Notes on the Loire

A reflection on my latest piece for Alta Journal.

My latest piece, “Call of the Loire,” has been published by Alta Journal.

It chronicles my trip to France’s Loire Valley for the natural wine salons held last winter. You’ll meet people like Nathan Ratapu, owner of Rerenga Wines in Paris, and Dante Clark, the poet who sells wine for Zev Rovine Selections in New York. However, the main protagonist is Pascal Carole, a former San Francisco-based computer engineer who uprooted his family to make wine in the Loire.

I wanted to include Carole in “A Vineyard in San Francisco’s Black Belt” but failed to pull it off. He had just moved to the Loire and hadn’t yet made wine. I knew he had a story to tell and hoped, in good timing, that I could write about him. The following year, Alta’s editorial director suggested I write about Burgundy. When that idea also fell through, I pitched the Loire instead.

Until last year, my work had focused almost exclusively on California. I had gone to the Loire once before, in 2022, but I certainly wasn’t an expert on the culture. I returned with a premise and let fate guide the rest. The people, places, and epiphanies I gathered along the way became the story.

But first came the hard part. I had to write the damn thing.

I wrote while living on the road—from France to Southern California to Virginia and everywhere in between—over the course of eight months. I never fell into a rhythm. Most of the process felt like pulling teeth. It wasn’t until the third or fourth draft that I surrendered to what words made it onto the page.

After the piece was finalized, I started rereading American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, a selection of eight articles he wrote for The Atlantic during President Obama’s tenure in office. Alongside each article was an original essay in which Coates reflected on why he wrote them at that particular time in his life and career. He was deeply self-critical about his early work and viewed his first article for The Atlantic as an unsuccessful attempt to combine opinion with portraiture and memoir.

This line especially stood out to me:

“I characterize this as an ‘attempt’ because I felt myself trying to write a feeling, something dreamlike and intangible that lived in my head, and in my head is where at least half of it remained.”

Coates’s words felt true to form. The Loire’s wine salons took place over a few days. Thereafter, I rode the train to Bordeaux and spent two weeks writing, sightseeing, and researching. There was so much left unsaid about my time in France.

Les portraits des Deurbroucq. On display at Château des ducs de Bretagne.

I didn’t write about my day trip to the port city of Nantes, to the late 15th century Château des ducs de Bretagne, where there’s a sobering museum exhibition on the Loire’s slave trade, and how it was so gruesome that I fled on the next soonest train back to Saumur.¹

I didn’t write about the Breton grape—better known as Cabernet Franc—or how it came to the Loire in the 17th century. The origin story cites Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII, who drank Cabernet Franc in Bordeaux and liked it so much that he sent some vines to be planted at a monastery in Bourgueil. The same Richelieu chartered the Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique, the company that would colonize Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635.

I didn’t write about the horrible jet lag. On one of many sleepless nights, I went down a rabbit hole of researching the French slave trade and came across an article about Thomas Jefferson’s visit to Bordeaux. The late Black American scholar Karen E. Fields confirmed what I had suspected: Bordeaux wine traveled the triangular trade and was one of the commodities exchanged for Black bodies.² It’s no coincidence that when I visited Bordeaux’s international wine museum, Cité du Vin, there was an exhibition titled “Wine Conquering the World.”

I didn’t write about James Hemings, the enslaved valet who left his native Virginia to accompany Jefferson to Paris and be trained in French cookery. I wondered what Hemings knew of the city’s wine culture and whether it was those five years abroad that instigated his alcoholism. His sister, Sally Hemings, was also summoned to Paris (This was the period when she became Jefferson’s concubine).³

Months later, I read Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello. She referenced a letter written on April 17, 1787.⁴ Jefferson was on a wine tour through the South of France. Hemings was in Paris training under the Prince of Condé’s chef, who planned to take him to Burgundy and cook for the parliament in session there. I don’t know if they made it to their destination, but in my mind’s eyes, I picture Hemings standing at the stone cross overlooking the Romanée-Conti vineyard.

And I could have written more about Jefferson. In both Bordeaux and Paris, I took city tours with the Afro-French activist group Mémoires & Partages. The latter tour coincidentally began at Jefferson’s statue, erected along the Seine on July 4, 2006, for America’s 230th birthday. Later, I found the site of Jefferson’s former apartment at 92 Champs-Élysées. It’s now occupied by a WeWork office in the middle of one of Paris’s busiest tourist destinations.

I sent my editor the first draft of “Call of the Loire” on April 1, 2024, the same day I started research at the International Center for Jefferson Studies. What I witnessed in the Loire and Bordeaux, it turned out, also rang true in Charlottesville. All this history weighed on me and brought deeper meaning to telling Carole’s story. Still, I’m unsure how effectively I conveyed the significance of the moment, of a Black man from Martinique claiming his right to the French vigneron’s life.

I’m grateful to Carole for being the muse and trusting me to attempt.

1. Read more about the Deurbroucq portraits.

2. Fields, Karen E. “Thomas Jefferson’s Bordeaux in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Pan-African View of the French Revolution.” The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (2006): 129–47.

3. “The Life of Sally Hemings,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Website.

4. Philip Mazzei to Thomas Jefferson, April 17, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives.