Part Three...Quelle Suprise!

We still had a few days to spend around Domaine Tempier.  During the day, Annie and I would visit the sights…the beautiful fishing villages of Cassis, Bandol and Sanary sur Mer, the hill town of Le Castellet and the surrounding countryside, which is oh so beautiful.


Cassis is my favorite little fishing village in France and is where we were staying.  There is a beautiful little port, with nice restaurants and bars lining the quai.  In the water are small, colorful fishing boats and in the morning the fishermen sell the fish they caught that day.  There is a nice cafe, called the Bar de la Marine, where we would go in the mornings for breakfast.  The restaurants all serve the freshest of fish and the best thing to order is bouillabaisse, the amazing huge plate of fish boiled in a soup of tomatoes and saffron and served with aioli. In the town square, old men play petanque.  They will tell you here that it was Cassis where petanque was first played many years ago.  Not sure about that, but it makes for a good story for the town.

The fishing village of Cassis...

One evening, Jean Marie, Catherine, Annie and I went to a very nice restaurant in Le Castellet, which is the hill village right above the Domaine (and was the place where they filmed Marcel Pagnol’s masterpiece, La Femme du Boulanger, in the 1930s).  Now it’s a nice tourist town, the typical ‘village perché’ that are all over the South of France.  It has narrow, winding streets, old homes (most with their windows shuttered) and stores selling lavender, herbs de Provence and postcards.  There are beautiful views from all sides of the village of the Provençal countryside.  At the time, there was a Michelin 1 star restaurant that Jean Marie and Catherine recommended, so we went there for dinner.  Annie and I usually didn’t go in for starred restaurants, country bistros were more our thing.  But I must say it’s nice to be pampered once in awhile…waiters at your beck and call, nice table settings, a beautiful view out the window.  And the food!  I can’t remember all we had, but I do remember the amazing plateau de fromage.  Well, it was more like a cart of fromage, where the waiter came by pushing a cart on wheels and it had a huge assortment of cheeses.  Also, this restaurant was a client of Jean Marie’s so they had Tempier on the menu.  I’m pretty sure, however, that Jean Marie brought his own bottles to the restaurant.

Some fine dining in Le Castellet...

The next evening, Jean Marie and Catherine invited us to their place at La Migoua.  They lived in an old house (18th Century, I’m thinking) right in the middle of their La Migoua vineyards.  It was a beautiful old house with huge wooden beams in the ceiling.  On the patio, Jean Marie cooked some lamb chops in a barbeque he had constructed years before. With this, Catherine served some roasted potatoes that I have been trying to duplicate ever since, without success.

Annie and Catherine at La Miguoa...

Jean Marie with his hand made barbeque...

The next day was the Big Surprise.  It so happened that at the same time we were travelling in Provence, Annie’s younger sister from Poitiers, Marinette, and our nice and nephew from the USA, Veronique and Drew (Veronique is the daughter of Annie’s oldest sister, Mauricette and Drew was her husband at the time) were also there.  They wanted to meet us at Domaine Tempier, but we told them that we would already be gone by the time they got there.  Well of course we were still there and just wanted to surprise them.  We had to tell Drew what was going on so he would get everyone to the Domaine by 11am, as they were going to have a tasting with Jean Marie.



We arrived at the Domaine a little early and were ushered into the living room by Lulu.  Out came a bottle of rosé and we had a nice talk waiting for Marinette, Veronique and Drew.  The plan was that Lulu would bring them into the living room and there we’d be.  The plan went perfectly.  Lulu brought them into the room, Jean Marie was up front to shake their hands and out we popped!  Luckily, I was able to snap a photograph at the exact moment they saw us.  The look of surprise on Veronique and Marinette’s faces was priceless! 

Marinette and Veronique look a bit suprised...

We all sat around and talked for awhile and Drew handed out a couple of presents he had made; hand drawn Domaine Tempier logos on a couple of baseball hats for Jean Marie and Lucien.  They looked great!  And they were happy to know that, as far as we knew, these were the only Domaine Tempier baseball hats in the entire world.

Lucien and his new hat...

The very dapper Jean-Marie... 

From left; Catherine, Drew, Jean-Marie, Lucien, Lulu, Annie, Marinette and Veronique...

Drew, Jean-Marie, Annie, Veronique and Marinette pose in the vineyards...

But now it was time for business…a trip down to the cellars for a tasting!  Jean Marie showed us the big steel vats where they put the grape juice in and where it magically turns to wine and then down to the cellar with the big foudres. 

We tasted the blanc and the rosé, the five 1990 reds which were still in barrel and the ’89 Cabassaou, which was also still in barrel.  Ah, magnificent, as always.  I'm sure this was quite the eye opener for Drew, Vero and Marinette, as it had been for me everytime I'd entered this hallowed ground.  Tasting young wines out of the barrel is a lot of fun, delicious and quite educational.  Well, fun and delicious anyway.

I think Annie and Drew are indicated the number of bottles so far...

Le pére et le fils...

About this time, Lucien came down to join us with some small appetizers Lulu had sent down with him.  He sat down in his chair and tasted the wines with us.  Again, he was quite poetic talking about the different vintages and comparing them to classical music composers.   I just loved listening to Lucien talk about his wines.  At one point, Veronique sat down with him and Lucien became fascinated and quite amused with some little frogs she had on her shoes.

Lucien always has something beautiful to say about his wine... 

But we weren’t anywhere near finished with the tasting.  Jean Marie went to the cellar and got out a 1985 La Miguoa and a 1988 La Louffe.  The La Louffe was a very special bottle.  It was made from a small parcel of the La Miguoa vineyard, mostly made with mourvedre.  They only made this particular cuveé in 1987, 1988 and 1989, as it was thought by Jean Marie to take too much away from the La Miguoa cuveé.  But what a bottle it was, one of the three best bottles of Tempier I have ever tasted (the other two being the 1988 Cabassaou and the 1971 Cuveé Speciale).  It was so full of flavor, incredible deep and just lingered in the mouth for minutes after drinking (alas, I drank my last bottle years ago).  Jean-Marie also brought out a bottle of the magical 1971 Cuvee Speciale and a rosé from 1967!  A rosé, almost 25 years old you say?  How could any rosé be alive after all of this time.  Robert Parker, probably the most influential wine critic in the world, once called Tempier's rosé the best in the world.  But he probably never tasted one this old.  The color was beautiful, not the bright pinkish red of a young rosé, but a darker, garnet like color.  And what flavor...llike no rosé I have ever tasted.  It was much deeper and had that aged quality that is hard for someone like me, who is not a wine writer, to explain.  Suffice it to say it was magnificent.

We were all having an amazing time.  Veronique, Drew and Marinette, who were ‘virgins’ with this Tempier experience and Annie and me, who had had a couple of tastings by Jean Marie before, but never one like this, where he kept going back in the private cellar to bring out yet another bottle from a past vintage.  I think Jean Marie, whose job, after all, was to bring clients down here for tastings, had a great time himself, as this wasn’t just a tasting for professionals or clients, but a full on party!

The most memorable picture I have of that day is of all of us (including Catherine who had come down to join us, but without Lucien who had gone back upstairs) behind the eight bottles of wine we had just enjoyed, all lined up by Jean Marie, by color and vintage. We all have big smiles on our faces and our cheeks and noses are maybe just a little more red then when we had entered the cellar.  Looking at this photograph, now over 20 years later, reminds me of something Ernest Hemingway once said;

“Wine offers a greater range of enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.”

Part Two: A Meal to Remember

In our kitchen is a framed old parchment.  It’s from July 2,1991 and is a menu with the logo of Domaine Tempier on the top.  The menu is handwritten, by Lulu Peyraud herself, and lists the many courses we had for lunch that day.  On the side, handwritten by Jean Marie, are the various wines we had and the menu is signed by all the Peyraud family members who attended that day. This menu is one of my prized possessions, as it is a  memory of the single greatest meal I ever had.

It was a perfect Provencal summer day.  The sky was clear, the cigales were singing and all was well with the world.  Annie and I were invited by Madame Lulu Peyraud, the matriarch of Domaine Tempier, for lunch, with tout la famille. 

Lulu Peyraud was well known in the foodie world.  If you know of Chez Panisse, the famed restaurant in Berkeley, and its owner and founder, Alice Waters, then you probably know about Lulu.  Alice Waters met Lulu in the early1970s and taught Alice much about French cooking.  Lulu’s great feasts were legendary for decades and here we were about to partake in one.  Wow.

We met Jean Marie around 10am for a vineyard tour.  We hopped in his car and he took us around to the different vineyards.  Around the Domaine itself, which is on flat land, are the vines for their Cuvee Classique, their regular less expensivewine (in those days, this wine sold for around $10 at Kermit’s store.  Now it’s around $40).  But up in the higher elevations are their other vineyards, La Tourtine, La Migoua and Le Cabassaou.  These have older vines, some as old as 50years.  The soil is a bit different, some are terraced, and the resulting wines are better.  In the old days, all the wine from the better vineyards was bottled together into a Cuvee Speciale.  But starting in the 1970s, they decided to separate out the finer wine into these special bottlings.  Cabassaou, in particular, is on a very steep hillside and the whole vineyard is terraced, with what look like very old walls supporting the terraces.  Interspersed here and there in the vineyards were olive and juniper trees.  Jean Marie explained about all the different vineyards, their history and when the Domaine obtained them.

Jean Marie and me up in the vineyard of La Tourtine...

Soon we were back at the Domaine and he led us down to the cellars for a tasting, basket of small wine glasses in hand.  Again, we went around the great cellar, to many of the huge foudres, tasting the different cuvees from 1990.  The 1989s had recently been put in the bottle, as had the 1990 blanc and rose.  We tasted the various red wines, finishing off with the 1990 Cabassaou.  Because we had a meal and a lot of wine to go, we of course did the ‘professional’ thing and spit out the wine after tasting.  If you’re going to taste 10, 20 or 30 wines, this is a necessity, unless you want to be ‘under the table’ pretty fast. 

The wines were simply amazing.  The mourvedre grape is a very difficult grape to grow, as it has to be picked at exactly the right time for the wine to turn out right.   That's one reason most growers, in other parts of the South of France, use very little of it and blend it with other grapes.  But in Bandol, a wine must be made up of at least 50% mourvedre.  The wines we tasted were black as night, full of exotic flavors, very deep and alive.  There were even tar and smoke flavors, not necessarily a bad thing in wines.  I've read critics call it 'black smoke'.  That's not a bad description.  To me, Domaine Tempier's wines have always represented what Provence is all about.  Full of life, full of flavor, a wine to the max.  There is sometimes a bit of the barnyard thrown in.  Earthy, real flavors...and that's what I love about the wine.

Jean Marie, rose and glasses in hand, with the hill village of Le Castellet in the background...

Tasting wine in the cellars...

Jean Marie filled up a couple of empty bottles with some of the wine from the casks.  He led us around the house to the terrace, where there was a big table set up forus.  Here we met the Peyraud family whowere going to have lunch with us…Lulu, Lucien, Catherine (Jean Marie’s wife),Valerie (Jean Marie and Catherine’s daughter), Francois (Jean Marie’s brother), Paule (Francois’ wife) and Jerome (Francois and Paule’s son).  I must say I was a bit intimidated at first, but the friendliness of everyone very soon put Annie and me at ease.  Almost immediately, we were offered ‘amuse gueles’, or appetizers of tapenade and an amazing preserve of octopus. 

Jean Marie and I arrive avec les bouteilles...

Lulu offering a glass of rose...

We meet the family...

From the left: Jean Marie, Annie, Paule, Lulu, Jerome, Valerie, Catherine, Francois, and sitting is Lucien...

We sat down in our spots. On one side of the table it was Lulu, me, Catherine, Francois and Valerie. On the other, was Lucien, Annie, Jean Marie, Paule and Jerome. Annie and I brought some gifts to them, one that I specifically remember was a poster of a photo of Jean Marie that I took the previous trip. It is of him, in the middle of the vineyard, with the hill town of Le Castellet in the background. Jean Marie and Catherine still have this poster in their office at home.

Jean Marie with his poster...

Lulu serves Annie the rouget in grape leaves...

So here was thelunch, as listed on the menu…

Aperetif tapenade et confit de pulpe

  (olive paste on toast and a preserve of octopus on toast)
Rougets en feuilles de vignes
  (a small fish from the Mediterranean, wrapped in grape leaves and roasted)
Pintades roties en bohemienne
  (guinea fowl, roasted, served with a ratatouille type dish)
Fromages blancs aux figues fleurs
  (white cheese served with fresh figs)
Melon au vin cuit
  (melon served with vin cuit, a special ‘cooked wine’ they make at the Domaine)
Café
Marc du Domaine
  (Marc is a brandy like drink made from the pressings of the grapes)

I think all of us have had the experience of meeting people for the first time and you feel, after a few minutes, that you’ve known them for years.  This is how I immediately felt with the Peyrauds.  They were all so friendly and Annie and I felt so welcome in their home. Thanks to Annie, who of course spoke fluent French, we were all able to converse with no problems.  The only family members there who spoke English were Catherine, Valerie and Jerome.  But with Annie’s native French and my half assed, sort of okay especially if I have a few glasses of wine French, we talked non stop.  Lulu herself, very beautiful in a blue flowered dress, all made up and coiffed, looking so regal (and full of energy that I hope to have at least half of when I’m 73, which she was at the time), severed us one by one.  First out came the rougets, individually wrapped in grape leaves and roasted.  Oh my.  The fish was so perfectly done, sweet and juicy and went wonderfully with the white and rose wine that Jean Marie poured with it.


Enjoying a true feast...

Next up was the pintade.  This has always been my favorite fowl in France.  It’s guinea hen (kind of hard to find in the US) and has a gamey flavor much different then chicken. You've never really tasted a good fowl until you've had one of these fresh off the farm birds, which in France are much easier to fine then here in the US.  It was roasted and served with what Lulu calls a Bohemienne, which is similar to a ratatouille.  Different vegetables, cut up into small pieces and slow cooked. Jean Marie served several red wines with this.

Catherine and Lulu in the kitchen with the pintade...

Although we were under mostly shade, it was warm with dapples of sun coming through. I was wearing my ever present Panama hat (and because of this and my red hair and red beard, they kept saying I was a dead ringer for Vincent Van Gogh) and Lulu took me inside the house and in the entrance hallway the wall was covered with about 20 straw hats (which she collects)!  Soon, half the family had picked a straw hat and had joined me as hat wearers.


This is me...

This is not me...

Once the red wines came out, it was Lucien’s time to shine. Lucien was a poet at heart and the way he described each of the wines was amazing.  I wish I had had a recorder.  What I remember is, Lucien sitting next to Annie, he carefully explaining about each wine, showing how when you twirl the wine in your glass it should leave a sheen, which slowly drips down the inside of the glass.  This he called the ‘legs’, or les cuisses, and it indicated a good wine. Then he would go very poetic, comparing each wine to a classical music composer.  This ’89 Miguoa, he said, is like Mozart.  It’s lively, fresh, with many notes to it.  This ’88 Cabassaou,however, is more like Beethoven.  It’s deep, full and powerful.  I felt so lucky to be sitting here, next to two living legends, eating food like I’ve never eaten before and listening to a man describe wine in such a beautiful, poetic and unique way.

Lucien waxes poetic about his wonderful wines with Annie...

Next was half a melon with vin cuit in the middle hole. Vin cuit (literally, cooked wine) is a special concoction they make at the Domaine, only for their private use.  They usually make it at Christmas time and Lucien was the one who made it until he then taught Valerie how to do it.

Lulu and me...

When the cheese cameout, it was time for a bit of a surprise. I had read in Kermit’s book that the 1971 Cuvee Speciale (20 years oldat the time of the lunch) was one of the Peyrauds’ favorite wines from all they had made.  Well, here Jean Marie produced a bottle of this rare wine.  Wow, it was amazing.  I couldn’t believe that this wine was 20 years old (over the next many years, I drank bottles of Tempier that were 20 years old or older and these wines do indeed age well).  It went perfectly with the cheese and figs.

Last, but not least, was coffee and a glass of the Marc du Domaine. This is a brandy that they make from the pressed grapes.  It is very strong, has a beautiful amber color and goes best if you put just a little bit in your coffee cup when your coffee is almost drunk.

Jean Marie can also wax poetic when it comes to his wines (and life in general!)...

Soon, the menu was being passed around and everyone signed it. Then Jean Marie listed the various wines we had with the meal…

Blanc 90

Rose 90
Rouge 90 Cuvee Speciale
Rouge 90 Migoua
Rouge 90 Tourtine
Rouge 89 Classique
Rouge 89 Tourtine
Rouge 89 Cabassaou
Rouge 88 Cabassaou
Rouge 71 Cuvee Speciale

So what do you do once you’ve spent 2+ hours sitting around the table, eating, drinking, and talking?  You’re in the South of France, it’s hot, the cigales are singing (these are cicadas, which hang out in the trees and have this very loud creek-creek-creek sound that they make all during the summer months) and you maybe need to get up and move a bit?  You get out the balls and play Petanque,that’s what.  Petanque, or Boules, is the French game similar to Bacci.  You have metal balls, weighing about 700 grams, and you play in teams of two or three.  The object is to get your balls as close to the little wooden ball (called a couchounet) as possible.  You can toss it slowly, or toss it hard to try to get the other guy’s ball out of the way. Eventually, once your team makes it to 13 points, you win.  Everyone joined in, even Lulu (Lucien was resting, watching us).

The afternoon wore on…the cigales were still singing, the boules were still flying, but the sun was slowly setting and it was time to go. It was truly a day to remember.

But our time thatyear at Domaine Tempier wasn’t over yet. We had relatives in Provence at the same time and they were due to visit the Domaine in a couple of days.  That would turn out to be a big surprise for Annie’s sister, Marinette and our niece, Veronique.  That story will have to wait until Part 3. 

Part One: Discovering Tempier

In 1988 I read a book by the wine merchant Kermit Lynch, called ‘Adventures on the Wine Route’.  In this book he talked about the winemakers he met, mostly in France, and the stories about their wineries.  One of the chapters was about the Peyraud family, of Domaine Tempier.  Reading this chapter would change my life in a remarkable way.

I had travelled extensively in France since 1983, when I married Annie Bougoin, who was from Poitiers.  We travelled mostly in the southwest of France, near where her family was from.  In 1985, we went to Provence, in the southeast.  I immediately fell in love with that region of France…the people, the landscape, the food and the wine.  Over the next few years I learned more about the wines of Provence, like Cotes du Rhone, Chateauneuf du Pape, Les Baux de Provence and others.  But I’d never heard of wines from the region of Bandol until I read Kermit Lynch’s book. 

In it, he describes the remarkable winery of Domaine Tempier and the Peyraud family.  Domaine Tempier had been a winery for over one hundred years.  In the 1930s it was owned by Alphonse Tempier, a leather merchant.  The Domaine was a side business of his.  In 1936, his daughter Lulu married Lucien Peyraud.  Alphonse Tempier gave the couple Domaine Tempier as a wedding gift.

Domaine Tempier had won gold medals in the past, but the region had suffered greatly.  First there was the phyloxera bug (in the 1860s), which killed off all the vines of France.    French vines were grafted onto American root stock and this seemed to solve this problem.  But when Lucien started to study the history of Bandol wines, he discovered that in the past the wines were made up of mostly the Mourvedre grape, which is a low yielding grape that does very well in this region.  Winemakers in the previous decades had shied away from the Mourvedre and planted higher yielding grapes, such as Grenache.  Lucien made it his life’s work to return Bandol to its former glory and to get the French government to recognize it as an AOC (a designation that makes a wine region unique and to have it go by all sorts of rules) and to bring back the Mourvedre.  By 1941 he had accomplished his goal and Bandol became an AOC.  By the 1960s, his two sons, Jean Marie and Francois, were working with him at the Domaine, Jean Marie in the cellar making the wine and Francois in the vineyards tending the vines. 

By the late 1970s, Kermit Lynch was importing the wine to the US and it started to get a great reputation here.  Wine journalists, such as Robert Parker, praised the wine and it became pretty famous in America, especially here in the Bay Area where Kermit has his store. 

In 1987, some friends of mine started to meet every Thursday afternoon at the wine store, Singer and Foy, in San Francisco.  They sold a lot of Kermit’s wines, including Tempier.  After reading the book, I had to try some of the wines. I immediately fell in love with the wine.  It was all I loved in a wine…delicious, fruity, full, powerful and earthy flavors.  All natural, never fined or filtered.  It was ‘Provence In A Bottle’.  I knew that the next time I went to Provence I would have to go to Domaine Tempier and see the place for myself. 

In the summer of 1989, Annie and I took our annual trip to France.  Before I left, I wrote the Domaine and asked if we could come by for a tasting (this was pre-email and we actually wrote letters!).  In a few weeks I got a response from Jean Marie Peyraud, the wine maker, to come on by anytime.  Just call ahead and he would meet us there. 

On a lovely summer day in late June, 1989, we drove into the small town of Le Plan du Castellet and then found the driveway that led to the Domaine.  The driveway is lined by giant platane (Sycamore) trees that are all over this part of France.  On the driveway was an old man, walking along with the aid of his cane, out for his morning stroll apparently.  I drove by him and asked where I could find Jean Marie and he pointed to a nearby building, which was the office.  This old man, of course, was the famous Lucien Peyraud, now retired from active wine making at the age of nearly 80. 

Jean Marie met us with a big smile and a small basket with several wine glasses.  He said to follow him and took us around the big house and to the cellars.  Down the stairs we went to a huge room with giant foudres.  These are huge oak casks, some very old, that hold the wine for aging (up to 18 months for the red wines).  We went around to many of the foudres, where there is a little spigot sticking out, like a small faucet, where you can pour wine into your glass.  Jean Marie was obviously very passionate about his wine and spoke in poetic terms about the different cuvees, the Cuvee Classique, the Cuvee Speciale, La Tourtine, La Migoua and Le Cabassaou (the last three being specific vineyards which are bottled separately).  Tasting these wines right out of the barrel, some being just 9 months old, was a revelation.  All of the cuvees were stupendous.   Jean Marie even got some bottles of current vintages for us to try.  Oh, lovely!  We bought a few bottles to take with us (we had just started a 5 week trip and were going to Annie's hometown, so her family members could drink these wonderful wines). 

Jean Marie was very friendly and gave us, just two wine lovers whom he’d never met before, a lot of his time and energy.  I think it helped that Annie was with me, who spoke French, of course.  We left hoping we’d come back someday, but not necessarily expecting to anytime soon. 

Over the next 2 years, Jean Marie and I kept up a correspondence (mostly by fax) and became I guess what you would call pen pals.  So when Annie and I decided to go back to Provence and to visit in 1991, he said you must come back to the Domaine and we will have a meal together.  That meal would prove to be the best of my life.