How to Taste French Wine :: Personal Narrative France Papers

How to Taste French Wine The Vin Jaune, or "yellow wine", of eastern France's Jura region is not just yellow but the brightest yellow, like pure honey. The strange 62-oz. bottles in which they are sold are half-covered with dirt when photographed for supermarket glossies to show that their nectar, properly served chilled, is of the earth, of good, French earth. Plucked en masse from the sleepy fields of Chateau-Chalon, Arbois, or another smallish vineyard village of the like, Savagnin grapes are harvested late, almost in November, then squeezed, fermented, and sealed and aged in oak caskets for a period of exactly six years and three months. In these caskets, in dark and humid cellars, a layer of yeast forms upon the liquid's surface, protecting the young wine from the spoiling effects of oxygen and thus allowing for its unique yellowness to blossom from within. On the first morning after the last day of the third month of the seventh year, la Percà ©e, or "the piercing", of the caskets begins. Locals flo ck to a tiny, unknown village for the annual mass, ceremony, and piercing itself. There, 25 wine "houses" are set up, each offering only the most refined and choice flavors from the year's harvest. It was amongst these houses, each within a barn, or tent, or some other makeshift location, that I was introduced to proper wine etiquette, and how, in turn, to appreciate wine itself. It was also here where I learned how to go to a wine tasting with friends who buy bottles for in-between-tasting "tastings" and who drink on buses and trains. In other words, this is where I learned how not to go to a wine-tasting. The unknown village that would host the festivities this year was Cramans, indicated my yellow train ticket, printed especially for the event. It would be a formal affair, I decided, and I would wear a tie of red. Arriving at the town's train station around noon with my German friend Thomas, we stepped out into the soggiest, most bitterly cold February Sunday and continued down to a path of hay laid out like a red carpet that continued, little did we know, for about a half-hour until we reached the village "proper" (one main street, lined with ancient brick houses and barns, constitutes the "downtown"). We complained shamelessly and annoyingly about the weather amongst the large group with whom we were making our pilgrimage, but neither of us would have really turned back, not with the irreplaceable lesson in being cultured that lie ahead.