wine
A Sweet Life
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIM HENSLEY
All eyes were on the bottle...
Girls, French girls in fact, had been
persuaded to come over to where the tent
was pitched. This was not to be a beer and
potato chip event. This called for white
wine...maybe cheese, a fire on the beach.
This particular campground happened to be
in the south of France. It really couldn’t have
been anywhere else. The adjoining shop was
filled with accidental gourmets filling their
baskets with exotic foods. The group of
young men I was spying on had crossed the
Channel from England to try their luck on
the Côte d’Azur.
There’s an element of luck when picking out
a bottle of wine for any given occasion if you
don’t learn to decipher the clues. The bottle
the campers were leaning toward was clear
glass with an ornate, classy label—the wine
in it, a deeply satisfying gold color. They
had stumbled over a real unexpected pearl;
Ch. Climens, Sauternes at an astonishingly
affordable price.
Terms like red and white, dry or sweet have
only limited meaning. I’ve had red wines as
black as coffee, and the occasional bottle
of Chablis that looked pretty green to me.
As far as sweet goes, that Chablis had lost
whatever trace of sugar its chardonnay
grapes ever had. Buy a bottle of Chardonnay
from Sonoma County and you’ll likely get
more than a hint of sweetness. Now a lot of
this is up to the wine maker. Delaying the
harvest will make for riper, sweeter grapes.
44 | SWEET PAUL . HOLIDAY 2010
Ending fermentation earlier will leave some
of the natural sugars in the wine. That’s
what’s happening during fermentation—
the yeasts are consuming the sugars and
leaving alcohol behind. In theory, the more
sugar, the more alcohol. At a certain point
though, the amount of alcohol trapped in
the bottle will kill the yeasts before all the
sugar is converted. The wine will then have
a certain fruity sweetness to it. Sauternes
is a special case of nature doing something
unexpected and spectacular. Most other
white Bordeaux wines are bone-dry. The
northern latitude of the vineyards doesn’t
make for super ripe grapes most years,
and frankly the wine makers here don’t
want them. Except in Sauternes. There,
sweet white wine is king. Situated at the
point where one colder river flows into
a warmer one, Sauternes has an almost
unique advantage. The rivers create an early
morning fog at just the right time, in just
the right season and in just the right place to
encourage a particular fungus to attack the
grapes, pierce their skins and allow much of
the juice to evaporate. It’s called “noble rot.”
Most fungus in the vineyards is, well, just
rot. It ruins the grapes and makes for rotten
wine. Noble rot turns grapes into one of the
wine world’s real jewels.
How the campfire date ended, I’ll never
know. The three young men hurried off to
the cashier with a surprise bottle of dessert
wine, and a six-pack of beer just in case.
In my imagination they had a night to
remember, at least on one level.
SAUTERNES
Once in a lifetime
Tradition compels me to say
Château d’Yquem. Honesty
compels me to say I’ve never
had it. It is the head honcho of
dessert wines and one of the
planet’s most expensive liquid, by
the way. One vine makes about a
glass of wine.
Whenever you can
Almost any Sauternes will be
good, provided it comes from
a good year. Ask around. Try
Climens, Guirad, or Doisy-Daëne.
Whenever you want
Luckily, like other French luxury
items, there are believable
copies. Wines from the districts
Monbazillac or Cadillac can give
you almost the same quality for a
fraction of the price.
