Riomaggiore, Blood on the Tracks, Malval by Josephine LaCosta

Josephine is a friend of the store’s and an expert caterer. Find her here…

It feels like I’ve lost time, and now we’ve even had daylight savings here so it’s nine hours difference instead of eight. Perhaps it would be best to begin again with something relatively constant. Something we’ve seen throughout...the vines…

The vines look like craggy hands or some kind of warped and wrapped snake rearing its head out of the rocky soil, only about knee high. We took some back roads. Laura insisted, so that we could get ourselves closer to the premier and grand cru wines. These wines are a little higher in the hills. The base level wines, here they call them the “villages,” (pronounced vihl-ahj) are grown on the vines on flat ground, closer to the villages. But the crus are grown on the hillside. I think this has something to do with the way the vines retrieve minerals from the different geological layers in the soil, but I really don’t understand it.  So we took the back roads and ended up in the hills.

I wrote that bit a few days ago, when we were still in Burgundy. But since then not much has changed. We continue to explore the tension between the back roads and the main highway. Beaujolais was all completely twisted. A foggy haze of waking up at the crack of dawn in Beaune (Burgundy) to make a 10am appointment in northern Beaujolais. The roads snake just like the vines do, and soon we found ourselves between two cliffs, overlooking a few villages and alternating green and red plots of land. Most of it vines! The soil seemed a mixture of red clay and some greyish-tan rock that Laura kept reminding me was granite. There we met a couple, man and wife, who are farming and producing eight different chardonnays. And how are they different? Well, the different plots are bottled thusly. As you can imagine, I found it very difficult to taste much difference between each wine. The couple was slippery too; he spoke no English at all and she spoke maybe too much. In France, the old guard is comprised of families who divide the labor tasks in a classical manner. The women do the paperwork and promotion while the men farm and make the wine. It was interesting to meet these people, making wine from a very specific place in a very traditional way, but ultimately I found them cold, the wines too. From there we continued along the back roads, exhausted and starving, to meet some boys in the heart of Beaujolais. One of them, Nicholas Chemarin, is a man of about 36 we figure who is making gamay on some very steep, un-terraced slopes. He’s sly and his wines taste that way. After lunch and a few bottles, he drove us around the vines in his Mazda truck, Laura standing up in the bed. We drove straight up and down these hills and at the top he stopped to drop trou and take a piss, without really alerting either of us. He seemed to be laughing the whole time about one thing or another and knew some English, but chose not to speak it. The other, Julien Duport, is a man of about the same age making wine the way his grandfather did (his father never had the passion to make wine and was a firefighter instead). He uses a big blonde horse to plough his fields and his wines are extremely concentrated and earthy, like his passion for the old way of things. He was kind to us and interested in our opinions. E&R will be the first place in the US to sell his wines. In his cellar, he ages sausage and prosciutto along with wine in barrels. The sausages are hard, deep pink, and rife with dark mold. He gave us some to bring home, I wonder if we'll make it through customs.

We needed somewhere to stay for the night in the countryside. Laura entrusted Chemarin with deciding where and since there was no running water in his bachelor chateau, he sent us to an old stone house called “Malval” at the top of a hill, about twenty minutes from the winery. I’m telling you, the address for this place was simply “Malval,” no numbers no nothing. Thank god for google. We arrived at nightfall, totally exhausted and desperate for a bed. The front desk was more like a quaint family restaurant from a hundred years ago. A bowl of dried bay leaves, clay dishes stacked along the walls, a wood carved bar, paintings of horses and dogs on the walls. A man named Olivier checked us in and brought us to the room. Upon entry there was a wave of harsh heat and the scene was six sets of bunk beds all in one room, two showers, and a lone toilet in its own chamber.  Really bizarre. We slept like the dead. I awoke to the birds in the morning. Laura fed the horses in the field fresh grass from along the fence line and Olivier cooked us up some eggs and ham alongside bread and apricot preserves he made last summer. We went on our way, leaving behind the strangeness of Malval as we descended back into the valley. I wonder if I’ll ever return. I’m not sure it’s the kind of place I’d ever want to take anyone. But it was peaceful and simple and I suppose it is harder to come by places like that these days. Thanks to Nico C…

The road this morning was fast and easy, apart from a short detour through the upper Rhone valley where Laura wanted to see how they terrace the vines on the steep slopes. Things get a bit steeper as you go south in France, with the shadow of the alps kissing a large part of the southeastern corner of the country.  Today and tomorrow, we don’t visit any wineries. Instead we are exploring Aix en Provence, a preserved old city in the heart of the Provence region of France where dudes like Cezanne and Van Gogh painted mountains and cypress trees. Those trees are bewitching, as soon as you get close to the coast you start to see them pop up. Like witch hats, Laura says, a stark contrast to the roundness and twigginess of the other French trees. The earth is dryer down here and the weather more mild. We traded our coats for sweaters and scarves this evening while we took a walk on the cobblestones. It’s a city of fountains they say, hundreds. The Parisiennes come down here for shopping and respite, but I don’t find it all that relaxed. Pretty bourgeois and somewhat like a mall. We passed by what seemed to be a very important old palace in the city center, which has now been converted into a chic furniture store. Sort of mongrel, don’t you think? Maybe it’s appropriate, the money of four hundred years ago up against the money of today. But something doesn’t feel right about it.

I loved Riomaggiore. The humility of that sweet yellow orange and pink town, with green shutters, by the sea. The secret staircases led to new little moments each time I climbed them. There was an Italian word for them that one of the winemakers told us, all those stairs. I don’t remember. I liked the mist in the air and the really steep hills. I liked that the hillsides looked tropical and lush. I liked the way the wines tasted, like fresh rosemary flowers steeped in a glass of ocean. I liked the way the wines tasted with raw langoustines.

The drive through Chianti was beautiful but it felt like something so done and done and done. I don’t know - if people listen to Graceland over and over again for the next three centuries, will it even be good anymore? I told Laura this morning that Paul Simon could be my favorite male singer. She seemed pretty surprised at that. But then I explained that it’s only because he’s permeated so many formative moments in my life. I remember loving S&G from a young age, and singing Sound of Silence with a friend in Santa Fe at someone’s dinner party. Actually, America was a song on a 60’s CD mix that my mom used to play in the car when we were kids. I remember being introduced to Graceland by my ex Tony who was an Italian American heroine addict. I thought for sure he was the one at the time. I remember listening to the title track of that album as Laura, Michelle (another friend from college, who also dated Tony ironically enough) and I crossed the Mississippi River into Memphis, at night. The city lights were flickering and the river was just so much wider than I ever could have imagined it. It was a national guitar!  I remember buying a boom box for the kitchen at Ox and purchasing some of what I thought were the “best albums of all time” on CD. Of course Graceland was in there. And now I’ll remember snaking down the slopes of Cinque Terre thinking about Paul telling Kathy he feels lost.  Travel makes you feel a little lost. These memories are really meaningful and that’s why Paul Simon is meaningful. Maybe the drive through Chianti was meaningful because we listened to Blood on the Tracks and Laura said that the soft ebbs and flows of that record matched up with the landscape. Is that enough of a reason for it to be meaningful?