Cultivating oysters in France

ARCACHON, France--We're here on a wine tour, and one of the highest and best uses of the sauvignon blanc-based crisp white wine called Bordeaux Blanc is to accompany local oysters. So to the source of the oysters we go, accompanied by Xavier Milhade, owner of Chateau Recougne and a few bottles of his wines.

The Bassin d'Arcachon, a bay on the Atlantic coast southwest of the city of Bordeaux, is the principal oyster-growing zone for all of Europe. It's a triangle roughly four miles on each side, open to the ocean by a narrow passage. (Think Elliott Bay, but closed off between Magnolia and West Seattle.) Arcachon is tiny by comparison with Seattle's coastal waters: half a percent of Puget Sound's surface area. Furthermore, because it's shallow, there's a significant tidal coefficient in the best spots, a man can maneuver bags of spat (young oysters) in water.no more than knee-deep. (Don't ask Cornichon to describe the math; French sailors have an innate understanding of tidal coefficients.)

Our captain on the bay today is Jonathan Meyre; he's in his mid-twenties and bought the business from his father, a legendary oysterman named Camilot. Some 3,000 families make their living in the French oyster-growing business, 400 of them here at Arcachon, leasing concessions for specific oyster beds around the bay from the government. The Frenchword for this type of flat-bottomed steel scow, incidentally, is chaland, the same term used in the Louisiana bayous. A few of the boats, equipped with rails and safety gear, take tourists out into the bay, but two years ago, tragically, an overloaded commercial oyster barge capsized as it was leaving shallow waters and a crewman, thrown overboard, was killed by the boat's propellor. (The boat's owner is standing on trial this week for negligent homicide.)

While the United States, with thousands of miles of coastline, is the world's number one producer of most oysters, France is actually the number one consumer of the succulent bivalves, and Arcachon's oystermen supply 60 percent of the seed stock (newborns, or naissins). The reason, again, is the significant variation in the depth of the oyster beds between high and low tide. Fertilized oysters attach themselves to chalk-covered tiles set out in the oyster beds and are hand-coddled through every stage of their three-year development: regularly dragged out of their salt-water environment for sizing and graduating to heavy-duty bags with larger perforations, just like schoolkids. (You'd never find a corn farmer willing to put up with this much labor.) Some of the youngsters are shipped off to growers further up the coast, in Charentes-Maritimes, in Brittany, in Normandy; some are held back to be "finished" in local waters and sold at the growers own shacks, much the way lobstermen in New England do. Retail price on the spot, for a dozen medium-sized, three-year-old oysters, about $7. This sort of decentralized system would curl the hair of large-scale American oyster growers such as Taylor Shellfish.

We visit oyster beds marked with reeds planted in shallow waters, it's a calm day and Xavier (in photo at right) sets up a folding table on the deck of the flat-top. Out comes an aperitif, a bottle of Bordeaux Blanc from Montcabrier. Milhade also makes a rose and a red from his merlot vineyards near St. Emilion, but that's for later in the afternoon, with the cheese. (And yes, of course there's cheese.) Feet firmly planted on the flat steel deck of the barge, we toast to the good life, and the good folks who brought us here, the producers of Bordeaux & Bordeaux Supérieur.

Eventually, Jonathan glides the boat back to the dock, where lunch awaits: a splendid platter of shellfish from local waters (crayfish, shrimp, oysters). Locavores, you want a piece of this? More photos on my Facebook page.

Above: a platter of shellfish; below: the Meyre family's "oyster shack" on the beach on the Bassin d' Arcachon. Bottom: Jonathan with bottle of Chateau Montcabrier.