Cold Wine, Empty Streets: Sancerre Before the Crowds Returns

 

The plan was to escape. This is important context!

Nordic winters are long and grey and self-serious, and by the end of February Rita and I had reached the point where the darkness stops feeling atmospheric and starts feeling personal.

France, we reasoned, would be different. France in early March would be spring. There would be light. There would be warmth. There would be outdoor tables and wine and the specific looseness that comes from sitting in the sun in a country that takes lunch seriously.

And then we rented a small house in the town of Sancerre

Sancerre sits on a hill in the Loire Valley and is known, globally, for one thing: its white wine. Sauvignon blanc of considerable reputation. Writers have praised it. Sommeliers have wept over it. Restaurants in Copenhagen, London and New York charge serious money for a glass of it.

We looked forward to be living at the source.

 Now we are, and all is grey. It is cold. It rains every day.

Not the dramatic Nordic cold that at least has the decency to feel epic. A softer cold. A French cold, damp and patient, that settles into our rented house and stays.

The sky is the same color it had been in Denmark. The light is the same thin, unconvinced light we had specifically left behind. 

We had driven the darkness twelve hundred kilometres south and it had followed us without aparent effort.

The town is also closed. Not metaphorically. Physically. The wine shops has handwritten signs indicating they will return in April. The restaurants are shut.

 The one café that appeared open was open only in the sense that its door was unlocked. Inside, a woman sat alone reading a newspaper with the focused intensity of someone who did not want company. We ordered two coffees. She made them without looking up.

Rita and I walked the narrow streets in waterproof jackets and found them empty.

Cats watched us from windowsills with the mild contempt of locals who have seen tourists before and found them wanting.

 

The famous vineyards on the slopes below the town were grey and bare. Rows of pruned vines stretched across the surrounding hillsides like stitches on skin.

Rita said it was beautiful. I agreed, which was true, but beauty felt insufficient as a reason to be cold and damp on a French hillside in March when we had been cold and damp in Denmark just a few days earlier.

By day five I had finished my books and was sitting in the small living room looking at the ceiling. Rita had brought more books and was still reading.

We made soup. We drank the local wine - at our table, at six in the afternoon - and it was genuinely excellent, which felt almost beside the point.


There is something clarifying about a place that makes no effort to entertain you. We had come for French spring and received French winter instead, which turned out to be nearly identical to Danish winter but with better cheese and a more philosophical attitude toward closed shops.

Sancerre in March does not perform. It exists - cold, quiet, persistently rainy - and leaves you alone with yourself and, if you are lucky, with someone who is comfortable doing the same.

Rita turned a page. Outside, a cat crossed the empty street. The rain continued it's patient work.

I poured us both another glass. 

The wine had a pale gold hue. It - at least - was not grey.