Wine is fun with Bordeaux babes
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From left to right: Marie-Laure Lurton, Armelle Falcy-Cruse, Martine Cazeneuve and Florence Lafragette.
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LUDON-MEDOC, BORDEAUX, France -- In wine as in life, you have to know the rules to break the rules. And when you're a woman winemaker, stomping grapes against the big boys in Bordeaux's rigidly controlled wine industry, it's good to have some like-minded females on your side. In the Haut-Medoc, where growing grapes is like growing diamonds, four femmes du vin -- Martine Cazeneuve, Armelle Falcy-Cruse, Marie-Laure Lurton and Florence Lafrage -- are sisters doing it for themselves.
As harvest time nears, Martine Cazeneuve starts every day by eating grapes, and invites her guests to do the same. That's why I'm standing in Chateau Paloumey's 64-hectare vineyard on a brilliant morning in early October, chewing a single, succulent specimen of merlot. The hands-on tour is a gambit of Martine and her colleagues, who've branded themselves as Les Medocaines. In a day trip to Paloumey and the neighboring Chateau du Taillan, I'm getting a chance to "see wine-making from backstage," as Martine puts it.
Martine assembles our group of visitors on the edge of a vineyard fat with clusters of merlot grapes, dark globes that nearly brush the pebbley gray soil. Tall, slim and serious, with a chic scarf and horn-rimmed glasses, she holds a grape aloft.
"Bite!" she commands, demonstrating precisely. "The skin should be not too strong. It should taste sweet. Look at the seeds -- they should not be green." After 20 years of experience, Martine relies on her taste buds to set the vendange schedule. "Yesterday, I taste all parcels of merlot to find ones to harvest," she explains. Today, she arms us with shears and plastic baskets and points us down the orderly rows of vines. I quickly discover there's no easy posture for this task, which requires some ungainly moves: a deep-knee bend, a duck waddle or a stooped side step. In 10 minutes I fill my basket and dump it onto a conveyor. After a de-stemmer machine rinses and separates the grapes, our crew gathers alongside the rollers, removing crushed grapes and bits of leaves. The grapes vanish into a huge plastic hose, en route to 8,000-liter stainless steel holding tanks inside. The journey into wine begins.
Along the western bank of Garonne River a few miles from the city of Bordeaux, the Medoc has a 2,000-year history of viticulture. The British called its remarkable red wines claret, and imported it for centuries.
First Published December 2, 2010 12:00 am
