French wine for beginners at Glasgow’s Ubiquitous Chip ahead of the Euros 2024

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We speak to Sommelier Dan ahead of the Euros 2024 on French wine

Transcript

00:00With France being one of the favourites to win the Euros this year,

00:04we wanted to give you a bit of a guide to where to start with French wine.

00:08It's quite a daunting country to get into wine from.

00:12There's lots and lots of little areas.

00:15They do all kinds of different wines in France,

00:17everything from very, very sweet wines to big, bold, heavy reds.

00:23To get started, I would suggest thinking about

00:27what you like when it comes to wine.

00:30If you like very fresh, light-bodied white wines

00:35that are quite crisp and refreshing,

00:38then somewhere like the Loire Valley.

00:40It's the home of lots of very famous Sauvignon Blanc regions,

00:45places like Sancerre and Prus Fumé.

00:50They also have these incredible Chenin Blancs,

00:53and the reds tend to be also quite light and herbaceous.

00:56They use a lot of Cabernet Franc in the area.

00:59Certainly, if you're looking for a really good quality Sauvignon Blanc,

01:02then Prus Fumé would be my personal choice.

01:05Places like Meneteau Salon can give really good value for money

01:09and still have those kind of really nice herbaceous,

01:11slightly floral Sauvignon Blancs.

01:13There are some great rosé wines in the area as well.

01:15Places like Sancerre do some fantastic rosés using Pinot Noir.

01:19If you're looking for something a bit heavier and richer,

01:22it's easy to say start with Bordeaux.

01:24The problem with Bordeaux is good Bordeaux is generally very, very expensive.

01:29A lot of the entry-level Bordeauxs are very good,

01:32but don't have the same sort of excitement as opening one of those big, bold Bordeauxs.

01:38I'd maybe suggest going instead for places like the Côte d'Orone,

01:42especially the southern Côte d'Orone.

01:43You get some amazing value for money.

01:46And if you want some really fine wines, you've got places like Chateauneuf-du-Pape,

01:49you can go further north in the Rhone, where Syrah is the key grape.

01:53I really like wines from Cornas.

01:55They're very, very bold and very powerful.

01:57Lots of really intense, spicy kind of flavors on there as well.

02:02Lots of kind of meatiness once they've got a lot of maturity too.

02:05So if you are celebrating one of France's wins in the Euros,

02:09this is probably, for me, one of my favorite wines to kind of celebrate with,

02:14and one of my favorite styles of wine to celebrate with.

02:16So this is from Burgundy.

02:18This particular example is from a village called Ocygeresse,

02:22and it's a Premier Cru Burgundy,

02:24which means it comes from some really good-quality vineyard sites

02:30with great soil for the grapes to kind of grow in

02:35and almost ideal weather conditions to grow in as well.

02:42This particular wine is made by Domane Le Fouge.

02:45So Domane Le Fouge is run by Gilles Le Fouge.

02:51He joined the winery in the 1980s,

02:53started to take over from his father,

02:56and his impact on this particular winery was he started taking areas like Ocygeresse,

03:04which don't have the same kind of gravitas as some of the more well-known areas

03:11like Gevrey-Chambertin and Rue Saint-Georges,

03:13and taking them seriously and working using these single clemats,

03:19so taking grapes from just one sort of area of vineyards

03:24and making it and getting them together to make the wine

03:28rather than taking it from across the region.

03:31So you get a real sense of the area in a much more focused way.

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