected comics and kept them in plastic bags in issue order and records (limited editions, picture sleeves and coloured vinyl were all sought after – so lots of fun there) and as an adult I’ve progressed on to corkscrews, wine and (inexplicably) the branded stickers from bunches of bananas.

Tu me plais

My friend Roland, who is a respected, soon to turn 50, secondary school history teacher collects bricks (like the banana stickers there’s value there), Coke bottles (from places you didn’t know had heard of Coke) and vintage bicycles, so he’s definitely a fellow sufferer. Although we have no desire whatsoever to pursue each others interests there is a mutual appreciation. If I found a good brick or Coke bottle I’d definitely try and acquire them on Roland’s behalf and he’d certainly reciprocate if a fine corkscrew crossed his path. Both my sons show signs of inheriting the defect as evidenced by an obsessional (and costly) Pokémon card acquisition phase and a casual interest in banana stickers.

This blog comes to you at the dawn of a new collection the seed of which germinated overnight. I’ve always been a fan of US State car registration strap-lines as they succinctly proclaim what a whole region is about. New Hampshire’s – ‘Live Free or Die’ is a classic, Florida’s ‘Sunshine State’ is more obvious as is Maine’s ‘Vacationland’. It occurred to me in the still of the night that various French wine appellations have had similar attempts at distilling their raison d’être into a strap-line. There’s Muscadet – tu me plais, as found on my Dad’s fridge, Côte Rôtie’s immodest Légende d’un Terroir and Hermitage’s famous A Bon Taing Bon Vin. Admittedly a measly 3 examples isn’t much of a collection but it’s a start. It is a platform on which to build. By this time next year I might have hundreds! Nurse! Nurse! 

Beaucoup damour

Since writing this article I’ve discovered the following additions:

Gigondas – Un Trait d’Esprit sur Votre Table  

Quincy – Beaucoup d’Amour

Sancerre – donne moi ton secret

I’ve also met a woman who collects banana stickers so maybe it’s not a weird male gene after all….

Château Simone Wooden Box

I don’t know at what age specifically you officially become eligible to appear on “Grumpy Old Men” but I suspect that I’m getting near.. or at least getting nearer than I would like. I have become increasingly irritated by the way that day-to-day products are packaged, not only the wastefulness  but the simple practicalities like having to find scissors to open a new razor, a knife to open a pack of smoked bacon or the way in which a cardboard carton of milk never opens without a bit of a struggle.

I make my daughters packed lunch sandwiches and wrap them in greaseproof paper, as this just works for all concerned and when a product packing “just works” it is a real boon and when the product inside “just works” as well it’s a pleasant exception to the rule..  however in the world of Yapp it gets even better, let me explain..

In my first week at Yapp I saw the wooden cases from a recent shipment of Château Simone – they were suitably classic in style and matched the iconic wine inside (our tasting notes start with “A rare unreconstructed historical gem that belies comparison”) and having grown up in world of Airfix WWII models hearing that this was one of Winston Churchills favourite wines just added to it’s appeal.

The wooden cases are indeed iconic but apart from keeping it’s valuable cargo safe in transit across the English Channel it’s solved many a problem at Yapp HQ. I’ve seen the wooden boxes used for filing tasting notes, storing glasses and on the odd occasion various collections of staff lunches on Yapp Sale Days. Our shop in Mere uses them to present wines but they can double as furniture too – when staff need a quick adhoc discussion gathering round a PC the boxes have been used as chairs – and still survive to support the next meetings.

So, I’m not suggesting that you buy 4 cases of Château Simone to replace your dining chairs at home but if ever you get chance to either taste (or taste again) this iconic wine or utilise the classic wooden cases that look after them both have their uses and are definitely worth exploring!