chianti petillante: la colombaia @ avn dégustation, 75019

Tasting the wines of Helena Lomazzi, right, with Cyril from Le Verre Volé, left.

At what is essentially a loose conference of rebellious Vin de Table-happy vignerons, it's pretty hard to stand out simply by presenting weird wines. ("They're weird - and?" being the implicit response.) But La Colombaia's Helena Lomazzi, who was also notable for being the only Italian vigneron in the room* at Monday's Association des Vins Naturels Grand Dégustation, had a bottle that actually made me laugh, it was so joyously strange.

A sparkling Chianti.

character reversal: twin peaks & mâcon-chaintré

To my mind, David Lynch's greatest formal innovation with Twin Peaks - his half-parodical adoption of the "low" genre of television soap opera - was less an innovation than a restoration. The key tropes we associate with soap operas, e.g. hidden lives, sudden character reversals, things being generally never as they seem, are as old as literature itself. They're as elemental to Shakespeare's comedies as they are to Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. What Lynch did was to restore these plot elements, which had fallen to being just that, mere pivots for action, to their proper literary place as descriptors of the human psyche.

And so as we plowed into the strong(er) first half of Season 2, it was only fitting that the Native Companion and I shared a bottle of Domaine Valette's 2007 Vielles Vignes Mâcon-Chaintré, a wine that ended not at all as it began, a wine of two faces, of double lives... A wine I really ought to have researched a little further beforehand, and decanted. (Slaps forehead.)