Loire Love Letter: Pascaline Lepeltier, Wine Director, Rouge Tomate, NYC

The second in our series of Friday Loire Love Letters from wine industry guest bloggers comes from Pascaline Lepeltier, the wine director for New York restaurant Rouge Tomate. Pascaline, a native of the Loire Valley, here shares one of her early memories of falling in love with the region’s wines.

“Prendre le temps de Loire, c’est prendre le temps de boire.” -Sylvie Augereau

When I’m at the restaurant and our guests ask me about the wines from my region, the middle of the Loire, I never know what to say, so I don’t. I just nod to the guests, walk away and grab a bottle that we pour by the glass. I return to the table and give them a taste. I know that once they experience the special combination of simplicity and complexity, a rare taste, a special time expressed in the vintage in the wines from my region can express, they will understand what I can’t translate or describe properly except with a glass of wine. Perhaps I get tongue tied because I want them to experience and discover these wines and fall in love with them as I did when I was a student in Angers.

Angers is my hometown. It is a small town dominated by a medieval castle and very close to the vineyards of Anjou. It has also become an international wine center and at the end of January it is dominated by wine showcases, especially the Salon des Vins de Loire. Over time a cluster of other fairs have crammed into this time of the year, as well, most notably the Dive Bouteille and the Return to Terroir. Angers has become an amazing city for the wine lover, but not a place where you feel the heaviness or the “pomp and circumstance” of the “Please-pay-attention-and-bend-down-on-one-knee-before-taking-a-sip” approach you can still find in certain areas of the wine world. No. This is a place where somebody is filling your glass with some old-vines grolleau with a knowing smile because they feel you will fall in love with what is in the glass.

The very first time I harvested I had no clue about what wine really was, but I had a hunch that it was to be my life. I had begun to taste great wines in an attempt to grab an intellectual understanding of it (bad habit from my philosophy studies, always trying to deconstruct…), I had read many books, but that very first morning when I started to pick the grapes, I realized I had no clue what the nature of wine was.

I was picking grapes with my friend and mentor, Patrick, at Domaine des Griottes in a vineyard very close to Quarts-de-Chaume. It was a sunny morning, very early, with the Loire and the hills of Savennières in the back still sleeping in the fog. The owner of Griottes is a man named Pat, who with his assistant, Babas, taught me a lot. They changed their lives to go back to the vines in a very simple, forgotten way: ploughing with a horse, watching the seasons and nature very carefully, eschewing chemicals, and putting inside the bottles what nature intended after a year of nurturing and caring for the earth and the vines.

And we were here, the “vendangeurs” of a day, in this plot of 100-year old chenin. This vineyard was given in fermage (leasing) to Pat by a retired winemaker. The land never treated by chemicals but only treated by care and love. The vines were gnarly with tiny, concentrated berries. The grapes tasted sweet and sour and bitter and full of rhubarb and chamomile and roses, and salt and spices. I never tasted anything quite like them. I wanted to understand why (yes, again, I always have to understand), where, how was it possible – the age of the vines, the organic farming. “Why?” I  kept on asking them. Pat stopped me – “No need to speak. Feel and observe, take your time, you don’t have to rush, you don’t need too, you will understand.”

We harvested the whole day. At the end of the afternoon, we headed back to the winery, full of grapes. I was still very confused. After tasting the juice just out of the press, and the wines of last year, Pat disappeared, only to reappear with a bottle without a label. “For you,” he told me. He opened it, poured a glass to the assembly. I took a sip. It was pure and sharp, full of quince, linden, wax, with a touch a bitterness, and long, and good. “From the vineyard we picked today.”

It was from 1959.

“I just have one bottle left,” Pat said to me, “but I thought you may enjoy it. I thought it may help you to ‘understand’ that there is not that much to understand, but a lot to give and share. Just take the time.”

I think this is why I prefer to allow the wines from the Loire Valley to speak for themselves, because I can’t express as well as they can the unique character of the place. This simple but incredible combination of taste, terroir and craft.

- Pascaline Lepeltier, Wine Director, Rouge Tomate

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