JEAN COUTURE bends down in his vineyard and gently caresses his dew soaked malbec grapes. He cradles the fruit gently and lovingly in the palm of his hand. The plump black-skinned grapes ooze a sweet sticky juice at the slightest encouragement. They taste absolutely delicious, writes PETER MURTAGH.
It will be a good year, says Jean Couture, perhaps a very good year. Little rain and beaucoup de soleil. “Beaucoup de soleil!” he proclaims with emphasis lest we do not understand the significance of this crucial ingredient for the vigneron. That and the sugar content.
We are high above the river Lot, a little west of Cahors in south central France and it is harvest time. The vineyards here are among the highest in Cahors and it is hard to understand how this stony, boney and parched earth of sun-bleached limestone can produce fruit of such succulence. But it does; year after year.
The red wine from this vineyard is Château Eugénie’s finest – branded as Haute Collection and selling in the chateau for €22. To put that price in context, the chateau’s other wines sell for as little as €4.60 a bottle.
There’s something impish about Jean Couture. A grin will often start to creep across his face but then he’ll suppress it and get back to the serious business of wine talk. He’s a slight man, lean and fit for his 68 years. He sports a neat tash and goatee. There’s a whiff of the Fourth Musketeer about him.
From the vantage point above the Lot where he brought me and my friend Tony in late September, he was able to survey many of the 45 separate vineyards, amounting to some 113 acres, owned or rented by Château Eugénie, the largest independent chateau in the area. The Lot at this point near Albas is fat, lazy and majestic as it winds its way west to join the Garonne and pass Bordeaux.
The valley floor is rich alluvial soil, made fertile by the Lot’s flood waters washing over it. But it is not the best land for grape production. Jean points to one particular chateau down on the plain and talks history.
The “black wines of Cahors” have been prized in France and abroad since at least the 12th century. The marriage in 1152 of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry Plantagenet, the Duke of Normandy and future Henry II of England, helped popularise Cahors there. Around the same time and for many centuries thereafter, pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain were also tempted by the occasional draught of Cahors, eventually returning home extolling its delight.
By 1310, Cahors was producing an astonishing 850,000 hl of wine annually (today the figure is around 163,000 hl or 1.8 million cases), amounting to 50 per cent of all wine exported through Bordeaux. In the mid-19th century, a plague of phylloxera destroyed virtually all the vineyards of Cahors and the region has never fully recovered.
Peter the Great of Russia, who travelled much in France in the early years of the 17th century, became a devotee of Cahors’s deep rich reds and began an association with the region that Jean Couture helps keeps alive.
Back to that chateau below in the valley . . . “That,” explains Jean Couture, “was the last chateau producing wine for export to Peter the Great.”
When they stopped, Jean’s family, who have been vignerons in the area since 1470, bought some of the vines, transplanted them and continue to cultivate them. Today, the descendants of those vines produce Château Eugénie’s Cuvée Pierre le Grand, named in honour of the tsar. The link pleases Jean no end.
Jean and his brother Claude have built Château Eugénie into what it is today: the largest independent chateau in the area, but nothing grand for all that. Jean’s home is a modest farm house about 30 years old. Claude has retired almost totally; Jean potters about the place taking an interest in all that goes on, proudly showing visitors about the farm but essentially leaving the running of the business to his son Vincent, and Claude’s son, Jerome.
The high side of the Lot valley is shrouded in early morning mist as Jean trundles from vineyard to vineyard searching for the grape-picking machines to show us. Long gone are the days of hand picking and bear foot treading of grapes. The harvest these days is carried out with industrial precision.
We hear the noise of the machines at first as they emerge out of the mist looking a little like bit players from War of the Worlds. The driver sits elevated above the vines, the legs of the tractor-like picking machines straddling either side of the rows. As he drives up and down the line, hooped-shaped plastic sticks mounted on the inside of both sets of legs vibrate violently, causing all the grapes to fall off. They are caught by a moving belt that shunts them into hoppers and collects them in large tanks, elevated on either side of the picking machine.
The harvesters are painted yellow and look, for all the world, like bumble bees with great sacks of pollen on their back legs . . .
Tractor-pulled trailers ferry the harvest back to the winery. More machines separate grapes and juice and leave and stalks. The grapes are allowed rest for a time in their own juices before being vacuum squeezed to extract every precious drop.
Then begins the process of fermentation in great vertical silo tanks for 10 to 30 days, followed by decanting into 400 litre oak barrels and storage for up to 20 months. The final process, the all-important blending before bottling, is a family affair conducted around the kitchen table. Repeated sampling results in consensus as to what wines should be mixed to achieve the desired result.
And they’re good at it, the family Couture, as medals displayed proudly in the winery shop testify. There, at the end of a long hard day, the men stand around in their working clothes, chatting before heading home. In each farmer’s hard is a delicate glass of rosé. They sip and chat – for all I know about football or what’s on the telly that night, but they pay serious attention to the rosé as well.
Inside his farm house kitchen, health conscious Jean Couture is making a pot of his special herbal tea – a ghastly looking brown brew. “Elixir de l’emperor Chinois!” he declares with an impish smile.
Me? Thanks, but I’ll stick with Cuvée Pierre le Grand.