Sancerre: Geology, Wine, and Crottins de Chavignol

After spending a couple of weeks in the U.S., I flew home, did some laundry, played with the dogs, made a batch of dog meatloaf, repacked my suitcase, and in about 48 hours was boarding another plane, this time to France. My ultimate destination was Sancerre, located in the eastern (upper) end of the Loire Valley, south of Paris and almost in the center of France. My goal: attend two weeks of French language immersion at the Coeur de France school. Because this was another amazing adventure, I’m going to have to spread it across a couple of posts. In this one, I’m going to talk about Sancerre itself. If you couldn’t care less about history, geology, wine or cheese, then you’ll have to wait a bit for my post about the language school experience!

Sancerre is an unbelievably charming medieval walled village located on the top of a hill overlooking the Loire River. It isn’t the highest hill in the area but it clearly has major strategic value by virtue of its many clear sightlines across the river floodplain and back into the hills. The older settlement in the area is located down on the river itself but it apparently was abandoned several times due to flooding and warfare; the river is broad and shallow and the floodplain is  flat although bordered by low hills, and the riverside settlement would have been difficult to defend.

Looking east towards Sancerre from the vineyards.

Looking NNE towards the Loire River in the upper left distance. You can see the broad river floodplain and the gentle hills that surround it. Sancerre village is directly behind me.

The hill is a distinct topographic feature (more on this below) that was probably used for thousands of years by Neanderthals and other early humans for a variety of purposes, even if for nothing else but the views! Native Celts probably used the hill for scouting (they established settlements in the area though apparently not on top of the hill) and the Romans certainly liked it, building roads up it, several successive churches on it, and a fortification on the top. Foundations of the village wall date from this time. Things really began cooking in the 10th century as the growing middle class of landowners and merchants started building larger, more elaborate homes, establishing Sancerre as an important center of commerce, trade, and power. There is a mostly intact (it’s been thoroughly repaired) tower dating from around 1150 that is all that is left of a larger, multi-tower castle. And there are buildings in the village, some occupied now as private homes, that date from the 1380’s or so. The fortified village was involved in a dizzying array of wars and local power struggles because of its geographic position and the wealth of its residents. Still, it has managed to survive and thrive.

View of the 12th century tower (far upper left) from my window. The other towers that you can see in the middle background are much younger.

I climbed to the top of the tower on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. The tower is at a topographic knob at the top Sancerre, roughly in the middle of the "back side" of the hill. Here I'm looking southwest. In town, you can see the main church in the middle left. At the west end of the small plaza in front if it is the charcuterie. This photo really shows the topography of the gently rolling hills within the Sancerre AOC and the topographic isolation of Sancerre village.

I'm looking south from the top of the tower. In the middle of the village at my feet you can see an L-shaped, grey-colored, grey-roofed building with white window casements. That is the Coeur de France school. My apartment was on the right side of the L on the second floor.

The Sancerre hill is the result of a fault that runs at its foot (see the map below). The fault juxtaposes different rock types (older rocks to the west of the fault, younger ones to the east). Because the section of older rocks is tilted, different types of rocks are exposed at the surface. This soil variation is the source of the world-famous Sancerre wines. There is verified documentation of wine making in the area dating from 582 AD but as with most things of this nature, it is likely that the people in the area were making wine for centuries before that.

The blue colors are for older rocks of Jurassic age, say 150 Ma, and the greens are for younger Cretaceous rocks, say 90 Ma. The orange blob north of Sancerre is Eocene age, around 35 Ma. The tan color at the top of the Sancerre hill is also Eocene produced by weathering of the Eocene rocks. This map is a reproduction of an old hand-colored map and unfortunately the colors in the legend don't match up too well with the colors in the map. The linear fault runs N-S at the foot of the Sancerre hill (on the west side of the hill). To my great annoyance, there is no scale on the map but I estimate that one inch at the full-size of the scan is about 1 mile. Put another way, the crow-flight distance from the center of Sancerre to Saint-Satur is about a mile.

If you drink wine, then you have heard of Sancerre white wine, which is made using sauvignon grapes. You may not know that in the same area they also make small volumes of rosé and red wines using pinot noir grapes. The small wine region around Sancerre has a coveted AOC (appellation d'origine contrôlée) designation, and the land and the vines are very tightly controlled indeed. Many of the larger vineyards have storefronts in Sancerre or in nearby villages and I did two formal and several informal tastings. One of my favorite wines was a rosé from the Alphonse Mellot Domaine Moussiere vineyard which has obtained a rare “biologique” (organic) labeling from various European and French agencies (they don't make much of this rosé and don't export it; I was lucky to be there at the source). I also really liked the white wine called “Les Chasseignes” made by Domaine Fouassier. It is a beautiful example of a Sancerre white: light, dry, low acidity, slight fruit aromas and flavors but not fruity tasting (nor terribly sweet), and smooth to drink.

(For you wine buffs, Pouilly Fume whites are cousins to Sancerre whites. They come from similar soil types and also have their own AOC, but the vineyards are located on the other side of the Loire River. This constitutes an enormous difference in the world of AOC.)

There is a museum in town called “La Maison de Sancerre” which has to be one of the more interesting museums I’ve visited in a while. They don’t have art. Instead, all of the displays address some aspect of the history, anthropology, manufacture, cultivation, science, even the geology, of the local wine industry. And the displays utilize an amazing array of technology, lighting, and color. It was professional and scientifically thorough. I know that might put some of you off but I found it fascinating! There were bizarre 3D models, examined under a magnifying glass, of the various parasites and insects that can infest grape vines. There were panels describing in fair geologic detail the four main types of soil present in the Sancerre AOC (variations on chalky, chalky-clay, and chalky-flint). There is quite an obsession with the different taste that each soil type gives to the wines. There were movies that contained long and rather humorous interviews with local winemakers that you watch on Macs in small alcoves or projected onto large screens placed at the back of a diorama of an underground storage cave. The movies were in French, of course, but there were English subtitles and they were a great opportunity to practice listening to “common” French (which is different than written French or formal spoken French). In the movies you could watch multiple generations of winemakers, fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, talk about their work making Sancerre wines. There are even a couple of women winemakers. Traditionally, many farmwives maintained a few vines and made their own wine, but commercial wine making ventures are not often run by women in France. The museum is housed in a mid-17th century building that was originally built as a meeting place for the guild of Sancerre winemakers. Out back was an herb and flower garden in full, magnificent summer display. I gained a much deeper appreciation for the history of winemaking in Sancerre from the afternoon I spent in the museum.

A description of one of the important soil types from La Maison de Sancerre (the wine museum).

These soil profiles are not in La Maison de Sancerre but in the tasting room of one of the largest vineyards in the area, Henri Bourgeois. This was an activity arranged by the school. We got to taste 10 Sancerre wines, a real treat. I bought a bottle of 2002 Jadis, an unfiltered wine made using old fashioned techniques on grapes grown on chalky caillottes soil (the word "jadis" means "in times gone by"). This wine was incredible! It had an almost powdery texture and was very flowery without being at all sweet. It is unusual for a Sancerre blanc to be aged for so long but it was a wonderful bottle of wine.

Like most decently sized villages in France, there was a small number of local food shops: a couple of patisseries and boulangeries, quite a few fromageries (see next paragraph for more on this), a tiny marché with a lot of canned foods and a few fresh vegetables. There was also a charcuterie around the corner from the school, facing the small plaza in front of the old church (the structure of which is only three hundred years old or so). Madame made pork and duck terrines using local ingredients, stuffed the sausages by hand, and of course she sold beautiful chops from local, free-range pigs. You might not be surprised to learn that I ate pork in some form and drank wine every single day I was in Sancerre. Every. Single. Day. (Lardons on top of greens with shaved goat cheese and a dash of olive oil most definitely count as a form of pork.) It was sublime.

The local goat cheese industry was also a surprise. They call the individual cheeses, little round wheels about 2” (5 cm) in diameter, crottins de Chavignol (this link is definitely worth a visit!) (Chavignol is a tiny village west of Sancerre). They have a rather silly story to explain the origin of the word, something to do with impractically small oil lamps roughly the same size and shape as a crottin. But most suspiciously, the word for poop is crotte or crottin. It sure makes a lot of sense if you imagine the little cheeses to be the droppings of a rather giant goat. But that doesn’t make for a very palatable tourist sell, does it?

 
Anyway, crottins de Chavignol also have a coveted AOC designation; the area of this AOC overlaps closely with the Sancerre wine AOC area. It’s hard to imagine how they find room to fit in pastured goats when so much of the land space is covered with grape vines, but they do. There are three or four kinds of crottin which are all the same cheese prepared the same way but progressively aged. The young crottin is very soft and smooth, brilliant white inside with only a tiny bit of yellowish rind. It tastes a bit too much of goat pee for my taste. I liked the demi-sec, aged about a month, the perfect texture and firmness for cutting up and serving on a small plate with a glass or two of Sancerre white wine (I didn’t even need guests for dinner to do this; I often made this little treat for myself after class was over for the day). The sec crottins, aged 3-4 months, are perfect for shaving over sautéed veggies or a fresh salad or fresh melon or peaches (the latter were in season and I stocked up). The sec crottins can look horrendous: covered with a thick, grey or brown, wrinkled rind that looks like a fungal infection gone very wrong. The hard cheese inside is a pale yellow color.

Sec crottin at top, aged 4 months. The two on the lower left are demi-sec, aged two months, and the one on the lower right is the young one, aged just a couple of weeks.

You already know that I love to cook and I particularly love to cook when in France, so I was able to indulge myself almost every day. Besides eating pork and drinking wine, I managed to eat some crottin de Chavignol every day as well! It was sublime!

I stayed in an apartment above the school, which is located in a 17th century house built by a local semi-demi-nobleman. My apartment had a small but decently stocked kitchen and a tiny washer and dryer. And utterly fabulous views of that mid-12th century tower that looks over the town! I never tired of watching the sun rise and set each day out my windows.

The tourist industry hums along in Sancerre. It has more hotels and hostels and BandBs and apartments for short-term rent than most French villages of its size. I saw many French families on holiday but there were plenty of Brits and Dutch, a random German or two, and a scattering of Americans. Most were making day trips into the village as part of their chateau-viewing adventures farther west along the valley but plenty of people stayed overnight.

I took early morning jogs through town, exploring the streets in the pre-dawn grey when everything was quiet and it was just me, the cats, the bats, and the guys who go around town each morning to water the hundreds of flower pots maintained by the town. Apparently there was live music in the main square in the evenings but I don’t go out much after dark no matter where I am and stuck to my early-morning habits. Even though none of the street surfaces are original (houses have plumbing and municipal water; all the original streets were ripped up to lay mains and sewers, although some were resurfaced with cobblestones to give an air of authenticity), I could easily imagine myself in another time when walking along the curving, narrow streets, some no more than alleys, far too narrow for modern cars, overhung with crumbling buildings.

On the Sunday in the middle of my stay, I made a long morning hike of about 15-16 kilometers, following a designated randonnée that I researched on the internet. Randonnées are formal walking routes, often with a bit of signage here and there. It took me 5 hours to make the round trip from Sancerre through the villages of Amigny, Chavignol, and Verdigny, skirting a bit of Saint-Satur on the river, then back up the hill to Sancerre. Except in the villages, the route was through the vineyards covering the hills. There is a maze of roads and paths up there so I used the GPS on my iPad to make sure I didn’t miss a turn and end up too far from home.You can see all of these villages on the geologic map.

View of vineyards that I took during my hike. Every so often you see a brightly colored flowering plant at the end of a row of vines. The plant type may vary (roses are most common) but the flowers are usually red or deep pink. What is the purpose of these flowers? Decoration? That seems pretty frivolous for the serious business of making wine. We discussed this in class and thought it might be a sort of "canary in the coal mine" thing whereby if the flower wasn't doing well, perhaps the vines needed some attention too. But there were far too few of these flowering plants for them to be a broad measure of something like soil health or fungus or something (this site agrees that the roses don't serve this purpose in the modern vineyard). Another suggestion is that the flowers are used to attract flying pollinators (bees, moths, etc.) to the vines. But most grape types don't need flying pollinators (see this link and this one for TMI). So this explanation doesn't work too well either. I guess we'll just enjoy the spots of color and not worry any more about it!

Although I could have rented a car on the weekends, the idea of trying to see a chateau or two along with the hordes of other tourists just didn't seem very pleasant. Except for a couple of trips down to the Carrefour in Saint-Satur and my Sunday randonnée, I stayed close to home in Sancerre.

It was almost like having two separate vacations in one: the quotidian routines of life alternating with the intense atmosphere in the language classes. With four hours of instruction each day and hours of homework and extra study each night, I was working very hard. Excursions to buy bread and cheese and wine were a welcome break from that.

We have a four-day weekend in KSA so I have no excuse to finish the second post in this set on my language school adventures. Stay tuned!