Day Trip 1 – Savoie

The chateau that we were staying at was approximately one and a half hours from the Rhone wine region and it was one of our major goals while were were in France to get there. However, wine is made just about everywhere in France and we figured that we should sample the local fare before heading out to the more well known places.

The region that the chateau is located in is called Savoie (pronounced sah-vwah by the locals) and upon the advice of the Equestrian Queen, we headed up to the little village of Chignin (shin- yin) in search of local wine.

In Savoie, there are a dizzying array of local white grapes than can be grown including Rousette (also known as Altesse), Chardonnay, Chasselas, Jacquère, Rousanne, Marsanne, and Aligoté. For red grapes the list is just as long, however, the majority of red wines are made from Pinot Noir, Gamay and Mondeuse. Chignin is one of the fifteen villages that is allowed to add their name to the Savoie name on the label.

In the photo above you can see that there are plenty of wineries in the village proper but if you look carefully you will notice that there are only three surnames represented here. That’s because there are three major wine making families here in Chignin and each one of their wineries is literally right next door to the next one.

We were in search of the winery of J. Pierre and J. Francois Quenard but we very quickly discovered that they do things much differently in France. Instead of offering tastings at the winery itself, many of the wineries have their wines offered for tastings at a centralized tasting room. With a little help from the folks here we managed to discover that Savoie had recently opened a large tasting room for the region a couple of villages over in Les Marches called Vigne & Vin.

This turned out to be a different experience from that of Chignin. This was a very modern facility which had wines representing 60 different winemakers in the Savoie region. Here, a delightfully beautiful woman (Just a quick aside here, what makes people speaking English with a foreign accent so damn attractive?) took us through a tasting of eight different local wines.

I was very happy to have found this place as it really gave me an appreciation for the wines of Savoie. I would have been hard pressed to purchase enough wines blind to give me a great sense of this region. Regardless of the grapes they are made from, the white wines of this region all tend towards the big and fat side of things with a flavors of apples and stone fruits with a lack of acidity that would make them sing. The reds were better with the Pinot Noirs and Gamays being of the light and delicate variety. The biggest, boldest red wines are made from the Mondeuse grape. These wines all tend to have Cherry and dried fruit flavors finished by a zing of black pepper. It made these wines the perfect foil for the rich creamy cheeses that they make here too.