n.d.p. in burgundy: le montrachet, puligny-montrachet

The guiding principle of the Bro-gundy road trip my caviste friend J and I took last fall was thrift. It's like this with most of the trips we take together, because I'm congenitally broke, and he's tactful, and neither of us are very fussy about accommodation. We usually sleep on floors. The point, after all, is the wine: learning about the wine and where it's made and about the people who make it. 

But J and I also share an inclination towards targeted profligacy, particularly at those moments when splashing out will tick-off some cultural landmark or other. Internally I categorize these times, which occur with alarming frequency in certain regions, as a sort of sociological expenditure. 

This is how I rationalised doing a bro-lunch with J at Le Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet's famous formerly-Michelin-starred restaurant-hotel, a staidly ritzy place that would otherwise seem better suited to couples renewing their wedding vows. 

n.d.p. in london: terroirs, covent garden

I kind of went about visiting acclaimed London wine bar Terroirs backwards. It's my fault. I'd read about how two years ago, in partnership with leading British natural wine importer Les Caves du Pyrène, Terroirs opened near Charing Cross, and how the restaurant has since proceeded to upend the London dining scene by introducing strange vivid glorious natural wines by the legendary vignerons (mostly French).* So I was duly eager to visit. But since I was staying way east in Hackney, among a bunch of homebody artist folk who seem to avoid central London the way I used to avoid West LA or Marina Del Ray, my friends and I visited first the newer venture by the Terroirs owners, a much smaller more charming restaurant called Brawn on Columbia Road. This may have been the reason I found Terroirs sort of ho-hum in the end. I'd already seen the beautiful evolution of their concept at Brawn.

But the two restaurants, finally, are shooting different fish in different barrels with different guns. Terroirs, comprising two floors of slick natural wine ambassadorship, situated smack in the big overproduced theatre district, is about as subtle as a bazooka. Walking around central London always feels a bit like Attack of the 90ft Restaurants! but nevertheless it was very strange, after passing so much time in pokey Paris natural wine dives, to see in Terroirs the hugely successful Disneyfication of the natural wine movement.

The place was jammed on the Thursday night we dropped in. So we didn't even eat. Just soaked in the scene, and a bottle of 2008 Pierre Frick Alsace Chasselas "Sans Soufre."