A trip to the coast

This weekend we were in Cannes for the Concours Mondial du Vin Rosé , the biggest rosé tasting in the world.

But first we had to get over the culture shock - on the Croisette people’s sun glasses looked like they’d had an optical version of baby bio sprinkled all over them. Triffid frames engulfed tanned faces barely affording their wearers an opportunity to breath. Men draped themselves in white linen suits looking like modern day Don Johnsons, ageing women ignored the effect of gravity on their cleavage and wore plunging tops and heavy jewellery which counted time as they tottered along. There were sofas on beaches, cocktails sprouting tropical fruits and queues outside nightclubs. It may only have been April but we saw more marcha in an afternoon on the Cote d’Azur, than the whole winter in the Luberon.

At the Concours things were very serious. In a backroom over 1,400 wine bottles had been wrapped in little black plastic body bags and a great sheet of plastic tarpaulin had been spread across the carpet. It reminded me of a crime scene.

Out front teams of tasters were methodically working their way through all of the wine. Now you would have thought that being a taster at a Concours would be one of the great jobs in the world, on par with being the swimwear correspondent for Sports Illustrated. And when we arrived late morning after the tasters had already evaluated over thirty bottles, I’d expected the chatty conviviality of a pub before closing time. Not a bit of it.

Instead everybody sat hunched over a small handheld personal computer from which their tasting notes were immediately uploaded to the central server. Tanya commented that it could have been a conference of engineers. Nobody seemed to be taking any sneaky sips to relieve the monotony of all the spitting and the lunch that followed was as dry as the Sahara, with the professional oenologues no doubt preserving their palates for an afternoon of data input.

On our return to the Luberon, things had changed. Spring had arrived. Just a week ago one of our vigneron friends, Rupert Birch, (http://www.labrillane.com) confided that he was worried he’d killed his vines. Then the fields around his domaine had been full of rows of inert skeletal fists but in the space of a weekend they’d sprouted long green fingers. The plane trees, lifeless for so long, have finally started to provide shade. It’s as if God finally decided to put up the parasols for the summer. Our house is now surrounded by yellow fields of rape, wild poppies grow in red swathes, and the whole thing looks a bit like an impressionist painting.

You can find the results of the Concours at: http://www.mondial-du-rose.fr/fr/resultats,mondial-du-rose.php?langue=fr