(Come back tomorrow if you’re here for the food or the travel, or just to find out where we are).
Terre des 2 Sources wines. A typical line-up.
What a luxury to have so much time here in Montpellier that I can– without any guilt or fear of missing out– spend an entire day in my pajamas. I can’t think of when I’ve more needed a day of rest. We’ve had a week of almost non-stop activity and indulgence in fabulous wine, food and conversation.
The past week has been astonishing and exceeded my expectations, which were high. I hoped we would enjoy some good wine and food, learn more about the region, see lovely places, and bask in the Mediterranean sun.
All of that happened, but to an extent I never could have imagined a few months ago when I RSVP’d “oui” to a wine party in the south of France.
We’ve been in numerous wine clubs over the years, nearly all loyalty programs from Michigan wineries. As I mentioned previously, my neighborhood shop, Lake District Wine Co., has a membership club curating wines from around the world, and I highly recommend it. All of the wine clubs I’ve been in generally have a pick-up party, where you collect your quarterly wine package and are treated with nibbles and wine tastings.
And then there’s Princess & Bear, a niche Franco-Seattle wine club which overachieves with the membership perks. The owners, Carol and Steve, are an American couple who refocused from their careers as lawyer and surgeon to establish a home in the south of France. They fell so in love with the wines and the people who make them that they started a business to bring these artisan wines — generally with not enough production to attract an importer — to their friends back in the States.
How did we find it? That’s a story we’ve been asked to tell many times this week as we were the only members from Michigan — and from anywhere outside the greater Seattle metro area — at the annual fête.
Because I live within a five-minute walk of an excellent wine shop, I never considered joining a club that ships wine to my door, even when huge discounts were promised. I like to walk over to the shop and pick up one or two bottles at a time to accompany whatever I’m cooking that night, always getting excellent advice from the shop owners. I had no interest in a random selection of “wines we know you’ll love” from someone–or a robot– who’s never met me.
Until a few years ago when this club specializing in wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France caught my eye.
We vacationed in the Languedoc in 2018 and I loved the region and the small, family-owned wineries we visited. I wanted to keep drinking those wines and imagining myself back in the south of France during the long Michigan winters. My neighborhood shop, excellent as it is, had only a small inventory of wines from the Languedoc, primarily because the region does not enjoy the market demand of Bordeaux or Burgundy or even the southern Rhone.
Then one day on my Instagram feed appeared a beautiful fairy tale-like map of the wines of the Languedoc. I was enchanted by this watercolor, and I’ve had it as my phone’s screensaver ever since. (Two nights ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the artist, Nicola Blakemore.)
Anyway, back in 2019, or maybe it was 2018, when I first saw this image, I clicked the accompanying link and discovered Princess & Bear. I could have four bottles of wine from small producers in the Languedoc shipped to me four times a year. I imagined one of the boxes including the delicious wine we enjoyed at one of our favorite stops on our 2018 trip to France: Domaine La Tour La Pagèze, which is unobtainable in the U.S.
Four bottles wasn’t much of a commitment, and I could quit the club at any time, so I decided to try it out, only to learn they couldn’t ship to Michigan. I forgot about it until the pandemic hit and circumstances made me worried I wouldn’t be able to get any wine at all from the Languedoc. So I tried again, hoping rules had changed. Sadly, still no shipping to Michigan, but then I asked: “do you ship to Chicago?” They could. I would not be defeated by protectionist Michigan laws!
So my dear son has been smuggling the wine to me from his home in Chicago for the past three years, except in the winter when I receive it in North Carolina, which despite being in the Bible Belt and legalizing “liquor by the drink” (the ability to order a cocktail in a restaurant) in my lifetime, has more lenient wine-shipment laws than Michigan. Go figure.
The first bottle I opened, a white from Chateau Pech Redon, blew me away with its freshness, depth of flavor, minerality and harmony. It was exactly the taste I love the most. But what really struck me as a sign from the universe is that shortly after drinking that delicious wine, I was walking passing Raduno, where the owner and chef extraordinaire was taking a break on the terrace with a couple of her friends. I saw the label on the wine they were drinking and it was Chateau Pech Redon! “Are you in the Princess & Bear wine club?” I asked the visitors. No, they had brought that bottle back from their recent trip to France and loved it so much they wanted to share it with their chef friend.
So that first bottle was a brilliant confirmation that I’d made the right choice to join this little wine club, even if it means driving to Chicago to fetch it (a 10-hour round trip, but we get to see our son and daughter-in-law). Every bottle since has been additional confirmation. They have all been a pleasure to drink, and I have particularly enjoyed the whites.
Last spring, I switched to P&B’s high-commitment club, the Mediterranean, which is 12 bottles, four times a year. Obviously, I’ve really loved the wine. And as I was soon informed, the Mediterranean club came with a special perk: an invitation to an annual party in France. I couldn’t take advantage of it last year, and I thought at the time I probably never would, but as fate would have it, this year the timing was good.
The princess and the bear in their beautiful lair.
More to come.
