Sunshine at last

After a period of two weeks which feels more like two months, the sunshine has finally returned to south west France today.

This morning we got up to a pleasant, clear day and by lunchtime the sun was shining bright in the late autumn sky.  Sadly, it didn't have enough strength to chase away the cold which has enveloped us here for the past couple of weeks but temperatures rose to almost 20C (68F) although they never quite reached that peak remaining stubbornly a couple of degrees below.

It will be good news for my friend Bernard though, who I saw on Friday when I called in with some guests to buy a bottle of his sweet white dessert wine, Monbazillac, and who was telling me that this year's vendange was being quite problematic because of the poor weather.

When making Monbazillac wine, the grapes are left on the vine until they get attacked by the fungus, botrytis.    Moist conditions are required for an infestation of botrytis on the ripe grapes but then the grapes need to be exposed to drier conditions which concentrate the sugars.   This process is known as noble rot and is the essence of production of sweet white wines such as Monbazillac, which will keep for upwards of 60 years after a particularly good vintage.

However, if the botrytis infestation occurs and the weather then remains wet, the rot quickly turns to grey rot which can destroy the whole harvest.

Because of this requirement to select fruit which are at exactly the right state of infestation, the grapes are picked by hand and several passes through the vineyard need to be made.   Monbazillac is a sweet dessert wine made from 80% Sauvignon, 15% Muscadelle and 5% Sémillon grapes.

Villereal, Kate and a day in Perigord.

Kate, of Hills and Plains Seedsavers, is spending a couple of days  here as part of her Vegetable Vagabond world tour.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to Villereal for the weekly market.   The market has quietened down a bit from the business of the height of the season and it was nice for Kate to meet and chat to some of the traders that I regularly visit.... I just had my usual weekly fruit and vegetable shop to complete but Kate had decided to cook dinner for us on Sunday evening and happily bought mussels, ginger, limes, lemons and other bits and pieces for her chosen recipe.

Before getting back to start some serious gardening, we paid a quick visit to my friend Bernard's vineyard where Kate was able to taste our local Monbazillac wine....   Kate doesn't drink that much wine but she certainly enjoyed the sweet dessert wine and tried two or three different vintages before deciding which year to purchase.

Later, we visited another friend with a large kitchen garden and Kate spent about an hour and half chatting happily about fruit and vegetables, taking in the way we do things here in the south west of France and passing on the differences and similarities to her own gardening experience in South Australia.

Our friends Michael and Mary met Kate on Friday evening and invited us all to go along on Saturday so that they could prepare a typical Perigordine dinner for us.  Kate's love of food meant that this opportunity could not be refused so we ended the day at their house enjoying a great meal.

When we arrived we spent about an hour looking around her potager and fruit trees before strolling over to the "chook" house.    In their household, Mary does the gardening and Michael looks after the chooks.  Before we had been their many minutes Kate was inside the fenced enclosure moving about trying to get photographs for her blog while the chickens, and in particular the large cock, rushed about trying to avoid her whilst herding his girls.

Dinner started with a cocktail and Michael produced his cocktail "menu" for Kate to choose from.... a selection of 101 cocktails!!!

After the cocktail, served with duck boudin, home grown cherry tomatoes, prunes and apricots wrapped in bacon we moved to the table for dinner.  

First a thick creamy garlic soup....  Then a plate of local cold meats including sliced dried breast of duck, Foie Gras, duck saucisson and various other local delicacies.... Next a "confit de canard" served with local potatoes sautéed in duck fat.... A cheese board with 5 different cheese from the south of France was then followed by Kate's apple pie and cream, made to her own special recipe.

It was a great traditional French evening with lots of good food, lots of good wine and most importantly, lots of good conversation and humour.

Villereal - 21st June 2008

It was market day again today and as usual on a Saturday morning we went. As it happened, this week, we didn’t need to buy any fruit or vegetables but I did need to go to a couple of other vendors and the bank.
The sun was shining and the temperatures were up into the higher 20’s C (mid 80’s F)





First stop, as usual, was the coffee shop for breakfast

We wandered around looking at the wine stands and the flowers. There are usually between about 6 and 10 different vineyards selling their wine at the market. My friend Bernard doesn’t come to market every week and he wasn’t there this week. However, there are plenty of other vineyards about and the photo shows a different vineyard which makes that same combination of wines that I spoke about recently.

I was unable to take many pictures of fruit and vegetables today which were absolutely stunning as usual. Some regular readers will know that my accomplishments do not yet stretch to mastering the digital camera and today the sun was incredibly bright and all the fruit and vegetable stalls were under deep shade to protect the produce. I tried a couple but even though I remember taking them I cannot even recognise them on my camera!!!! However, these tomatoes, which did come out give you a sense of what it’s like. I’m afraid, to get a more complete picture you’re going to have to come here, or, with a bit of luck, wait till I master the camera!! Don’t hold your breath waiting though.



Several stalls had flowers out in the open and I did manage to get a picture of those.







Then finally I got to Yousef!

Yousef runs a goat farm a few kilometres outside Villereal.






He has invited us to a gourmet market which he is holding at the farm every Wedneday evening through the summer. This sounds very like the one I went to a couple of weeks ago at Clos de Pech Besous. We buy his gorgeous tasting goat’s cheese virtually every week.



One of the great things I like about markets here in France, is that you never quite know what to expect. The markets I go to are village markets. Traditionally, this is where the French housewives would go and buy everything they needed for domestic life. As well as food, in all it’s shades, there are pots and pans, clothes, jewellery, books even watches, sunglasses, thermometers rainfall gauges etc.


This week, this guy had set himself up in a small alley and was weaving baskets. He was selling the ones he was making right there at the market. He made just 3 different designs, all fabulous spiral things and if you wanted one, he wove it, and you popped back and picked it up later.
Now, how simple a form of trading is that?

Marché Gourmande

I have another friend who grows grapes, Sylvie. She owns a very nice little vineyard whose land adjoins ours.

The other day she held a Marché Gourmande – a Gourmet Market.

This is the fourth year that she has organised this event and it has become an important day in the local calendar.

Sylvie has a large courtyard in front of her chai and the other outbuildings she uses for storing both the wine and all equipment necessary for making wine. The chai is the area where the wine is actually made.

She put up 3 Poly tunnels – the 6m (20 ‘) high sort and laid out tables and chairs under them. All around the courtyard she set up market stalls for the various vendors.

We arrived about 6.30pm and were greeted by Sylvie with kisses and an aperitif, her own sweet white wine (Bergerac Moelleux).

There were various vendors in attendance, Sylvie had a stall selling her own wines, by the glass or by the bottle, there were a couple from Champagne selling their local wine! A local pork farmer was there with his excellent locally bred pork offering Jambon Braisée – a kind of roast pork. There were people selling cheese including an excellent sheep’s cheese and people selling ever so fresh Strawberries.

We wandered around for a while meeting and greeting our friends before buying a plate of this and a plate of that and taking our places at one of the long tables to eat. For my first course I had charcuterie. In this case a beautiful mousse pate of duck accompaied by dried duck breast and some duck sausage. It was delicious and had been made within about 5 kilometres (2 miles) of where I was eating it.

Of course, there was a bottle of Sylvie’s rosé wine on the table to accompany it. I was joined by several of our neighbours who shared their foods and wine with us. We had bought a bottle of Rosé for the first course and someone else bought a bottle of red to accompany the main course of roast pork with sautéed potatoes. Bread had been bought by another of the neighbours and was also shared across the table.

We had forgotten to take our own plates and cutlery so one of my neighbours also came to the rescue providing us with both. I had carefully guarded the plastic glass that the aperitif had been served in so that I would have a drinking vessel for wine and water as the evening progressed.

Cheese came after the main course. I actually don’t know who bought the cheese but one of our neighbours bought cheese for all six of us and I enjoyed a very creamy cheese made from sheep’s milk.

We bought dessert for all six of us. It took the form of some of the biggest, freshest, juiciest strawberries I have seen this year and we all had a small glass of the Bergerac Moelleux to accompany them.

Our village is quite small. We have a council chamber and one permanent member of staff and we also have a community hall. There are 340 people in our village. I reckon about 300 people attended this evening market.

After we had all finished eating the band struck up and entertained us. As the stage had been set up across the courtyard from where we all sat under the poly tunnels, they soon abandoned the stage, preferring to come out amongst us and play an acoustic set. The three members took a poly tunnel each and climbed up on the tables to entertain us, leading the singing and dancing and trying to coax as many people as possible to join in.

It was a great evening and was well past midnight when we finally strolled back to the car for the short lift home. We ended the evening with a glass of Armagnac shared between ourselves and the two neighbours who had collected us.

My Friend Bernard

I visited my friend Bernard the other day and was forced to try a couple of his wines.

The first was his 2007 AOC Bergerac Rosé. Of course, this wine was still very young at only a few months old but rosé is best drunk young.

This one was a very nice, well, rose colour and was very light on the palate although the label told me it was 13% alcohol.

I bought a few bottles to drink in the afternoons, sitting on the terrace, when the temperatures reach 35C (96F) and it's too hot to do anything else but have a chilled glass of rosé

The wine tasting went on with another 6 or 7 different bottles which I didn't sample as I was the driver!!! However, when Bernard produced a 1984 Monbazillac (pronounced "MON+BAZ+EE+YAC") desert wine I decided that, as I had only tasted the tiniest bit of rosé, I could also taste the Monbazillac.

Monbazillac is an Appelation covering about 2200 Hectares (5400 acres) south of Bergerac in South West France. From this tiny region about 6.5 million bottles of a sweet dessert wine are produced every year.

The New York Times recently rated the Monbazillac as one of the best dessert wines available and a "Must Buy" for it's wine collectors.

I love any Monbazillac but the opportunity to taste a 20 year old one doesn't come along that often so I allowed my self a half glass and reminded myself of the wonderful way that sweet wines develop over the years. This one reminded me of mango but with honey in there as well.

The colour was a rich golden. Monbazillac shows both the percentage alcohol on the label and the percentage sugar. So if you go to buy one, check the 2 figures - something like 14% + 8.5. They should add up to more than 21% and the greater the last figure the sweeter the wine. This is excellent wine to accompany very sweet desserts - or smooth rich pates like duck or goose.

Monbazillac is a very well kept secret with only about 20% being exported from France and most of that staying in Europe. I heard recently that exports to the USA had reached 5% of production but I don't know whether that is true.

If you get a chance, buy it and put it somewhere cool and dark. 24 year old Monbazillac is still quite young as the classic vintages will keep in excess of 60 years. However, please do remember to change the cork every 20 years!!

Ian