Exploring the Loire Valley through materials.
I have a wonderful friend named Claire. We met on Instagram probably about 8 years ago, when Instagram was a naive platform and it was just people posting the cool stuff they were making, there were no influencers or brands or dancing. Claire reached out to me about the terrazzo I was making at the time and I discovered she was an amazingly talented mould maker and sculptor. She jumped on the train to visit me in Nottingham and what followed was not only a fun collaboration project, but also a wonderful friendship and a joint obsession with materials and the natural world. Take a look at Claire’s work here. She is amazing and she’s also working on some material research that I am so excited to share when she is ready to put it out into the world.
Anyway! Apart from being a little love note to my friend, this blog is about how I ended up in the Loire Valley, exploring mushroom caves and visiting wicker villages. So, Claire planned the whole trip. She text me asking if I wanted to go to France, of course, I said yes, but I really had no idea about all the amazing materials and processes that I was about to discover.
My greatest takeaway from the trip was understanding the connection between the materials that were being worked with, the food that was being grown, and the wine that was being drunk. One process always seemed to complement another. For example, caves that were excavated to mine stones for building, or even to create caves to live in, then became the perfect environment for growing mushrooms or maturing wine.
Landscape
Building
Produce
People
Food
Wine
I wish I could articulate that feeling more eloquently. I’ll work on that!
Mushroom Caves
There are mushroom caves scattered across the the Loire Valley, we visited La Champignonniere du Saut Aux Loups. These mushroom caves, along with the wine cellars we also visited are located inside the spaces left behind by the excavation of tuffeau stone. This is the local limestone that was used for building the towns and Châteaus of the region. It is a very soft and porous stone and light in colour.
The mushroom caves are dark and sprawling and pretty amazing. Both Claire and myself left the caves feeling slightly in awe and also slightly squeezy! There’s a conflict going on in the space between growth and decay, life and death.
The famous Paris mushroom, which looks like the mushrooms we see in our supermarkets, were growing in large metal under lights. They would be harvested daily by staff and taken to be used in the museum restaurant or sold on.
Further into the caves you will find the oyster and shitake mushrooms being grown in mycelium and substrate bags either hung or placed on racking.
Overall, quite magical, a little bit creepy and reminiscent of a morgue and despite thinking we wouldn’t eat mushrooms for days after due to the squeezy damp feeling, we dug into mushroom tarts for dinner.
Villaines-les-Rochers, wicker and basketry village
The village of Villaines-les-Rochers provided another contrast to digest. Part ghost town, part home to ateliers producing for the likes of Delvaux and Mini. A small walk around the village, allows you to explore the wicker museum and cooperative, artist studios and see willow growing in the central park.
Known for its deep-rooted tradition of wickerwork craftsmanship, despite being extremely sleepy, the village is a hub for the art of basket weaving, with a strong cooperative of artisans continuing the age-old practice of creating baskets and other wicker items from locally grown willow.
I was a bit confused by the terms wicker/willow to start with, so here is a quick explainer. Willow is a type of deciduous tree or shrub known for its long, flexible branches, often found near water sources. Its branches are used for weaving due to their pliability and strength. Wicker refers to the method of weaving these flexible materials, like willow, into items such as baskets, furniture, and decorative objects. The term "wicker" describes the technique rather than the material itself
There were lots of beautiful studios to visit, all with their own style of making. Our favourite was the Vannerie Romand Art where Catherine Romand and her husband worked. They collaboratively produce amazing work, such as the wicker seats pictured below, which were destined for a one-of-a-kind Mini Austin Beach.
Langlois wine tour and caves
I’ve experienced a vineyard tour or two, but this was something else. We picked to visit Langlois, as it was the winery that the host of our Airbnb worked at. We booked into a tour, which turned into a private tour, which turned into an exploration of the caves and understanding a little more about how the landscape of the Loire creates its beautiful produce.
Langlois produce a crémant which is a sparkling wine that is produced using similar methods to champagne. It involved a double fermentation method. Where the second fermentation happens in the bottles inside the tuffeau stone caves. Wine walls are created from all the bottles that have been filled and are fermenting. Every now and then you will see a gap in the wall where a bottle has exploded during the process.
Traditionally these bottles would slowly be rotated by hand to move the sediment within the bottle towards the cap., this is now done by a machine rotating a palette at a time. The bit that blew my mind is that in order to get this sediment out, the process is to freeze a small amount of the wine near the bottle cap, which would then shoot out of the bottle, before having a cork added.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the tour, apart from the tasting at the end, was being shown around by a wonderful intern, who as part of her degree in French traditional products was at Langlois for a 6 month placement. What a wonderful degree!
Other nice things
This hasn’t really been a guide, or a detailed materials exploration, more an expression of my thoughts and experiences of materials and products from of very specific place and a fascination with how all those things come together to give such a strong indication of a place’s identity.
I guess there is some comfort in materials, products, food and drink feeling so local and so rooted in a place.
Full credit goes to my friend Claire for all organisation and restaurant picks. I simply turned up touched things and drank the wine, which felt like a luxury i didn’t deserve!