La Tour du Pouilly-Fumé – well worth a visit

La Tour du Pouilly-Fumé

During a visit to Serge Dagueneau et Filles yesterday, Valerie Dagueneau recommended that we visit the newly opened La Tour du Pouilly-Fumé, so we dropped in at the beginning of the afternoon. It is an exhibition centre for the wines of Pouilly, somewhat in the style of la Maison des Sancerre, and shares premises with the Pouilly tourist office. We had also met Georges Perret, a photographer, over a pickers' lunch with the Dagueneau family. Georges took the very fine photos of the Pouilly vineyards in all the seasons that have been used in the audio-visual displays at La Tour.

The exhibition and tourist office are housed in a historic group of buildings in the centre of Pouilly with la Tour dating back to the 15th century. The centre was inaugurated on 16th September, although it was unofficially open during the summer.

La Tour features an audio-visual presentation that is spread over three rooms. In the first room 'Paroles de vignerons' concentrates on the history and development of the vineyards and wine of Pouilly-sur-Loire. The next room has 'les 4 saisons du Pouilly-Fumé' which shows the work in the vineyard throughout the year and in the last room producers talk about vinification and the style of wine. The visit concludes with a tasting of four wines – a Pouilly-sur-Loire and three Pouilly-Fumés from different terroirs – clay limestone, marne-kimmeridgean and silex (flint).

Overall the presentation is very well done and well worth the charge of 6€ and it is good to see something like this at Pouilly-sur-Loire, which hitherto has been rather moribund, especially in comparison to the dynamism of Sancerre, whose inhabitants seem to regard the people of Pouilly with the superior amusement that the rest of France reserves for the Belgians and are similarly the butt of jokes.

There are further plans: in 2011 l'observatoire de Saint-Andelain will open giving visitors a 360˚ view from Nevers to Gien and across to Bourges. Then in 2012 it is planned to open a restaurant in the old chai of La Tour de Pouilly.

A couple of small points: the English translation is sometimes not quite right and the bottle of Pouilly-sur-Loire tasted was nearly empty and may have been open a few days, so was rather faded. The French word taille was translated as cutting when, in the context, 'pruning' would have been better.