Dining on the Wine Trail: Rue de la Glacière, Bédarieux
Named for nearby road where she lives with her partner Axel Prüfer, Ute Zwanzig's paysan ice cream shop and épicerie is revitalizing downtown Bédarieux. (Try the honey flavor.)
When I visited Haut Languedoc vigneron Axel Prüfer last April, his dining room was dominated by a large whiteboard bearing about fifty different potential names for his companion Ute Zwanzig’s imminent new paysan ice cream shop, which opened in a more or less finished state this past July. Today Zwanzig’s new venture on the central Place aux Fruits bears the name of the nearby side street where the couple live: Rue de la Glacière. (The kismet of their street name’s allusion to iceboxes won out over the confusing nature of naming an establishment after a road it is not actually on.)
The word paysan (tr. “peasant”) is thrown around a lot within natural wine circles, where it is among the highest marks of respect. It connotes a principled wariness of, and a measure of resistance to, capitalist forms of exchange. You might however reasonably wonder what makes an ice cream shop paysan.
For starters, Zwanzig counts on running Rue de la Glacière as a cooperative association with other producers and artisans. Alongside her ice creams will be offered local vegetables, tisanes, lemonade, and, eventually, restaurant service - “Because, as you know,” she says, “there’s not much around here.”
For now, as mainly an ice cream shop, Rue de la Glacière is distinguished by the provenance of its ingredients: with the exceptions of vanilla, honey, and coffee, all the flavors derive from Zwanzig’s own garden or those of her neighbors.
“I have watermelons, tomatoes, basil, cucumber, beets, blackberries,” she recalls. “But friends brought me the mirabelles and the peches de vigne.”
It is just before closing time on a Saturday in September when the Native Companion and I first visit with a musician friend. The Place aux Fruits is deserted, giving the white umbrellas the township has strung up above the square a faintly ghostly air.
We have been harvesting some abandoned grenache for my tiny non-commercial wine production all afternoon and couldn’t be more delighted to sample Zwanzig’s ice creams. Her sorbets, she admits, are sweeter than she and Prüfer would like, but she finds the sorbets don’t attain the correct texture at lower sugar levels. She professes a preference for the notion of sorbets. They appeal to her sense of autonomy, since she is obliged to source milk from elsewhere for her ice creams.
Having, perhaps, internalized, to a somewhat greater degree, the necessity of monetary exchange to obtain raw materials for the production of artisanal goods, I hope Zwanzig never gives up the ice creams. Her honey ice cream, in particular, is magnificent, nuanced in flavor and possessed of a beguiling wafer-like grain to its cream. (I return several times during the course of harvest, always in search of more honey ice cream.)
Surprisingly, given how accomplished certain flavors are, Zwanzig’s interest in ice cream and sorbet production dates only to the previous summer.
“I did a stand in the street when there were events and concerts,” she says. “The town really supported me. There were food trucks, and I was there to provide dessert.”
Wracked, like many small towns of southern France, with advanced depopulation of the town center and an enduring identity crisis related to changing demographics, Bédarieux gets a bad rap, even among neighbors as nearby as Faugères. I find this slightly unfair. Criss-crossed by the Orb river and grassed-over railway arches leftover from its time as a mining center, the town is not unbeautiful, and it is at least home to one notable natural wine cave-à-manger, Chai Christine Cannac. Now, thanks to Zwanzig, there is a second reason to visit.
Rue de la Glacière
11 Place aux Fruits
34600 BEDARIEUX
Tel: +33 6 33 58 19 44
FURTHER READING
Dining on the Wine Trail: L’Òrt(o) aux Serres de Cessenon
Dining on the Wine Trail: Chai Christine Cannac, Bédarieux
Dining on the Wine Trail: Picamandil, Puissalicon
Prüfer’s Purchase.
A March 2021 interview with Axel Prüfer.
An October 2021 piece on Bédarieux-based estate L’Absurde Génie des Fleurs.