Somehow, seventy-two doesn’t seem that old nowadays, or maybe I am just placating myself. Maybe it is because I do know that I am no longer a spring chicken, but I keep going. Some people try to hide the fact or deny it, as you can see, I don’t. We actually started celebrating it last month, or at least my Bride let me get away with it, and the dinner was planned the night before, because the restaurant wasn’t open on a Monday.
My Bride’s cousin was joining us, as she was spending the night, as the next day, another girlfriend of hers was also going to see a replica of Noah’s Ark at The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky and they were also going to visit an adjacent Museum of Biblical Artifacts. They invited me, but I said that they would have more fun as a “girls getaway.” We got into Ann Arbor early, so we walked around the downtown area, until the restaurant opened. I was also getting a bit parched, so we stopped by Vinology for something cold and wet. What is odd is that this was the first time we had ever been there. The owner of the establishment had a wonderful wine shop across the street from where I worked for years, and Vinology was the perfect place to let his daughter hang her hat, as the old expression goes.
The ladies had a glass of Le Coeur de Reine Sauvignon Touraine 2024, by Domaine Jacky Marteau of the Loire Valley. The estate is in its fourth generation of family winemakers and is twenty-nine hectares of which twenty hectares of Sauvignon Blanc and four-and-a-half hectares of Gamay all on clay-silica based soil. Touraine is in the very heart of the Loire Valley; the city of Tours is halfway between Sancerre and Nantes. Touraine is a regional appellation of about five-thousand hectares and almost sixty percent is white, but it also produces red, rosé and sparkling (in all three colors). They use pneumatic pressing and cold fermentation for seven days in Stainless Steel. The wine is a pale gold color with notes of grapefruit and melon, fresh cut grass and traces of flint. On the palate this medium-bodied, well-balanced wine displayed tones of crisp citrus with bright acidity and ending with a medium-count finish of fruit, spices and flinty terroir.
I tried a different wine, just to be contrary and I had a glass of Domaine Marc Portaz Savoie Apremont France 2025. Jean-Marc Portaz worked at wineries in New Zealan and California, before returning to his family’s estate just south of Chambery, the capital of the ancient Duchy of Savoy at the foot of Mount Granier in 2000. His family created a ten-hectare vineyard in 1993, and the Apremont Vineyard (rough mountain) is their “tete de cuvée.” This wine is pure Jacquere, the grape of the region and is also known as Martin-Cot or Molette de Montmelian. The average age of the vines at Apremont are thirty to fifty years of age on a soil of limestone rubble and glacial debris from an ancient avalanche. It is organically farmed with no pesticides, manually harvested, with full cluster pressing, fermentation using indigenous yeasts in temperature-controlled Stainless-Steel tanks, and aged on fine lees. A pale golden colored wine that offered notes of stone fruit, honeysuckle, white pepper and basil. On the palate this light-bodied, high acidity and mineral driven wine displayed tones of pears, citrus and herbs blending with crisp acidity and ending with a medium-count finish of fruit, spices and minerals.
