Pursuing Dreams: Muscadet, 2026
“What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.”
“That’s how it goes,” Úrsula said, “but not so much.”
When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.
– One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Gabriel García Márquez
…Muscadet is no longer a wine consumed exclusively in its country of origin. In less than twenty-five years, its triumph has been sensational…
– Les Vins de Loire (1956), Pierre Bréjoux
In One Hundred Years of Solitude the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) weaves a unique tale, bringing to life on the pages several generations of the Buendía family. Inhabitants of the fictional Latin American town of Macondo, the Buendía family live in a world of magical realism, where the gritty reality of their impoverished existence blends with a sequence of fantastical events.
The event which sticks in my mind more than any other is the moment when Remedios the Beauty spontaneously ascends into heaven. One moment you’re innocently folding sheets in the courtyard, the next you’re drifting high into the clouds – sheets still in hand – with seemingly no reason or purpose, while those below watch on, powerless to act.
One of the novel’s central themes is the cyclical nature of time. The matriarchal character Úrsula realises this, as she reflects on their dreamlike existence in Macondo, where time seems to no longer move forward. Instead it loops back on itself, as new generations of the Buendía family go on to exhibit the same behaviours, desires and destinies of their forebears.
Although not my favourite Marquez novel (I won’t bore you with details of my preferred reads right now – I will save that for a different day) the events within the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to mind recently when typing up this year’s Muscadet tasting notes. While I don’t recall any Muscadet vignerons having spontaneously ascended into the heavens above (at least none of those I know have owned up to it), this is certainly a region where time appears to be looping back upon itself.
Happily, in a more positive fashion than that experienced by many members of the ill-fated Buendía family.
Muscadet in the Ascendant
The words of Pierre Bréjoux are testament to this. During the 1950s Bréjoux, author, subsequent participant in the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, and onetime Inspecteur Général of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO), wrote of Muscadet’s meteoric rise to stardom.
Up until World War I the market for Muscadet had been a purely local one, the bars and restaurants of Nantes, Saint-Nectaire and the region’s many small villages and towns more than capable of soaking up the entirety of the region’s annual harvest. This was to the advantage of the region’s growers, and was perhaps a necessity; many had no cellars of note, and with no way to safely store the young wine through the summer heat the simple solution was to sell it all.
