Tour de France
For wine sippers and food lovers both, France is a resource as rich as a Carnegie's cupboard.
Which land makes better butter, cheese, cream or breads? Whose vineyards produce such a variety of terrific wines? Can there be a more delicious chicken than a poulet de Bresse? Tastier fat than foie gras d'Alsace?
Italy, China, California—each also lays claim to the world's best provenance and cuisine, but when Italians, Chinese and Californians travel in order to eat and drink, they travel to France.
A short tour of the country's better-known wine-producing areas offers a glimpse of French wines and some foods that best marry with them.
Alsace
Oft overlooked because it is remote, Alsace makes what some consider France's best stable of white wines for food. Produced from grapes grown rarely elsewhere in the country, the flinty, very dry and buoyantly fruity wines of Alsace are terrific tablemates, especially for rich foods. Riesling and fish; Pinot Blanc and paté; Gewürztraminer and sausages—these are delicious pairs.
Loire
When there were kings, the French equivalent of the Hamptons and six times as long. Home to some of France's better white wines, the Loire turns out zesty, crisp Vouvray, Muscadet and Savennières (a Chenin Blanc-based, flinty, minerally white worth a seek).
Foods for Loire wines: seafood of most every stripe, especially shellfish. Try this: Muscadet and oysters well may send shivers up your spine.
Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on unsplash.com
Champagne
The name comes from the Latin campus, "field," and this is a land of rolling swells of low hills, rather flat to the eye, but the very womb of French history. From Clovis on, the French kings were crowned here in the capital city of Reims.
It is, of course, the birthplace of the wine most people throughout the world associate with France itself. Some drinkers enjoy richer, more robust sparklers such as Roederer, Krug or Bollinger. Others enjoy lighter, more delicate wines such as Pommery or Moët et Chandon. You choose.
Champagne, as a rule, may be the country’s most versatile wine, delicious by itself (of course), but also able to keep steady throughout a meal. Some suggest that the best match for French cheese of most any sort is Brut or Demi-Sec Champagne.
Bordeaux
To Americans, France's most sought-after wines come from here. Home to "great growths" such as Château Lafite-Rothschild and delicious sweet wines such as Château Suduiraut. Because it is France's most prolific producer of top-quality wine, values are easy to find. Good-deal appellations: the "satellites" of St-Emilion (Montagne, Puisseguin, for example), Fronsac wines, and Côtes de Bourg.
The Bordelais eat simply, as a foil to their delicious wines. Roasts of red meat, especially lamb, are classic accompaniments to red Bordeaux. White Bordeaux is as versatile a light wine as can be found.
Burgundy
By some estimates, more than 350 types of soil exist in the 200 miles from Chablis in the north to Beaujolais in the south. And each soil type, each slant of vineyard and the various skills of the 14,000 farmers who grow grapes here allow for wildly different wines.
To most people, Burgundy is the Côte d'Or, the mix of the two districts of the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune. But there also is the famed white wine area of Chablis to the north, the southern Maconnais district and the third "river" of Burgundy (after the Rhône and the Saône), the prolific area of Beaujolais. Some of the better buys in top-notch Burgundy are white wines from lesser-known villages such as Rully.
Situated close to Lyon, the coeur of French food, Burgundian cooking is rich in layers of flavors. Something as simple as a stew is always elysian.
Rhône
The long Rhône River Valley is home to some of France's most robust reds, made from grapes that capture the scents of the earth and wild foliage of the area. The more expensive wines carry evocative names such as Hermitage and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Good values are available from such areas as Gigondas, St-Joseph and Côtes-du-Rhone.
Like Burgundy, Rhône cooking is hearty but fine and, as you approach Provence, also filled with the scents, sun and savor of the Mediterranean.
Several other areas of France have come into prominence in recent years because they offer very good wines at a low price. For example, the southwestern district of Languedoc-Rousillon makes both reds and whites that are earthy and aromatic. Some folk, however, consider the rosés of the area to be stars. They are seldom equaled as wines for summer drinking.