Wines and Liqueurs

Your first thought will probably be that in mountains as cold as the French Alps can be there might not be very much wine. But for millennia, some mighty fine vines have been growing just about anywhere they could grow—old moraines, the rocky slides of the Pre-Alps, and as high as an exceptional 3,003 feet in the little town of Orelle in Maurienne.

This was in the nineteenth century, however. The amount of acreage given to the cultivation of vines has diminished seriously since 1860. At that time wines from the Roussillon and Corbières were so inexpensive that they could almost be shipped to Savoie at a lesser cost than local wines could be produced. There were up to very recently wines in Talloires and in Veyrier around the Annecy lake. I remember in my childhood sitting in the back of my father’s Peugeot 5HP as we were driving behind a rickety truck full of manure; at Talloires the truck turned into a small patch of vines where its cargo was used as fertilizer. In earlier times, the same cargo had been transported by boat on the lake, and the manure was produced by all the horses in the city of Annecy. Now, with very few exceptions, the Annecy lake vines have succumbed to the multiple summer homes built in the last fifteen years.