On Sunday, April 19 from 12-7pm in both the Manhattan and Brooklyn wine stores we’ll be tasting inexpensive organic wines including Chateau des Hospitaliers Prestige Coteaux du Languedoc, a white from a producer we’ve carried since we opened that is back just in time after having run out earlier this year. Enjoy its lean peach and apple flavors with Graber olives or grilled trout stuffed with rosemary and lemon. For $14, it is hard to find something this satisfying. With summer coming, this is a ‘buy the case’ wine – our 15% case discount makes it only $11.90 a bottle.
The promotion of organic farming is all the rage in the marketing plans of wineries all over the world. They tout their organic practices in the brochures and on their labels. A noble and worthy endeavor for sure, but it sometimes comes off as just another marketing ploy. For Serge Martin-Pierrat and his wife at Chateau des Hospitaliers, farming naturally is just the way things are done. You won’t see it on their label. Or in a brochure. But for 20 years of farming apricots, peaches and grapes in the red clay of the Languedoc, the Martin-Pierrat family have not used chemicals in their vineyards. After all, their children play in the same vineyards where their grapes grow.
When Sara from the wine store visited the Martin-Pierrats years ago, they were building their winery. She remembers:
And when I say they I mean he was building it himself. It was all done with saving energy and using natural products in mind. The insulation was sheep’s wool, they used gravity to move the wine around and they took into consideration the windows and the positioning of the sun in order to maximize solar energy.
Sara, by the way, is enjoying her time on the west coast and says she frequently gets a shout out to Fort Greene when she wears her Greene Grape sweatshirt. Though no longer working in the wine business, she has continued her passion for the grape through a new website, vine-yl.com, which she describes as the love child of a wine geek and a record freak. Check it out!