Sorrel

In 1973, the Troisgros brothers Jean and Pierre debuted their salmon with sorrel dish, saumon mi cuit avec oseille. It was a dish that was heard around the world. A defining statement in nouvelle cuisine and quite possibly the last time French food culture was both thrilling and essential to global food culture. 

The salmon was served partially cooked - a supremely bold move for an era when fish was always thoroughly done, and the sauce, while still bolstered with cream, carried none of the earlier signifiers of fine dining. There was no Champagne, no Cognac, no truffles, no lobster, instead: sorrel, a relatively unsung herb, with pretty green arrow shaped leaves and a lightly lemony taste. 

Sorrel has been a staple of European cooking for millenia, serving time in salads and soups and contributing its trademark tang to sauces and relishes. It’s never quite made the leap to the big time, its tendency to oxidise when cut probably accounting for some of its lack of popularity. Its leaves turn from a bright pretty green to muted brown olive quite quickly. Furthermore, its main role was often to bring acidity to a dish, something which can easily be achieved with lemon juice or vinegar. 

That said, there’s an intriguing character to the sourness of sorrel; one that comes mostly from oxalic acid. The acidity is bolstered by the classic green leaf volatiles as well as a curious lemony character that I feel is partially a product of autosuggestion. So prevalent is the use of lemon as an acidity balancer in French cuisine, that the presence of any similar, but unknown, acidity leads our minds to interpret it as having a lemon like flavour. 

While oxalic acid levels in wine are almost always negligible there are a host of other acids that are hugely important in the flavour of the wines we drink. I still remember sitting down in front of samples of the big five; citric, tartaric, malic, lactic and acetic and getting lost tasting them. Like studying shadows on white paper, their mouthfeel shapes were like ghosts of their former selves. The memory of how a Granny Smith’s sharpness felt for malic acid, the softer seemingly milkiness of lactic acid, the easy familiarity of citric, the angriness of acetic acid and then there was tartaric acid; oddly orphan, strangely square-shaped on the palate and coming without any associative flavour memories. 

Tartaric acid is interesting in that it isn’t particularly common in nature. It’s only really found in grape juice and the fruit of the African baobab tree (certain types of cherry can also have quite a bit). Since its two main natural sources don’t share their geographical spread, we can assume that if we find tartaric acid residue in something, it either contains grape products or those of the baobab fruit. 

The Godin Tepe is an archeological site in Iran’s Zagros mountains. Dating to sometime between 3500 BCE and 2900 BCE, its excavation turned up some puzzling finds; what appeared to be a large funnel of a kind similar to those known to have been used to press grapes in much later installations, what looked like a large lid and several large jars of an early amphora style design. The finds obviously suggested that the Godin Tepe was a winery, the earliest yet excavated (other later sites have since been found). The presence of a reddish residue in some of the jars only seemed to reinforce this exciting possibility. 

Prior to the Godin Tepe dig, archaeologists had relied on the discovery of grape seeds for proof that wine making had taken place (indeed there’s a wealth of literature on the shape of the seeds discovered, along with some quite bold conclusions as to what can be inferred from their shapes, which is actually not much). Since no seeds were present, another approach had to be found. 

Enter Patrick McGovern and Virginia Badler from the University of Toronto. After carefully transporting one of the jars halfway across the world (detailed in a text I’ve still never found, gloriously entitled ‘Travels with Jarley’) they used transmission and diffuse-reflectance FT-IR spectrometry to show non-destructively that the jar most likely contained tartaric acid residues. Further analyses along with the distinctive shape of the jars meant they were able to say with a high degree of confidence that the Godin Tepe site site had been a wine production centre. 

Sadly we can’t really know what the wine from the Godin Tepe tasted like; the start of the nouvelle cuisine in the early 1970s is, however, still within the reach of living memory. 

Roanne, while technically in the Loire department, is only a short distance from Beaujolais, the southernmost wine region of Burgundy, and a region that since the 70s has seen more stylistic turmoil than most. 

The 1970s saw the heyday of Beaujolais nouveau, previously a locally feted early wine, the first release of that year's vintage and a time to celebrate the end of harvest before winter’s grip tightened. By the mid 70s it had become supremely fashionable and the juicy rustic wines quickly turned into mass-produced strawberry and bubblegum flavoured atrocities. 

It was the rise of nouveau that signalled the start of the decline of Beaujolais as a serious wine region; a decline that mirrored the ossification of French gastronomy in general. The world woke up to other countries’ cuisines and learned to love the wines of the rest of the world. 

It would be another couple of generations before the Beaujolais was thrillingly relevant again, a reemergence that was actually being born at the same time as the decline. Jules Chauvet’s 1970s experiments with wild ferments would lead to the natural wine movement, which would in turn lead winemakers back to the very roots of viticulture. Not quite the Zagros mountains, Iran’s long Muslim history put paid to any wine culture in its hills. But the geographically close Caucasus mountains in Georgia would find themselves the eye of a cultural storm that presaged the biggest change in winemaking philosophy since the modernisation of the 1950s. All this originating a pleasant four and a half hour cycle ride from the Troisgros brother’s restaurant in Roanne.