Another Fine Day

We went to Chateauneuf-du-Pape to check out a distillery.  Normally you go there for the wine but some friends had introduced us to the owners of Distillerie Blachere and we were invited for a tour.

The distillery was founded in 1835 and Sandrine and Raphael are the sixth generation to run it.  It has had its ups and downs and was in tough shape when they took it over 20 years ago but now it is thriving.

Their main product is sirops, non-alcoholic flavorings that are popular for making refreshing drinks in cafes.  But their real love is the rare and specialized distilled products, the best known of which is marc, or brandy.

The tour was a real treat because people are rarely allowed inside the distillery, in order to protect the company’s secrets.   Raphael gave us the tour, describing their products and showing us how some of the more exotic drinks are made.  The herb storage room was especially interesting, filled with bags of plants we had never heard of.  It smelled wonderful.

Raphael said that when he took over he wanted to recreate some of the drinks made by the distillery when it first started.  He consulted the original recipe books, all written by hand and nearly 200 years old now.  But the problem was that the names of the plants were all written in Provencal and he wasn’t always sure what they were.  The first problem was that Provencal is now a mostly lost language.  The second problem was that the names of plants often varied from village to village.  So while he was able to identify most of the ingredients, there are a few that have been lost to time.

The best part for me was going to the barrel room where they store marcs going back to the second world war.  We tasted a few and they were delicious.  But strong, whoa.

The production line was shut down for lunchtime but they restarted it so Jeremy could see the bottling machines in action.  Raphael noted that their old bottler, built in 1960, is much more reliable than the machine they bought ten years ago.  Val, who was also built in 1960, was very proud of this.

After our tour, Sandrine and Raphael kindly invited us to lunch in Chateauneuf-du-Pape.  We were joined by some other friends of theirs and had a lively and interesting conversation.  Then it was off to do some wine tasting and sightseeing, of course.  Can’t miss the wine!

From there we went to Sara and Christian’s house where we had a long, relaxing aperitif and dinner on their patio.  I’m pretty sure that tasty wine was involved but don’t quite remember.

KVS

Val says hi from the pope's old house

Dinner en famille