Aigle is the place to be Saturday

The awards for the winning Chasselas wines will be announced this evening, 26 June, and tomorrow will be given over to a public tasting session at the Château d’Aigle, which is also home to the Vaud wine museum.

The awards will be announced by the Mondial du Chasselas, an international wine competition in its fourth year, which just receivesd the blessing of Paris-based OIV, the international wine organization. OIV patronage means that the wines are judged professionally according to a high set of standards and expert-observers ensure that the rules are respected.

All of this is good for visitors to the wine festival tomorrow, where some 200 wines will be available. Chasselas was born in the Lake Geneva region centuries ago and it is still at its finest here, Swiss growers will argue, but last year’s sweet Chasselas category winner was from Germany and the overall top wine was from Vully, which is only part of the Lake Geneva region if you’re a foreigner and indifferent to Swiss political fervor.

Here’s how to enjoy the day

Take suncream and sunglasses, and it’s always a good idea when wine tasting to take along a bottle of water. Add some cash for non-wine stands – food and regional terroir products that you might want to take home. Take the train to Aigle or at least leave your car at the train station there and use the shuttle bus to get up to the castle where one-lane streets and almost no parking are a nightmare if you’re driving, and that’s without a crowd.

Pay CHF20 for your glass and be sure to hold onto it! This is your “passport” to getting another glass filled. You get to keep it as a souvenir (like some of us, do this regularly and your guests think you are a wineglass thief).

The tricky part: how to decide what to taste

Chasselas is white wine, and in Switzerland it is invariably made as a dry wine, rarely oaked. But the Mondial is an international competition, so you could do a geographic tour, starting with a couple non-Swiss Chasselas – they make up fewer than 10% of the wines submitted because the grape is grown only in 15 countries, in small quantities. In most parts of the world, including France and Italy,

Chasselas is a big fat table grape that bears little resemblance to the beautifully maintained vines’ grapes you find in Switzerland.

I suggest you then add Chasselas from different cantons, starting with Geneva, which tends to have more delicate and less mineral versions of this wine, then move along the lake through Vaud’s La Côte and one or two other sub-regions (Vully!), then take a detour to Valais where Chasselas is called Fendant, and head back to the famous Lavaux terraced vineyards wines – but expect queues for these last ones, widely considered among the best.

And do try at least one Chasselas that spends time in an oak barrel; you’ll have to ask wine producers, to find out. Try at least one sweet one, a rarity in Switzerland. If you aren’t too late for the limited supplies, expand your understanding of Chasselas by trying one of the older vintage wines.

Santé! Enjoy the day. If you have time, hiking the Chablais area around Aigle and Yvorne is pleasant, as is walking in the nearby vineyards of Montreux or further west, Lavaux (steeper).

————————

You’ll find my article on the language of Chasselas, just published on the Swiss Wine Directory blog, helpful if you want to talk to wine producers.

Here’s the WRS radio interview Tony Johnston did with me Wednesday on visiting the Chasselas festival.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/212073970″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]