La Table de la Bergerie, 2013: Wine Dinner
My visit to Angers, for the annual Salon des Vins de Loire, wouldn’t be complete without trooping out to La Table de la Bergerie. Well, that isn’t quite true; this is in fact only the second year that I have spiced up my annual February pilgrimage to the Loire with a trip out to this restaurant. All the same, it already feels like something of a tradition. The restaurant is located within the grounds of Domaine de la Bergerie and run by the daughter and son-in-law of proprietor Yves Guégniard, who is of course well known (or at least he should be) for the superb range of wines he makes here. As regular readers will perhaps know, maybe from my write up of this dinner and tasting last year, Yves is good friends with Claude Papin and Vincent Ogereau, and the three come together to pour their wines – new vintages and old – in the convivial surroundings of this restaurant. This gives me (and Loire doyen Jim Budd, also present, who organises the tasting) a chance to pore over the wines at leisure, but also to see how the older vintages perform with food.
The quality of the food prepared by David Guitton – who trained with Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon – is exceptional, and as a consequence La Table de la Bergerie is high on my list of places to eat when I am in Anjou, and find myself with a little time on my hands. Nevertheless, unlike my 2012 report this year I have chosen not to report on the dinner, or how each wine worked with each dish, and to instead restrict myself to a more focused review of the wines. After an apéro, a 1993 Coteaux du Layon from Vincent Ogereau, we worked our way through the wines in three flights, white, red and then sweet, each flight featuring the wines not only of the three vignerons but in each case a blind surprise, representing in turn the Pfalz, the Rhône Valley and Bordeaux.
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