Tagged with "le tasting room"

The butcher, the guy that supplies our wood for the fire, the local beekeeper, us, a sprinkling of friends and plenty of simple food and wine. It was just a day to remember.

This majestic ‘fleuve’ gets under your skin and once you’re smitten, that’s it. Come and see for yourself and you’ll understand.

At the end of the day wine is something to be shared and enjoyed. A carafe of wine with no visible origin served on the terrace of our local café overlooking the Loire, a bottle of Crémant with friends before a relaxed dinner in the kitchen, a sample of the new vintage taken from tank with the winemaker, a cherished bottle from the cellar. It’s all about enjoyment, discussion, pleasure and sharing.

Wineries start to shut their doors after harvest has finished but here at le tasting room, we offer a day tour that is perfectly suited to the chilly winter weather.

We sometimes complain a little – restaurants close on a Sunday evening and all day Monday, everything grinds to a halt during August, people don’t speak English. And then we have a perfect day like this when we go out on the river Loire with local boatsman Alain Gillot and afterwards enjoy a cold beer in the café by the church in Le Thoureil and realise that we don’t really want it to change.

The hedge of hydrangeas in the garden is a picture at the moment. We’ve struggled over the years to find plants that can tolerate the extreme alkaline soils here but these have been more than happy from the moment we planted them. They require pruning right back to the ground each year and yet push again providing beautiful flower heads the size of dinner plates. A bonus this year is that flowering was delayed by the awful weather earlier on allowing us to enjoy them later in the season for a change.

This spell of warm weather is a delight and last night we enjoyed a BBQ in the garden with friends and family. Everyone brought something to the table – flowers, bread, nibbles, salads and puds as well as plenty of wine. So lovely to be able to sit outside until the early hours of the morning and enjoy the balmy summer evenings.

The Coteaux du Layon is perhaps most famous for its wonderful sweet wines but producers in Anjou have a wide palate to play with so tend to make many other styles of wine too including sparkling, dry white, rosé and red. The landscape is quite different to elsewhere in the Loire valley and is well worth a visit on foot, by car or cycling through the vineyards.

At last – after all the recent bad weather and a distinct lack of sunshine we thought it would never happen. Flowering is an important stage in the life cycle of the vine and weather conditions during this time will have an impact upon the quality of the bunches that follow. In an ideal world we hope for warm sunny days and a light breeze.

The weather was perfect yesterday afternoon for our Secrets of the River tour. After a morning spent wine tasting here in our 16th century tasting room, we enjoyed a lazy three course lunch in our old barrel cellar and then went down to the river for an hour and a half on the water in an old sand dredging boat.

A few pictures taken at 7am this morning. When the sun rises and the sky is blue everything comes to life. The limestone glistens and becomes golden and the herbs, flowers and vegetables take on richer tones than at other times during the day. There’s a peace and tranquility too, broken by the sound of the cuckoo in a nearby tree in the hamlet.