Lewin Book Covers the Art and History of French Winemaking

Benjamin Lewin's 'Wines of France: A Guide to 500 Leading Vineyards' is the biologist's latest look at the country's celebrated wine industry.
By David Marcus ,

For most oenophiles, an intensive study of France's wine regions is an unattainable fantasy. Benjamin Lewin's success in his first career made that dream a reality. A biologist, Lewin founded the journal Cell in 1974 and sold it to Reed Elsevier in 1999, and he also wrote the molecular biology textbook Genes, which is now in its 11th edition. That allowed Lewin to indulge his passion for wine, which he did by becoming one of about 350 masters of wine and then writing a series of large, ambitious, self-published books about the subject. His most recent is Wines of France: A Guide to 500 Leading Vineyards.

Lewin takes the reader with him as he proceeds around the hexagon, as the French sometimes call their country. The book is lavishly illustrated with maps, photographs and graphics. This one, a 19th century school map, shows which agricultural products France generates - wine, "vin," being one of the most prominent - and which it imports. Note the "Ble, coton, bois" - "wheat, cotton, wood" - from the U.S. in the upper left corner of the map, just below England.


School map of France


Mosaics of winemaking in the Rhone

The Romans brought grapes with them when they came to France. These mosaics date from the third century of the common era and show men treading grapes with their feet, operating a wine press and making amphorae, or large clay pots, for storing wine. Found in a Roman villa near Vienne, about 20 miles south of the city of Lyon on the Rhone River, they're now in the National Museum of Archaeology near Paris.



Hermitage

About an hour south of Vienne lie the hills of Hermitage, which are pictured here. There are vines on the slopes of both sides of the river; some of the best Syrah in the world is grown here, helped by the steep hills, which make for good drainage. The town by the Rhone River, Tain l'Hermitage, has about 6,000 residents.


Loire in art (Saumur castle/shot from tapestry of the apocalypse)

These medieval images are both from the Loire Valley in northwest France. The Limbourg brothers depicted the castle at Saumur in a famous early 15th century manuscript. Grapes are still grown in the castle's shadow, and Saumur is today known for sparkling wines and red made from Cabernet Franc. The vines are depicted in the Tapestry of the Apocalypse, a set of tapestries commissioned by the Duke of Anjou, woven between 1377 and 1382, and now on display in the city of Angers, which remains at the center of a region of wine production.



Grapes with botrytis

These grapes are from a vineyard less than 20 miles south of Angers. Unappealing as they may look, they're the material from which sweet wines such as Quarts de Chaume and Sauternes are made. The shriveling and discoloration come from a fungus called botrytis, which changes the grape chemically in ways that produce a sweet wine with notes of honey, curry and orange peel.

Image: Riddling and gyropalattes

Champagne may be the most powerful brand name in wine, one that conjures luxury and celebration. The sparkling wine is more expensive than other wines partly because of an involved production process. The Champenois make a still wine, then bottle that wine with a so-called liquer de tirage that includes wine, sugar and yeast and cap the bottle with a crown cap like the one on a bottle of beer. (Louis Pasteur figured out what the yeast did and thus how to dose the sugar.)

A second fermentation takes place in the bottle and generates the carbon dioxide that gives Champagne its sparkle. It also produces dead yeast cells. To get rid of those cells, the bottles are rotated a little each day until they rest upside down vertically and all the yeast is in the neck of the bottle, a process called remuage, which used to be done by hand - the image on the left - but is now automated in what are called gyropalattes, pictured on the right. Once the bottle is vertical, its neck is dipped in a refrigerated bath, the crown cap is removed, and the internal pressure in the bottle ejects the sediment, at which point the bottle is sealed with the traditional cork and wire cage. Hand riddling still contributes to the romance of Champagne, but the gyropalette allows for much more efficient mass production.

Old Beaujolais postcard

This is how a fall harvest procession looked in Beaujolais a century ago. It was a peasant celebration, and the wine people drank was light, fresh and slightly effervescent - nouveau, pressed and bottled soon after the grapes were picked. Most of that wine made it no farther than Lyon, about 40 miles south on the Rhone River, where the residents used it to wash down their sausages and pates. It took Georges Duboeuf to market Beaujolais Nouveau around the world; Lewin tells us that the wine wasn't even known by that name until the 1950s. Now, ambitious producers in the region are trying to move up-market by making wines with the ambition and aging potential of red Burgundy, whose top wines are among the most expensive in the world.



Chateau-Chalon

Every region in France has its local delicacies, and Chateau-Chalon, the tiny town in the Jura Mountains near Switzerland pictured here, is known for its vin jaune, or yellow wine. Made from Savagnin, a local grape, and aged like sherry under a veil of yeast, it has a nutty flavor and is often sipped with Comte cheese or used to make an intricate chicken dish that some of France's greatest chefs adopted in the 1990s. Their enthusiasm helped make Chateau-Chalon a cult wine both in France and the U.S.


Port of Bordeaux

Bordeaux has made wines for export since Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II of England in 1152. The Dutch furthered the Bordeaux wine trade when they drained the salt marshes around the city in the 17th century, and by the time this photo was taken in the 1907, wine merchants and shippers were centered around the city's port.


Chateau La Tour Carnet (note this is not the same as Chateau Latour)

Farming grapes is tough work, but you wouldn't know that by the images of chateaux that adorn many bottles of Bordeaux from the most humble to the most exalted. Just as collectors seek out the best wines from the region, the super-rich buy estates there. Bernard Magrez made his money in spirits and cheap Bordeaux, but he now owns several properties there including this one, Château La Tour Carnet, which has black swans swimming in its moat, Lewin observes.

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