| I started to write this letter to you on the train from Angers to Paris. I settled into my seat and tried to gather up all of the details of the intense four days of tasting which included five different salons. What was this fragment of tasting season in the Loire like? Kind of you to ask. Imagine this: On your feet from 9:00AM onward with little break. Activities include schmoozing, tasting, walking, strategizing. Just when you think you cannot put one more drop in your mouth, that your ability to analyze is done for, well, there’s another twenty bottles in front of you and you just get to it. Then at night there’s drinking and always scribbling and you’ve stopped being self-conscious about your stained teeth, black as licorice. Food is invariably mediocre for those of us who don’t eat rillettes. Eventually there’s bed, sometimes you’re hungry. An early night would be 2:00AM. On one of the days, someone slips you an invitation to an after-tasting, off-tasting, such as a soirée at Sébastien Dervieux’s (Vignes de Babass) cave, where there’s a dozen or so winemakers pouring. There might be Julie Balagny beating herself up for bringing the wrong bottles, or someone like Didier Grappe who surprises (and touches) you by actually remembering when you first tasted with him seven years ago, or was it more? It’s more than possible that there’s a self-made ‘natural wine star’ in a cap, bopping his head to the spinning of discs and bringing a club energy that makes you want to sit down and sketch it. Maybe he thought it was Cannes instead of tasting season in the Loire. Okay, whatever. And maybe when you get dropped off at your shitty hotel, you decide what the hell, run to the bar à vin 100 meters away to meet a friend from California for some bubbles, and there you fall in love with a dog named Riesling. | 
