Several months ago I spent about forty pounds on a bottle of Guigal's Châteauneuf du Pape blanc. I almost never spend that much on a bottle of wine, especially a white, so I had to ask myself: what was I thinking? Well, the fact is that I have a soft spot for the whites of that region.
Before I entered the wine trade, I took a backpack to the southern Rhône. I had already developed a liking for the area’s powerful and intoxicating red wines, so I decided to spend some time there, relying on public transport and my own two feet. It was high summer and the weather was glorious.
After visiting the attractive hillside wine village of Séguret, I walked several miles across the plain to my destination, Rasteau, in the middle of a roasting August afternoon. My route was complicated by the presence of the River Ouvèze, so I ended up going the long way via Roaix, a Côtes du Rhône named village which you almost never see on a label, at least in the U.K. I wrote the following in my notebook after that crazy trek:
Walk from Séguret to Roaix intolerable. Heat appalling, barely a breath of wind. Vines stretch across the flat land; gobelet, wires. Lots of canopy, big bunches of grapes. Hotel guy told me it hadn’t rained for two weeks; previous downpour was a violent thunderstorm.
Sweating buckets, I stopped at a roadside inn outside Roaix. It might have been wiser to order a Perrier or a Badoit, but I opted for a glass of 'vin blanc' instead. I don’t remember what it was, probably a Côtes du Rhône, but that was my memorable introduction to the whites of the southern Rhône.
After reaching my destination, I discovered that white AOC Rasteau was not a thing, that honour being reserved for Grenache-heavy reds and Vins Doux Naturel. Neighbouring Cairanne made whites, though, so I decided to go there.
I recommend that any energetic lover of wines from the southern Rhône should undertake the walk between those two villages. You ascend a hill behind Rasteau, past row upon stony row of vines. Eventually you reach the top of ‘La Montagne’, which is actually only about 350 metres high, from which point you can see the ‘vieux village’ of Cairanne on a nearby hilltop. It’s a lovely walk, and if you undertake it in August when all the farmers are on holiday, the only sounds you’ll hear will be from cicadas, mosquitos and the occasional passing helicopter.
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| Cairanne |
I got chatting to a wine merchant in the modern part of Cairanne, below the old hilltop village. White wine, he told me, was more important than red before phylloxera. Not anymore, of course! Still, whites are taken seriously in Cairanne, whose wines apparently have more acidity than those made in neighbouring villages. When I asked why this should be, I was given the rather enigmatic explanation that the soil and ‘terroir’ were responsible. I say enigmatic, because the soil and terroir seemed very similar to Rasteau’s to me: marl, clay, sand, an abundance of stones, all in a very warm and dry climate.
I was curious about the grapes used in the blend, for they were not exactly household words, at least to an inexperienced British drinker. Grenache Blanc, he told me, was neutral, but had body. Bourboulenc was also quite neutral, but brought acidity, a rare thing in the southern Rhône. The flavour came from Clairette, which now has the caché of being the principal grape used in white Gigondas. For some reason, Roussanne didn’t merit a mention, perhaps because it was originally from the northern Rhône! At the time, I had little familiarity with these varietals, so I was fascinated.
I never made it to Châteauneuf du Pape, unfortunately. It turned out that the southern Rhône shares one of the U.K.’s deficiencies: you can’t rely on local buses. As for why I’m keen on whites from Cairanne, Lirac, Vacqueyras and so on, I think I have to acknowledge that, most importantly, they remind me of that beautiful region. I might even drink a rosé from there.
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