Friday, February 2: Paris
Train Ride to the Loire vALLEY
After a sleepless red-eye flight to Paris and rushing to the Gare Montparnasse, I am writing from a high-speed train heading to the heart of France. Parisian city streets turn to countryside in a glimpse.
Before coming here, I moved out of my apartment in Oakland, knowing that when I returned, I would hit the road to Virginia to research the story of enslaved Black winemakers at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello. Suffice to say, the experience of the Black American in France is on my mind. I come armed with James Baldwin’s second essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name, published in 1961. In the opening essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” Baldwin writes about how the American writer must often leave home to reach a breakthrough. I am in desperate need of one.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Against the backdrop of the Loire Valley’s natural wine salons—an annual series of events where European vignerons showcase their wines—I have come to write about the Black winemaker Pascal Carole, who landed here in 2022 after nearly a decade in San Francisco’s tech industry.
For Carole, life had become fleeting. A year before the pandemic, his son, Malcolm, entered the world. His wife, Sarah, then faced a health scare, and her recovery was slow. During quarantine, Carole’s home experiments with fermentation (he’d caught the sourdough bug years before it became a trend) grew to include miso, vinegar, koji, and, eventually, wine. He met a winemaker who needed help farming a vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which was all it took for Carole to leave his desk job writing code for a banking software platform.
Down the hill from the Carole home, in the San Francisco neighborhood of Bernal Heights, Christopher Renfro had just begun stewarding the abandoned vineyard at Alemany Farm. Carole would be among those participating in the Two Eighty Project’s pilot program for a viticultural apprenticeship. The newly formed community of BIPOC winemakers that assembled gave one another a reason to dream. Soon, Renfro was telling everyone that Carole was moving to France to make wine. The idea wasn’t so far-fetched. Carole was born in Martinique, a former French colony in the Antilles (his mother and father are West Indian and Afro-Caribbean, respectively); he had never lived in mainland France, but he had the birthright to.
Baldwin moved to Paris to escape America’s color problem and write his first novel. Nearly 75 years later, George Floyd’s public murder reminded us that the Black man still wasn’t safe in the United States. In the Loire, the Carole family would pay only the equivalent of around $700 a month on rent, school was free for children ages three and up, and Pascal and Sarah wouldn’t have to worry about their son dying at the hands of a police officer or school shooter.
Now, Carole is pouring at the annual salons. Though he heeds his call to France, he is our brother to keep. I’m here to witness Carole’s reclamation of the French wine tradition. I want to know how the Loire has received its colonial son.
Saturday, February 3: Angers
A Stranger in the Crowd
In the morning, Carole picks me up at my hotel in Angers’s city center. Two years ago, we were here with our mutual friend, Sam, navigating the salons together, crashing parties, and huddling in dimly lit bars over glasses of cabernet franc. It feels like no time has passed, but everything has changed.
Carole and I travel deeper into Anjou, a region that American wine writer Jon Bonné once described as the capital of natural wine. This first salon, Naturall, includes 30 or so winemakers from across Europe. We pay a meager fee of €7, grab a glass, and enter the fold. Most of the participants are hardcore naturalists, who practice the method of nothing added or removed, letting nature determine the course of their wines. Knowing there will be no shortage of chenin blanc or cabernet franc, I gravitate toward the light, quaffable grenache-based reds of a winemaker from Madrid.
There are familiar faces, like Alice Feiring, the New York journalist and author, who has been writing about natural wine since the early aughts. Several others, all men, are here as plus-ones with the importers they work for in Los Angeles or San Francisco. These American men usually keep to their own circles, but on foreign soil, their curiosity gets the best of them. They ask whom I’m traveling with and what I’m working on.
I am on even higher alert than I would be in the United States, for I know that the natural winemaker’s code of ethics begins and ends with the vine. These vignerons aren’t holier-than-thou’s more traditional counterparts but a good old boys’ club in other sheep’s clothing. The European laughs at the American’s cries against racism, sexism, and homophobia. When the Court of Master Sommeliers–Americas is called out for sexual misconduct, the perpetrators are expelled. In France, when a woman accuses a vigneron of assault, he sues her for defamation and wins.
More than once, Carole has spoken about his struggle to find community. There’s no ragtag group of BIPOC winemakers in Saumur, the wine appellation where Carole has landed. Many of the vignerons can trace back their family’s winemaking heritage for generations. People are amiable enough, but they have little need to befriend anyone who’s not their own. Carole and I had periodically caught up over the phone. “You would think if you go 2,000 miles, they could meet you 1 mile in, right?” he asked weeks before my arrival. I didn’t have an answer, as the sunrise peered through my apartment window in Oakland.
Back at the salon, I point out how many locals seem to know Carole, though he’s quick to quip that his Black skin makes him hard to forget.
We are flashes of color in a vividly white landscape. Like Carole’s, my origins have one foot in the Antilles—in Cuba and Puerto Rico—but having never been to either place, I more readily cling to my father’s Black lineage from the American South. Still, my light-brown skin and freckles could be the product of any amalgamation. It’s only when I stumble over the words Je ne parle pas français that I out myself.
Carole may be an outsider, but he speaks fluent French. He’s the kind of guy who walks into his neighborhood bar and joins the old men’s boule de fort club. His dark features and shaved head bring out the gleam in his eyes. He is attentive and curious about the world around him. His lighthearted nature puts one at ease.
We make it back to Angers by nightfall. Salon-goers in town would have gone to Grenier Saint-Jean, which features more established vignerons pouring classically made organic and biodynamic wines. It’s held in a stunning venue: a 12th-century Gothic hospital that has been converted into a museum. I remember because it’s where Carole and I met for the first time, two years ago. Instead, we walk to a nearby parking lot overlooking the Loire River.
What in previous years was a back-of-a-van party has become a late-night salon under the stars, with a dozen or so featured winemakers, disco music blaring, and a guy shucking fresh oysters. The organizer, Jasmin Swan, has driven from Germany’s Rheinhessen region. Her former French-wine distributor, Fleur Godart, and their posse have traveled down from Paris in solidarity. Both are unapologetically using their brands, Katla Wines and Les Cuvées Militantes, to bring queer and feminist agendas into the natural wine sphere.
Just when I am feeling like a wallflower, I meet a young Māori American expat, Nathan Ratapu, who begins waxing poetic about the French wine world’s racist history, from one domaine’s glorification of Le Code Noir to Champagne’s connection to sugar production in the Antilles. After five years of living in Paris, Ratapu is still learning to navigate the French discretion around such topics. He’s the first person willing to break it down for me: It’s not that France doesn’t have a color problem—the French just fail to acknowledge that they have one. Ratapu invites me to come by his shop, Rerenga Wines, when I return to Paris.
In the meantime, Carole and I are running late for dinner. We make it to Chaussette in time to snag the last table. Over terrine and a bottle of chilled red wine, I lean in to hear Carole through the clamor of the tavern. He’s going on a tangent about how he doesn’t need epic stories about descending from African kings and queens to justify his right to greatness. It was during Carole’s teenage years, when he and his siblings were on scholarship at Le Lycée Français in Toronto, that being exceptional became a survival skill.
The U.S. tech industry is only slightly more diverse than the U.S. wine industry, where fewer than 1 percent of proprietors are Black. Carole wants to make exceptional wine. But this time, he has nothing to prove. This time, he’s doing it for himself.
Sunday, February 4: Saumur
Between the Bridges
To get to Saumur, I rent a car and take the scenic route, heading 50 kilometers east through a series of roundabouts and cobblestoned towns on the Loire’s right bank. Named after the river running through it, the Loire Valley bears many wine appellations, from Auvergne to the port city of Nantes. Wine has been made in the region for centuries, a story of Pliny the Elder, Benedictine monks, and French royalty, but I’m not interested in the colonists’ version. I learn that Nantes was once the largest slave-trading port in France. Now, when I look at the river, I think not only of wine but of Black bodies stowed on merchant ships like cargo, of the coffee, sugar, tobacco, and other goods enslaved people forcibly produced in the Antilles. It’s easy to fall under the Loire’s trance, but its calming waters carry a dark history.
My apartment in Saumur is a stone’s throw from the river—so close that I can watch it there across the road, lazily passing by as I lie in bed. Beyond that is the Île d’Offard, where the Caroles live. A small island flanked by the Loire, it’s referred to by the locals as “between the bridges.”
Carole invites a few of us over for lunch. His side of the river reveals a panoramic view of the Château de Saumur, perched on a hilltop above the city center. I meet Sarah, who has just returned from taking their son to music class. She gives me a tour of their narrow, four-story house, built by a mariner in the mid-1800s, and we share our woes of learning the French language. Then arrives Ratapu; his husband, Baptiste; and their friend Maryam, a winemaker in Baja California. Baptiste announces he has a cold—one has been making the rounds at the salons and will likely strike us next.
Before the meal, we head down to the dimly lit garage, which Carole has converted into a winery and cellar. Half of the room holds five steel tanks filled with wine resting from the previous vintage. An old, brick fireplace on one wall is now a makeshift tool cabinet; above, a poster reads, “Le super pouvoir d’être autre chose,” or “the superpower to be something else.”
Carole’s trajectory is quite remarkable. His first winter in the Loire, he found a pruning gig for the season. The job was the saving grace he and Sarah needed to rent an apartment in Saumur. His employer connected him with a grape grower and loaned him a cave to produce his first vintage of wines. Carole’s twin brother, Sarah’s parents, and a handful of their friends flew across the world to help that harvest. The following year, after finding a home on the island, they moved their small wine operation here, too.
We gather around as Carole uses a glass pipette to siphon wine from the tanks. For the 2023 vintage, he has produced cabernet franc in four variations. Ratapu, who’s more attuned to French wine than any of us, points out that Carole’s style is atypical for Saumur: In addition to purchasing most of his fruit, which some vignerons look down on, he’s experimenting with whole-cluster and carbonic fermentation. Though he has fallen into the Loire’s sans soufre—no sulfur—camp, it’s not for the sake of conforming to a particular group.
“My relationship with the world is one of trying to find that push-pull of control,” says Carole. “Which things do you need to surrender to? And which things do you need to embrace as they happen? Fermentation is a microcosm of that.”
Monday, February 5: Saumur
Misfits and Militants
On day two of the salons, Aaron Ayscough publishes an article in his newsletter, Not Drinking Poison, leaking an email that longtime organizer Sylvie Augereau has sent to the vignerons pouring at the most high-profile salon, La Dive Bouteille, telling them to leave their “slightly too crazy” wines at home and noting that some additives are preferred to “certain intruders.”
Is La Dive Bouteille no longer radical amid a “proliferation of smaller, younger, and more stylistically unified salons,” as Ayscough’s piece suggests?
In 1999, when Augereau took over the organizing, Dive, as it’s known, was the alt-salon to attend. In those early days, the event featured only a dozen or so vignerons on the cusp of natural winemaking, before the trend had a name. As in any movement, differing ideologies led to factions. This year’s season, there are a dozen or so salons. Over the course of my stay, Carole and I visit seven of them. Still, Dive remains the most famous and certainly the largest, with 200 or so participating vignerons. It’s the reason thousands of us make the pilgrimage to the Loire every winter. Without it, there would be no masses to attend the other salons.
The courtyard is as bustling as the Gare Montparnasse. I run into Dante Clark, a poet who sells natural wine by day and with whom I have been playing salon tag on this trip. He’s here with Zev Rovine Selections and prone to the death march that most importers make of wining and dining and visiting as many of their vignerons as possible. We find a seat along an old stone wall, watching passersby walk to and from the caves, and catch up on life. Clark has received a full ride to New York University’s MFA program. He’s taking a class taught by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong. It’s Clark’s first time in Europe, and he’s surprised at how much Paris feels akin to Harlem; when he and the Zev Rovine crew visit Jean-Pierre Robinot’s cellar, the French vigneron greets them wearing a Harlem baseball cap.
In a blink, Clark grows tense, as he catches sight of a man in the crowd wearing a jet-black Afro wig. Though we are thousands of miles from home, we cannot shed the particular wound of racism that America has thrust on us. Clark, who not long ago had dreadlocks, deeply knows how one’s hair can be weaponized against one. He wants to march over there and slap that wig off the guy’s fucking head. Before he can do so, his colleague intervenes. The man is wearing it for provocation’s sake, he says. With that, it’s time to part ways with La Dive Bouteille. Clark says he’ll see me later and goes off to another tasting.
Later that afternoon, I drive to Rues des Belles Caves in the village of Berrie, about 25 kilometers south of Saumur, and know I’m in the right place when hillsides of dormant vines come into view. The final salon is headlined by François Saint-Lô, a wiry man with blue eyes and dreads who debuted at La Dive Bouteille in 2013. Years later, he came across a former vigneron’s abandoned cave and turned it into a makeshift commune for young artisans. Now, Saint-Lô and his friends throw their own salon.
Carole is there waiting for me in the courtyard. He’s in good spirits. “These are the people who have been most welcoming to me,” he says over his shoulder. He was invited to pour after meeting one of the salon organizers at an art show. It’s within this community that Carole has befriended other young winemakers, like Fabien Perréard of Le Nadir, who will later wind up passing down a vineyard parcel to Carole.
We bypass the old farmhouse and head for the large wooden doors leading below it. Before us is a troglodyte cave, dug out from the Loire’s tuffeau limestone like an apple core, and an intimate salon setting among barrels, cement tanks, and other winery equipment. It isn’t nearly as grand as Caves Ackerman, where La Dive Bouteille is held, but is mystical nonetheless. I imagine this village gathering is what salons felt like in the early aughts. Some of the vignerons, like Carole, are pouring their first vintages. And, perhaps to Sylvie Augereau’s disapproval, not a soul in sight is using sulfur or other additives.
Banners are festively strewn throughout the cave, displaying the vignerons’ names over their allotted barrels. I follow the bend until I reach Carole’s station. He has two wines to taste: a chenin blanc and a cabernet franc. An hour later, Clark and the rest of the Rovine crew—including Rovine himself—arrive. They’ve come to see the newest vigneron in their portfolio: Pascal Carole. The wines are already on a cargo ship to New York.
Those of us who stay until dark are herded out to the courtyard, where we huddle around a crackling bonfire until dinner is served. We are no longer tasting but drinking. For a brief moment, lines blur, and it feels like I’m back on San Francisco Bay’s Treasure Island. It’s March 7, 2020, and I’m at an industry-only party for the French-inspired salon Brumaire, before the pandemic brought the world to a halt. There’s the same perfume of weed in the air, the drunk guy asleep at the table, and the whispers about crashing on so-and-so’s couch after dancing until two in the morning.
Only now, in the Loire, I can see how Brumaire is modeled after gatherings like this one. The music echoing from the cave is my cue to return to Saumur.
Friday, February 23: Paris
What It Means to Be American
I exit the Gare Montparnasse into a gust of bone-chilling wind. After leaving the Loire and two weeks of aimless wandering in Bordeaux, the energy is different in Paris, the pace much faster, and the streets slightly more treacherous.
Another train takes me across the Seine to the 18th arrondissement. Once on foot, I ascend to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, the highest point in Paris. Along the way, there are missing-person ads for Israelis abducted by Hamas. Someone has ripped off a piece where the word kidnapped would have appeared in bold red letters. I think of the Cameroonian law student who guided me through Bordeaux’s grandiose streets, pointing out forgotten sites of the port city’s slave trade, and how it was George Floyd’s murder that led her to join Mémoires et Partages, the activist group remembering this history. I think of James Baldwin, who once wrote about how we, Black folk around the world, were all wrestling with our bond to Europe. On the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, I take in the panoramic view of Paris and realize that I like this work of being a witness.
For lunch, I’ve booked a reservation at Le Verre Volé, the natural wine drinker’s quintessential bistro that opened in 2000. The server seats me next to a blond woman who’s dining solo. Neither of us acknowledges the other until the dessert course, when I point out that she has dropped her napkin. She responds first in broken French, then in English. I already know where the conversation is heading and wish that Carole was here to school her. Once I’ve broken the ice, she begins her interrogation.
“Are you American?” she asks.
“Yes, and you?” I bounce back.
I learn that she is from South Carolina and works in fashion. Now she lives in Lyon, the capital for food, she says, as if I wouldn’t know such a thing. Then it’s my turn to talk. I tell her that I’m from California and work in wine, that I came for the wine salons in the Loire and extended my stay to visit Bordeaux.
“Oh, so that’s why you’re here,” she says curtly.
I have nearly gotten away with avoiding this moment throughout my entire trip. Sure, other people, both French and American, have asked why I am here, but this woman’s tone is no longer one of curiosity.
Perhaps our meeting is karmic, because days before leaving the Loire, I had asked Carole why he deserved to be there. No white American has to endure such questioning, but I wanted to hear him say it out loud. He deserves to claim his French identity as much as anyone else, he replied. As much as I deserve to be in this restaurant, enjoying a four-course meal and a glass of wine.
I remember Ratapu’s invitation to visit Rerenga Wines, which is tucked away in a quiet alley of the 10th arrondissement. The petite cave’s display shelves are a politicized selection of natural wines and books that discuss social and political movements, discrimination, and forms of militancy, which upon closer inspection, send some French passersby scurrying away. Among the wines are Carole’s first releases; Rerenga is the first place in Paris to carry them. Ratapu sits at the checkout counter. He has a book for me: The Blood of the Colony, from 2021, by American historian Owen White, who recounts how French colonizers turned Algeria into one of the 20th century’s largest wine-producing regions, powered by an African labor force. We are all reclaiming our connection to wine. For some Algerians, the act of reclamation was ripping out the vines of their oppressors. For Carole, it was moving to France and making exceptional wine.
That evening, I end my time in Paris as I always do, with a drink at Les Deux Magots, the café where James Baldwin and other great literary minds spent many a late night writing. Once more, I scan the pages of Nobody Knows My Name for my favorite line, searching for the words to conclude this letter and prepare for the long flight home.
“If he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe,” Baldwin writes, “he has been preparing himself—for America.”•
Sydney Love is a wine writer based in Los Angeles. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Wine & Spirits, the Wine Zine, and Pipette.
