The past few weeks, I haven't been connecting with wine as much as I usually do. Things just haven’t been clicking a lot, wine wise. Sometimes in our circle of natural wine loving friends we say, ‘wine is tasting really good right now,’ because it will feel over the span of a few days or weeks that all wine everywhere in town is tasting delicious. I went for about two weeks of missing this feeling and sought to change it.
Last week I had a night to myself and ordered pizza from Jimmy’s Pizza Cafe, which I recommend for a new york slice style. I wasn’t sure about opening P’tit Poussot, a Chardonnay from one of Alice’s own vines. it’s on the spendier side for one of our wines, i didn’t think i’d finish the whole bottle to myself, and it doesn’t register for me as a ‘pizza wine,’ i.e. it's not sangiovese. On the other hand, it’s a winery that really gets at me, and it’s a wine that isn’t very high in alcohol, so I felt like if I did drink a lot of the wine, it would be less detrimental to the next morning. Now, in recounting this for the blog, I also remember drinking a 2014 bottle of Corvee de Trousseau from Octavin that was 9% alcohol by myself on a Monday night at Red & White, the wine shop where I used to work, and having a great time. I poured some for a person who came in to the shop and they also bought a bottle, even though it wasn’t what they had planned to get. It was spendy then too, and I felt my whim was rewarded. It was an interesting, engaging and perfect wine to drink alone, you didn’t feel alone but rather in the company of this wine as it shifted in your glass. It was a chatty wine, and we had a nice conversation.
I have been enjoying the wines for about seven years or so. I fell for her wines pretty hard. They showed me something unique about wine at a certain point in my career when I was ready to discover more. After drinking them for this time, and generally being into wines of nature, I have disabused myself of the notion of having an expectation of them. My expectation is, this is going to be different.
Alice Bouvot is a vanguard vigneronne working in the Jura mountains, in the capital of this beloved region, a town called Arbois. It’s easy to be obsessed with Alice. I’ve never met her but she seems passionate, intelligent with an amazing sense of whimsy based on how she labels and calls her wines, many illustrated with gnomes. My impressions are based on second-hand stories, and from this one video on her american importer's website, Zev Rovine Selections. She seems to be popular since she has a lot of winemaker friends to harvest fruit with when her vintage is low-yielding, as it has unfortunately been a lot in recent years. She travels to the languedoc, to Alsace, to Beaujolais to harvest fruit with these colleagues that she brings back with her to vinify at her winery.
Alice's wines are beautiful and totally inimitable. She is adept at many techniques of winemaking, displaying skill with carbonic maceration, petillant naturel, direct press and macerated wines. One thing that helped me understand her project is when I called up Zev Rovine to talk about the wines he had started importing from Domaine de la Pinte. Pinte is a more traditional Jura winery. It is much, much bigger, an organic farming enterprise in comparison to Alice's small shop. Zev was describing Domaine de la Pinte, and I asked, so how would you compare these wines to Alice Bouvot’s, and he didn’t really know where to start. Something interesting came up which is - that he said Alice doesn’t like very extracted wines, her emphasis is on brief macerations and concise fermentations. She also harvests on the earlier side, she’s not going for big ripeness. The wines are ready to age relatively quickly. I thought about how especially true this is in comparison to Domaine de La Pinte, whose craft is focused more on the structure of tannin and acidity. Alice seems to be working with something beyond the traditional expression of wine (of bitterness and brightness as the building blocks of weight and texture). Her building blocks are maybe not blocks at all, she seems to find ways in, out and through grapes that render you wordless. I probably have to go visit the winery to understand how she achieves the range of textures she does without leaning on ripeness and tannin, I’m sure it’s in how she does everything, from how she moves the juice to when she bottles, and more.
Sometimes I forget how important it is to listen to a lot of music at a loud volume, then I listen to music loud and find it so much better. The wine analogy for me is that sometimes I forget to drink the wine in my glass. When I am cooking I get my hands dirty and get busy and distracted, then it’s a rush to get food to the table, then I am hungry and just want to eat, and while eating I sip some wine but don’t really just drink. or don’t really get into the wine somehow, I’m too busy unpacking what I cooked, considering it from several angles.
Before I had my pizza I made sure to drink a glass of this wine. easy to do, as it was seriously delicious. Sometimes it’s nice to get a little drunk. To me, alcohol is an important part of a wine’s expression.
In other vintages P’tit Poussot has been so light and even lower in alcohol that you can’t quite catch it, trying to grab a fish from a stream. The last bottle I'd had was also lightly fizzy, floating up and away, even more elusive. I remember the wine being closer to green in color. I thought of Australian Semillon or some Riesling or something.
I was a little surprised and delighted at how this vintage of P’tit Poussot was. It feels airy yet also grounded. It turned out to be a perfectly great drink with pizza, it had enough body and acidity. Most of all, while not an intuitive pairing, what makes it work is that relationship of time and energy. I had space to be with the wine because someone else made the pizza.
So I recommend you try some pizza and P’tit Poussot. Or just drink P’tit Poussot, or any wine. I hope that, for you as it is for me, spending some time trying to dialogue with a wine will make for a nice night. We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of interesting and tasty things in the shop, including a rainbow of bottles from a new winery, Vigna Flor, from the Veneto, in Italy. Lots to explore and discover. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or curiosities, you can email rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or dm @rainbowwine. Cheers.
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