Dining on the Wine Trail: La Plage, Candé-sur-Beuvron
Between cyclists, retirees, and the local wine trade, Cécile Perrin-Lemasson's cosy riverside natural wine tobacconist is a lifeline to many.
Cécile Perrin-Lemasson warns me, when we sit down to chat at La Plage, her natural wine bar-slash-village tobacconist in Candé-sur-Beuvron, that our interview will probably be interrupted quite often.
She has run the place largely solo since opening in November 2020, during France’s second COVID lockdown. Terrace restaurant service was permitted in France six months later, an interval of calm that allowed Perrin-Lemasson, a journalist by trade, to learn the ropes of selling cigarettes and lottery cards. No sooner had her first summertime crowds arrived than did the suicide of her husband, the beloved Loir-et-Cher négociant vigneron Olivier Lemasson, send her life into profound disorder.
La Plage proved a lifeline, as much for Perrin-Lemasson as for its clientele of passing cyclists, devoted retirees, and the local wine trade.
La Plage comprises an entryway that resembles that of any other village bar-tobacconist, where Snickers and Mars bars are arrayed besides a shelf of tabloids and a fridge full of Coke and Orangina; a shelf beside the cash register where her friends’ natural wines hold pride of place; an interior where a herd of sofas and chairs teem beneath an exhaustive chalkboard of snacks and beverages; and an adjacent terrace styled as a beach cabana. A couple of sought-after tables perched atop the pedestrian bridge overlooking the Beuvron river across the road are also part of La Plage, but she kindly asks those clients to return their glassware to the exterior windowsill.
Perrin-Lemasson asks if I’d like a coffee. Espying an open bottle of her late husband’s cabernet franc - grolleau - gamay “R20” on the back bar, I ask for a glass of that. Once ubiquitous and known as excellent bargains in the hugely influential third wave of Paris natural wine spots - from Le Verre Volé to Crus et Découvertes and Quedubon and beyond - the Les Vins Contés wines have nowadays become fantastically rare. For two summers after Lemasson’s passing, I drank them during pit-stop lunches en route to Bretagne at Le Tire Bouchon in Rennes. Now they’re no longer on the wine list there, either.
“I almost never have a bottle of Les Vins Contés open,” says Perrin-Lemasson, explaining that, of all the wines her late husband made, she retains only one pallet of “R20.” “But last night a friend came in who normally doesn’t drink or smoke, and she said she’d make an exception and have one glass of wine and one cigarette. So I opened a bottle from Les Vins Contés.”
We are interrupted first by a client asking what snacks are available. Perrin-Lemasson bashfully explains that the village charcutier is on vacation, so she has only local goat cheese and bags of (organic) potato chips.
Next we are interrupted by a friendly, diminutive man vaguely resembling the lead singer of pop-punk band Sum 41. He orders a Corsican beer and teeters off to the terrace; he is a friend who constructed La Plage’s burnished scrap metal bar.
Next we are interrupted by another friend, a beaming woman with bobbed hair who delivers two cases of oysters and says they are a gift.
Next we are interrupted by Marie-Ju Venier, the wife of neighboring vigneron Christian Venier; she has come to deliver four cases of wine, which I help the ladies unload.
Next we are interrupted by a local baker purchasing Haribo sweets and inquiring about the possibility of acquiring a certain quantity of used empty clear wine bottles; Perrin-Lemasson introduces her to Madame Venier for this purpose.
Next we are interrupted by a thoughtful-looking girl of sixteen with spectacles, baggy jeans, and a pageboy haircut: it is Perrin-Lemasson’s younger daughter, Mahaut, who poses several questions concerning the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972 that we are unable to answer with certainty, because none of us were born then, and there is limited cellular service inside La Plage.
Next we are interrupted by a visibly inexperienced cyclist, who breaks the seal on a bottle of (organic) lemonade from the fridge while fetching two water bottles, and never offers to pay for the lemonade, instead demanding detailed cycling directions to Chambord because she cannot find them on the internet.
Next we are interrupted by a local man and his son, who order a shandy and a lemonade, respectively, and retire to one of the tables overlooking the Beuvron.
“Your phone is ringing,” says Mahaut to her mother. She says its the neighbor.
Perrin-Lemasson leaps to where her phone is charging behind the bar and returns the neighbor’s call. Throughout their brief conversation, she wears an expression of extreme gravity, such that I fear this will prove to be our conversation’s final interruption.
“It’s our neighbor,” she explains hurriedly, after hanging up, “She’s not well, really not well at all, so I have to make a little delivery.”
With that, Perrin-Lemasson plucks three packs of Gauloises from the cigarette shelf behind the cash register, and bolts out the door.
Two young men in search of beers do not interrupt anything, because Perrin-Lemasson is off delivering cigarettes, and Mahaut serves them, suggesting they return to pay when her mother comes back.
“She’s not well at all,” repeats Perrin-Lemasson, when she returns moments later. She explains to Mahaut that they’ll have to make some food for their neighbor, and begins rattling off a list of prospective dishes that, incidentally, far exceeds the very limited menu on offer at La Plage. Perrin-Lemasson will close the bar in a few minutes, and I have an idea how she’ll spend her break this afternoon.
In explanation of the situation, Perrin-Lemasson directs my attention to a fastidiously handwritten index card her stricken neighbor has pinned to the cash register at La Plage. Reading it, I gather that Perrin-Lemasson is paying something forward. In facetiously grandiloquent language, the index card urgently requests the aid of a gardener, an electrician, a cook, “and above all a math professor, so as to learn to count upon others.”
Subscribers can read a new interview with Cécile Perrin-Lemasson here.
La Plage
1 Rue du Château
41120 CANDE SUR BEUVRON
FURTHER READING
Becoming Cécile Again: An Interview with Cécile Perrin-Lemasson
Bert Celce’s 2012 visit to Olivier Lemasson at Wine Terroirs.
Jules Dressner’s heartfelt homage to Olivier Lemasson at Louis / Dressner Selections.