Charlemagne
Wine Club - 2002 Tastings
Monday 16th September 2002
Lena’s Loire presented by Lena Inger
The Loire is the longest river in France. It rises way down in the Ardeche,
flows north-west to Orleans and then turns left to cut a 400km-long valley
to the Atlantic. Along this valley lies the wine region known as the Garden
of France.
Because of its length, the region has a huge range of wine styles. They are
mostly dry white, but there is also a significant amount of rose, good light
to medium reds, quality sparkling wine, and some very fine late-harvest and
botrytis-affected dessert wine.
The diversity of styles and grape varieties makes it impossible to deal with
the whole region in one evening. So for this tasting Lena’s going to concentrate on
the wines of the middle Loire, - Anjou-Saumur and Touraine.
Lena Inger works with Sandy Leckie in The Wine Education Service which runs
courses for consumers in Central London, Manchester and Edinburgh. She
joined Charlemagne over 20 years ago when she was first becoming seriously
interested in wine and went on to make a second career of it. She says
"I've never regretted it. I'm so lucky to be working in wine. And I'll
always have great affection for Charlemagne because I learnt such a lot from
the people I met there."