greece invades china: q-tea, 75009

My friend D visits us each men's fashion week from Athens, where he has an excellent high fashion boutique in the Kolonaki area. (Just a stone's throw from the riots, in fact. His shop has so far been spared any looting, possibly by dint of its not having any windows.) After his visit this past January, we got to talking about Greek wine, and he kindly insisted on bringing over some bottles of my choosing in June.

The problem is, I know almost zilch about Greek wine. The only place besides Greece, to my knowledge, where one can taste it in educational quantities is, of course, New York. I wound up just emailing D some PDF wine lists of reputable NYC places and telling him I remembered reading nice things about Assyrtiko.*

D, in typical fashion, showed up with a generous sack of interesting bottles, most of which we cracked open after showrooms one night over a B.Y.O.B. dinner at 9ème Chinese gem Q-Tea,** thereby creating another incidental politically-odd pairing.

magnum misadventures: jeanne a, 75011

Having recently endorsed the general usefulness of the all-day-even-Sunday kitchen at the frightfully overdecorated 11ème épicerie-à-manger Jeanne A, I must now offer the following enormous caveat: wine is available from magnum only.

I adore magnums as much as any wine geek. But all magnums, all the time is kind of like the attractive girlfriend who surprises and dismays you by insisting, everytime you sleep together, that her six attractive friends also join you in the twin bed. "This is fine!" you cry. "Just not every night!"

My friends and I discovered the mag policy when we popped in for what was meant to be a quick dinner Sunday evening. It was the last night of fashion week, half of us had worked showrooms all day, and we all had a magazine party to get to. Imagine our perplexed, crestfallen faces then, when it became clear that if we wanted to have a drink with our poulet rôti we had to, you know, really drink.

It is just a good thing there were six of us. And that there was an appealing, if somewhat overpriced, mag of 2007 Domaine Huet "Le Mont " Vouvray available. We did what we had to do.