Wine Pairing Story

One Precious Kilogram…Le Méridien-Montparnasse, Paris.
Is there something more delicate and intensely aromatic than a truffle ? The retail price of the real thing, the “Périgord truffle” (Tuber melanosporum) is about 1000 Euro a kilogram in France, but the good restaurants can’t escape it, because the cheaper Chinese varieties of truffles are so tasteless that they can’t compete in terms of flavor and intensity. But you can do so much with less than a Périgord truffle that it’s worth the costs. The tiny black tubercle known under the Appellation name of Black Truffle of Périgord can be found  not only in the Périgord region (in South-Western France), but also in Provence, in the Lubéron, as well as in Italy and Spain.
I spent a couple of hours in the kitchens of Montparnasse 25, the one-star restaurant of the Méridien Hotel in Paris, to see how chef Christian Moine prepares 3 dishes with less than a single black truffle.
The first surprise was to see for real a one-kilogram stack of these precious black truffles [picture above]. I try to visualize these dogs and pigs sniffing for the truffle’s aromatic signature in the wild… There’s another strange thing about the truffle, it is the aspect and patterns of its inside, that you can see on these thin slices on the left, and which evoke the human brain. Chef Moine then chooses one of them to prepare the dishes : here is a typical 5-centimeter tubercle which weighs exactly 26 grams on the kitchen’s precision scale.

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Wine in india

Chemin de l’Argile, la Cadière d’Azur (Bandol)
The red Bandol of Domaine Lafran-Veyrolles made our day when we tasted it at the Maison des Vins de Bandol, the Bandol tasting-house where you can taste for free among dozens of Bandol wines and buy bottles if you want to at the estate’s price. This wine was very beautiful and intense, with tannins already subdued and gentle, if firm and structured, and I wanted to know more about the estate. I went there alone on a hot august day.
Lafran-Veyrolles has always been an independant winery selling its wine directly to the clients. The estate is located a few kilometers from the mediteranean, between  le Plan du Castelet and la Cadière d’Azur, along one of the renowned terroirs of the Appellation, the “chemin de l’Argile” (the “clay path”), not far from two Bandol estate named le Gros Noré and Pibarnon. It has about 10 hectares of vineyards, all around the winery, of which 6,5 hectares of Mourvèdre, the rest in Grenache, Cinsault, and some Clairette and Ugni Blanc. It also rents 2 hectares of vineyards, these ones mostly to make rosé. Overall, the estate is red-bandol centered. The white varieties make up 10 % of the whole surface,which is the average proportion in the whole of the Bandol Appellation btw. The estate is known for its reds, and for its long- and very-long-keep reds, says Michel, who works here to help Jean-Marie Castel, the vineyard manager and vintner in the estate. This is one of the oldest Bandol estates, Mr Ferec having in his time overlooked with Mr Peyraud (Domaine Tempier) the setting-up of the Bandol Appellation. The present owner is Mr Ferec’s daughter, and there has been a family continuity in the running of this property. The Lafran name comes from the farthest traced owner (1641), Melchion Lafran, with documents of that time designating this property as land, bastide (farm), vineyards, olive trees and walnut trees.

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