CLOSE to the LAND
“Wednesday. On Wednesday they will be mature,”
FRANÇOIS-XAVIER DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY SAYS as he pops another waxy cabernet franc grape into his mouth.
Joining him, I pluck a bluish-purple berry from the vine and bite down. The skin bursts with a satisfying spurt of grapey sweetness. And as I’m in the Bergerac wine region of France’s Dordogne Valley —during harvest season, no less—I fancy I can also detect an early expression of what wine aficionados refer to as goût de terroir, the unique flavor imparted to a wine by the soils, climate, and geology of the vineyard where the grapes were grown. Is this what sunlight tastes like?
Saint-Exupéry, a distant cousin of Le Petit Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, has no doubts about the distinctive terroir of the sloping vineyards at Château de Tiregand, a historic estate that his family acquired almost two centuries ago. “We had a terrible frost and lost all the vines in 1956,” he says. “My father replanted new ones closer together that produce smaller grapes. The roots dig deeper into the mineral veins because they are competing for the soil. The yield is less, but the grapes are much richer.”
We follow him to the estate’s tasting room for sips of his earthy, ruby-red Pécharmant wines, an appellation that encompasses just 400 hectares of gravelly vineyards within the greater Bergerac region. Made from the same grapes as
