A Look Ahead to France

Talk about a difference in wine philosophy. Local wine drinkers will have to make the hyper jump from the New World varietal wine universe to the Old World constellation of appellations and be prepared to talk terroir.

The French have never been big "grape" nuts but much rather prefer the all-encompassing term of terroir and have made it the foundation of their appellation system. The terroir word is never easy to come to grips with but it makes a lot of sense if you want to differentiate your wines based on site/soil, and that's exactly what they do.

You can expect a large group of champagne producers to be present and accounted for in 2014 to share the glories of their magnificent old seabed of vineyards. The world's finest bubbly clearly benefits from those chalky soils that over time and many geological events have come to the surface. Trapping heat during the days and releasing it at night, in a cool region, is a good example of how certain terroirs can be better than others for certain grapes, and how appellations get delineated.

Grapevines do not like wet feet so when you see the excellent draining galets (round stones) of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and feel the warm, dry Mistral wind in your face, you can understand why the Rhone Valley is home to so many fabulous red wines. Given the current excitement surrounding Cotes du Rhone wines, there will be numerous producers from both the south and north Rhone in Vancouver next spring.

You could say it takes a bunch of villages to make an appellation, but when it comes terroir there is much more. In places like the Rhone or Bordeaux, centuries of grape growing have revealed that the best wines come from grapes that fully ripen. Yet those grapes must get there slowly and live on the edge of that parameter. In other words, early-ripening grapes planted on warm sites do not make great wine and nor do late-ripening grapes perform well on very cool sites.

What the French, and now many others, know is that matching the right grapes to the right sites produces the best wine results. You can see now how terroir can be a complex idea that really can't be defined to anyone's satisfaction.

Getting back to the Rhone, we see Syrah thriving on the cooler slopes of the northern Rhone around the villages of Hermitage, Crozes-Hermit-age, Cornas and St. Joseph, while further south in the warm vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the later ripening Grenache and Mourvèdre do well in the stony soils. In Bordeaux, Merlot thrives in the heavier clay soils of Pomerol and St. Emilion on the Right Bank while in Pauillac and St. Estephe's Left Bank, the grape stars are Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, courtesy of the very poor gravelly soils of the Gironde. If you are thinking horses for courses, you would right.

Speaking of horses, it could be a festival of organic, biodynamic and sustainable wines, and the majority of them may not be certified. It's another curiosity of French wine and another layer producers can add to the patina of ter-roir. I'll mention natural wines here but that's an even deeper discussion for another time. You can expect to see some in the tasting room next year.

To be fair, grapes are not far from anyone's mind. In the Loire Valley, they love to talk Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc but in the end they have succumbed to their respective appellations: Sancerre, Anjou and Chinon.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Talking+terroir/8040408/story.html#ixzz2NMHbdl89