July 11, 2013
Non-alcoholic wine and pastis; Noilly-Prat; Muscat de frontignan; A Mésalliance?

     Leave it to the French to invent good-tasting non-alcoholic wines: shopping in the wine section of Intermarché Hyper (Intermarché's Superstore) near Carcassonne, I come across an entire line of alcohol-free wines: Rosé, rosé flavored with grapefruit, merlot, syrah, chardonnay.  Some may scoff, but the brand, Bonne Nouvelle, offers a beverage that is more than grape juice, but less than the hard stuff.  That is good news for those of us who often find the fruit of wine with a meal a migraine.  Mitt Romney --a young Mormon missionary assigned to France in the 1960s-- might have been able to meet locals on something closer to common ground had Bonne Nouvelle been around then.

     More surprising  is the non-alcoholic, sugar-free pastis.  For those who have not read Hemingway or Pagnol lately, pastis is an anisette-based liqueur 40-45% alcohol which is mixed with water and drunk in the South as a summer thirst-quencher.  Absinthe --which has been re-mixed without deadly wormwood and marketed legally again-- has a similar taste, but an alcohol content as high as 68%.  Pastis has an almost-legendary status in the French imagination: it is what the masquisards --the Resistance fighters-- drank.  The non-alcoholic, sugar-free version is made by Les Succeseurs de Manuel Limiñana (The Heirs Of Manuel Limiñana), a pastis-manufacturing company of Spanish origin established in 1884.  The product is sold in a large, brightly-labeled bottle that could pass for tequila, although the white liquid is anything but in flavor and kick.

     For those whose metabolisms absorb alcohol without distress, particularly those drinkers who like a dry Martini,  Noilly Prat white vermouth is a must.  It is made in nearby Marseillan, where the Canal du Midi flows into the Bassin de Thau.  Noilly Prat is also a favorite of cooks using a recipe that calls for white vermouth.

     Another alcoholic wine type that is popular in Languedoc-Rousillon is muscat, a slightly sweet wine that is drunk as an apéritif or as a desset wine.  There are six types meriting the appellation d'origine controlée ("AOC")  désignation, four of them from the region: Le Frontignan, Le Saint Jean-de-Minervois, Le Mireval, Le Lunel.  (The other two are Beaume de Venise (Rhone Valley), and Muscat de Rivesaltes ((Hautes-Pyrenées). )

  

         Visiting Mèze again for a few days, this morning I shop in the boulangerie, the covered and the outdoor markets, and at the wine store.  I buy freshly-made seafood salad for lunch; tomato confiture and oil-cured Spanish black olives; a head of lettuce and some tomatoes; fresh rye bread, savory tielles, and sweet pâtes de Pézenas; apricots and fresh strawberries.  All this before going into the wine store before it (and all the other stores) close at 12:30 p.m..

       The wine store carries fruit-flavored rosés, Minervois red wines, sparkling and "foaming" wines (vins petillants et mousseux), as well as local muscats.  The most interesting feature of the store is, however, the giant metal vats of red, rosé, white and muscat wine, which are each about 1.50 Euros cheaper than the already cheap bottled wines (6-9 Euros).  The tub wines are sold at 4.50 Euros the liter, and plastic litre bottles are provided.  I buy a liter of rosé and a liter of muscat.  Several locals have taken away bottles of the tub wines, so I figure they must be passable.

          Back home, with lunch, I opt for a glass of cold muscat with the seafood salad. They are wonderful together.  Yet I have made a major wine-pairing mistake, taking muscat for muscadet --a white wine with a crisp, dry taste, made near Nantes in the Loire Valley.  Muscadet, not muscat, is the classic wine to serve with seafood. I have been drinking nothing but non-alcoholic wine and pastis for a week, so perhaps my palate has degraded.   Nevertheless, on a blazing 91-degree day in the Midi, what wine experts would decry as a mésalliance of food and wine (literally, a marriage with a person of inferior social position), seems inspired and a Bonne Nouvelle, if you like French puns.