(The following is the unedited essay I wrote that appears in The Oldways Table (Essays & Recipes From the Culinary Think Tank)
After a stellar tasting in their deep stone cellar, Jean Louis Chave, the younger generation of the most revered domaine in Hermitage, Domaine Chave, handed me a bottle of Vin de Paille. This is a sweet wine made from grapes raisined on straw mats—hence the “paille,” It was a 1996 and the first vintage his father and mentor, Gerard, allowed him to vinify. He explained the wine took five whole years to stop fermenting. Modern wine producers would never have the patience for such a lazy wine. They would have fed the wine yeast and presto--the wine would have finished fermenting in a matter of a few days, not years. But this is not the way winemaking happens with the Chave’s. If the wine goes slow, then it goes slow.
Well, Jean Louis asked me to share that bottle with “George the Greek” an infamous character in Tain Hermitage. George’s store changes into an impromptu wine bar on sultry summer nights. And that night, with winemakers swapping many bottles with each other (and me) the Paille was overlooked. At three in the morning, I called it a night. George insisted on making me breakfast in the morning.
I was still bleary when I stumbled into George’s store, now transformed into a caf. There were fresh picked apricots, yogurt, pain seigle, espresso and…a chilled 1996 Chave Vin de Paille. He insisted I taste it…before coffee. “Just think of it as your morning juice,” he said. The wine was a brilliant and nervous wine, an exotic nectar of apricots and peaches in one sip, gooseberries and pineapples and perhaps a bit salty. This was one of the freshest of the genre of ‘raisined grape’ wines I’ve ever tasted. Even though I was about to get on the road again, I had to have a wee bit more.
Sweet wine is best when it is made the way the Chave’s do it, in a completely naturally manner. During fermentation the yeast eats up all of the sugars in the wine it can stomach. If the yeast is vigorous it wants to digest it all until the wine is left dry. However, if there is still sugar left, the wine stays sweet. You can stop the fermentation by adding neutral spirit—as with Port or the category of wines called 'Vin Doux Naturel (such as the French Maury or Beaume de Venise). However, if the grapes are super-concentrated and super-sweet to start with, fermentation will “stick” at some point.
The world’s most famous sweet wines concentrate their sweetness with “the noble rot.” Botrytis is the a rot that sweetens the inside grape. This is the way with the golden Sauternes from Bordeaux, Monbazillac from the Dordogne, Azsu from Hungary, Beerenausles’s of Germany and in some years some gorgeous Loire whites made from Chenin Blanc.
Freezing is an option. This technique can makes the most romantic of all sweet wines. While many ‘modern’ winemakers very unromantically shove their ripe grapes into a freezer, there are still brave winemakers who gear up, steal out in the middle of the night of the first deep freeze, and pick frozen grapes off of the vine. They press those extremely concentrated fruit into precious and extremely expensive nectar—‘Ice Wine.'
And then there is the raisin technique, probably the most ancient of all. Some say it debuted in Crete when winemakers twisted stems of the grape bunch to cut off its nutrition. The grapes shriveled on the vine. This method is used in many areas of the world, most notably in France and in Italy. Some famed examples of these are Italy’s “Passitos” (love the dark cinnamon-ish Sagrantino di Montefalco from Umbria) and the seductive Amarones from the Veneto.
And then there’s that honeyed Vin De Paille. The trick to making any top-notch sweet wine is to maintain the balance between the wine’s lemony acidity and its sweetness. And this wine had it. In the end, it was a great match with the exquisite sun-blushed apricots. Sure sweet wine is a perfect way to end dinner, but before breakfast it really isn’t so bad. –Alice Feiring
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