n.d.p. in london: 69 colebrooke row, angel

Having at some point decided my recent wine explorations in London would amount to almost nothing, just a lot of screw-capped new-world Chenin, I was proportionately more eager to visit the city's various cocktail destinations.

Possibly I was just more eager to drink. It doesn't matter.

I met my Parisian New Zealander friends P and Z at the unassuming molecular mixology bar 69 Colebrooke Row, near Angel, where the first and only disappointment of the evening was hearing from the genial leggy server that the bar's general manager, a sharp woman called Cara I'd once gotten drunk with in Paris, was away from London for the holidays. Oh well. Even without the personal touch, 69 Colbrooke Row makes a profound impression - chiefly because its whole underdone ethos is a successful (I hope?) refutation of the dead-obvious lux approach I found so dull at ECC Chinatown.

everything all of the time: jeanne a, 75011

Down the street from my apartment in the 11ème there is a slightly fusty restaurant called Astier. I haven't yet been there; I mean to, but it has always emanated a kind of middling, pretentious air that puts me off at the last moment. There are something like 40,000 restaurants in Paris (source: the BBC) so one has no choice but to follow one's gut on these things.

Guts are fallible, however. A prime example is my reaction to Jeanne A, the cave à manger / épicerie / deli / you-name-it restaurant the owners of Astier have recently opened next door to said restaurant. Upon first walking by, shortly after Jeanne A opened, I saw an automatic sliding door, several magnums of Moet and Veuve Clicquot for sale, and some generally frightful decor, and I kept right on walking. The last thing the neighborhood needed, I thought, was an overpriced moron marchand, seemingly plucked straight from rue Saint Antoine, hawking yet more industrial foie-gras, foiled chocolate, and mass-market Champagne.

Happily, as my visiting friends R and S and I were delighted to discover the other Sunday, I was pretty far off the mark with this analysis.

n.d.p. in london: little georgia, hackney

In the course of some typically cursory research for this blog post, I turned up an execrable hack restaurant review of Hackney b.y.o.b. haven Little Georgia by The Sunday Times' Giles Coren. Ordinarily I'd just hit the little 'x' on the browser and graze onwards, but in this case the reviewer, a man who is on record as being "proud to be famous for being rude," manages to miss the graces of the restaurant so squarely as to actually infer their existence to a perceptive reader. Like, if you are at a party and someone is walking around blindfolded poking the other guests with a tail, you can be confident there is a donkey present.

In this case, Coren's eagerness to impersonate A.A. Gill - another Sunday Times restaurant critic,* another famous tosser - leads him to spend 15 of the review's 20 paragraphs making wincingly humorless, tone-deaf jokes about how people in Hackney are, in general, poorer than he is. He repeats again and again in his endless intro** the common blunder by which writers and speakers routinely lower themselves beneath even the most quivering insecure eastside hipster, which is to say he complains about hipsters. When Coren finally gets to the meal he emits little more than the names of the dishes at Little Georgia, having pretty much spent his literary load complaining about the hipsters in the poor neighborhood where he feels unwelcome.

All in all, high comedy. I visited the place last week in London and can attest that everything Coren failed to notice, all the discreet charms of Little Georgia, pretty much made me swoon with restaurant affection (a feeling seemingly alien to these reviewers I have mentioned).

n.d.p. in london: brawn, hackney

In Hackney, east London, there is a quite new restaurant called Brawn whose only flaws are derivative graphic design and a misleading name. It opened in December, the kid sister restaurant of a larger one called Terroirs near Charing Cross. It has a blatantly St. John-inspired logo that consists of a wine bottle drawn to look like a pig.

And "brawn" is the British term for testa, or head / face meat, none of which delectable substance was actually present on the menu. These criticisms, however, are roughly the equivalent of blinking during a meal, for me; something I do everywhere, involuntarily, and they in no way detract from the main achievement of this restaurant, the highlight of my recent London trip: it succeeds in presenting excellent natural wines simply and properly, not as though it were some kind of unnatural feat for them merely to be natural.

This would be commendable anywhere on earth. But it's astonishing in London, where titanic overdesigned restaurant groups are the norm, and natural wines are essentially nowhere to be found.

n.d.p. in london: pembury tavern, hackney

This previous week I spent in London felt particularly long. It was a combination of burnt-out friends and random misfortune. (The house I was meant to stay in was burgled by some miserable bastard on Christmas Eve, while its inhabitant was out treating ten of us to lunch in Soho. In the kind of cosmic bitch-slap that only happens to truly good people, news of the burglary arrived simultaneous with the bill, via text message.) No matter how long I stay in London, however, I always seem to leave thinking I have not spent nearly enough time or money at the Pembury Tavern.

It is just a wonderfully unassuming, kind of pokey beer-geek hang-out in Hackney. A place where I always seem to have good conversation.

n.d.p. in london: fortnum & mason, piccadilly

If you google "negative epiphany," among the top results are answer-forum queries from writers seeking a single word that might permit them to avoid using the clumsy, rather ad-hoc sounding phrase "negative epiphany." There's isn't one, to my knowledge. This is probably due (inasmuch as the organic manifestations of language and meaning can be "due" to anything) to the fact that "epiphany" by itself ought to mean only a striking revelation or insight, not necessarily a positive one. I suspect it is the fault of literature, which admirably prizes understanding above all else, that the word "epiphany" in contemporary idiom must be accompanied by a qualifier such as "negative" if one wants to avoid conventional rosy connotations.

Anyway, it was in the basement floor wine section of chi-chi London grocery megastore Fortnum & Mason that I had the first negative epiphany* of my recent trip to London.

n.d.p. in london: ECC chinatown, soho

In London I met up with my New Zealand-via-Paris friends P and Z*, and since we all share an interest in good cocktails, we took the opportunity to check out the new Chinatown location of the Parisian bar group Experimental Cocktail Club.

ECC founders Romée de Goriainoff, Olivier Bon and Pierre-Charles Cros have lassoed a really tremendous site for their first cross-channel endeavor: it's a former nightclub with a 3am license located above a Chinese restaurant on a mobbed street just south of mobbed Soho. Once you claw your way in the unmarked door (which, confusingly, opens outwards but has no handle), you find yourself ensconced in the plush cushions of capital L-luxury, two ambitious floors of it.

So, as much as the lack of signage might hint at the sort of low-key elegance that typifies the original ECC location on Rue Saint-Saveur, the new bar is in fact another grand ante-up beyond Prescriptions, ECC's most recent, and most vulgar, bar in Paris' 6ème arrondissement.

aligoté perversity: drinking de moor at christmastime

In retrospect, it probably wasn't the most inspired decision to open the Aligoté first, among all the wines I'd brought to share with my friends' families in London. It was an academic decision, one that made sense internally - the next white was an ethereal dew-sweet cru Savennieres by Claude Papin, after all - but was in fact kind of a blunder in the exterior world of social propriety, where the occasion dictated that I open something rather more enjoyable first.

Even setting aside, for the moment, the difficulties of presenting any kind of wine to your average bunch of Brits, who as a people seem to submit to the habit of wine much as one submits to, say, yearly prostate examinations: Aligoté is, furthermore, a resoundingly dislikable grape. So much so that when several of those gathered professed to actually like Olivier et Alice de Moor's 2009 Bourgogne Aligoté, which I'd only brought out of perversity and haste, I was pleasantly stunned.

I chalked (ahem) it up to the peculiarities of the British palate,* and to the near-magical expertise of the de Moors, who I'm convinced are to Aligoté what Jenny Holzer is to LED lighting.

office carousing at le bal café, 75018

A brief word on my workplace's excellent office Xmas party, for which I must thank our fearless Président-Directeur-Général, who had specifically requested that Anselme, wine director of Le Bal Café, serve only natural wines at the event. Previously I'd had no idea the PDG even drank, or took any joy whatsoever in things not directly related to work.*

Anselme's list, happily, contains a very adequate proportion of natural wines.** So we all sipped Domaine Plageoles' agreeable buckwheat-honey-toned bubbler Mauzac Nature, and François Chidaine's precise, silvery Touraine Sauvignon all night. It marked the first time I'd ever been to a non-restaurant-industry office party where honest wine was served.

not encountering selosse at: caves augé, 75008

You may remember that I had notably failed to meet legendary Champagne vigneron Anselme Selosse at Spring's "Promesse du Vin" tasting a few weeks back, because he was late and I felt awkward waiting around. Well, the other day while I was Christmas shopping at Spring Boutique, my friend Josh (the wine director there) happened to mention there would be another Champagne tasting at the landmark 8ème wine shop Caves Augé the next day, and Selosse was slated to attend.

Pictured above is the barrel where he and his wines ought to have been. 

As my patient, unflappable friend S and I tasted through a lot of other great grower Champagnes in the miserable torrential frozen slush that afternoon, I overheard a Caves Augé employee explaining to someone that Selosse was, in fact, bloqué dans la neige, which is French for "couldn't be bothered to show up in this sickening weather." 

gustatory archaeology: 19th century cognac at julhès paris

I must begin this post by thanking my friend S, then visiting from New York, for gamely joining me for what turned out to be a breakfast of hard liquor at Julhès Paris' recent Cognac / Armagnac tasting. What's more, she did it all in good faith, without any convincing, since frankly I'd have few ideas about how to convince anyone to drink Cognac or Armagnac in the first place, let alone for breakfast.

It's just an uphill battle. Good Armagnac is fascinating and delightful but prohibitively expensive, ditto good Cognac, which latter spirit presents the added difficulty of being encountered almost never, having been crowded out of the market by the bad versions. Neither industry has had any marketing epiphanies over the past century that might have created a more engaged everyday clientele for the spirits, with the result that both continue to radiate an unfortunate aura of decrepitude and / or decadence. You have slick unsophisticated commercial Cognacs swigged by rappers who ought to know better, and then you have an obscure sliver of an artisanal industry, including the Grosperrin Cognacs S and I tasted that day, usually enjoyed by the thimbleful at fine restaurants on anniversaries. Neither of these market segments are really enough to sustain the kind of abiding dialog around a subject that leads to greater public understanding of, and therefore mental investment in, said subject. (E.g. wine criticism.)

That business diatribe notwithstanding, S and I tasted some pretty sensational things that day, including a Cognac Grand Champagne distilled in 1820, bottled some hundred years later, just after WWI. (!)

cool house: le dauphin, 75011

Le Chateaubriand chef Iñaki Aizpitarte opened a wine bar next to his famed 11ème restaurant earlier this month. I'll say straight away that, so far, I really dig the place. To arrive at that conclusion, however, took several visits and a measure of puzzled reflection, time that I spent working out whether Le Dauphin's charms were indeed genuine, or whether I found them charming only because in Paris until now I've been totally starved for a wine bar that shows even a wink of ambition.*

It is mildly regrettable that said ambition is at present more perceptible in the divisive, lurchingly overdone Rem Koolhaas & Clement Blanchet interior (all swooping mirrors and confrontational white marble, even the ceilings) than in the wine list, which is sort of a Natural Wine for Dummies primer of present-day classics - Foillard, Villemade, Descombes, Rateau, etc.

sans soufre dans la rue: drappier drunkenness, 75004

sacred monsters of champagne: julhès paris, 75010

G quizzing the Krug rep, who sported a leather biker jacket under his blazer. He said it was due to the cold. 

Some disconnected observations from the "Montres Sacrès du Champagne"* tasting Nicolas Julhès hosted the other weekend at Julhès Paris, his wine-and-foodstuffs wonderland near Strasbourg St. Denis:

1. Krug tastes quite a bit like fish roe.

I mean this in a beamingly positive sense; this is a wine that's pretty universally impossible to hate on. But it's fishy, with a dewy light corporeality to it, something translucent and ever-so-slightly saline. I say "fish roe" and not "caviar" first because the flavor itself is definitely closer to something from Yo! Sushi, and second because it's just too boorishly facile to come out with a line like "Champagne tastes like caviar." It's like saying "Wow, this alligator skin feels like cashmere."

free-run from the former press: gregory leclerc

At the recent "Buvons Nature" tasting organized by Catherine Vergé in Paris, my friends F, Z, and I had the pleasure of meeting the Loire vigneron Gregory Leclerc, whose Vin de Table Gamay "La Mule" is by now probably recognizable to most of my friends as "the wine Aaron always seems to have in his bag."

(Not, like, on street corners. I mean when people invite me over.)

I continually turn to "La Mule" partly because it is reliably in stock at the two or three cavistes within walking distances from my apartment, and while being light enough not to shut off my palate for the night, it's weighty and red enough to please most casual hosts. It's organic carbonic-maceration Gamay from 25-30 year old vines, brightly acidic, but surprisingly black and structured, which latter qualities I imagine account for the wine's name, although it didn't occur to me to ask. In other words, it bears more than a passing resemblance to solid cru Beaujolais, at about half the price (around 10€).

M. Leclerc holds a different magnum of wine, however, in the photo above: it is the free-run* juice of "La Mule," a pretty astounding variation on the original that we first tasted that evening. Out of some blend of perversity and economy Leclerc bottles it with the same label.**

domaine du pech: buvons nature tasting, espace beaujon, 75008

I don't know what I had in mind. When Mâcon vigneron Catherine Vergé told me at the AVN tasting that she was hosting her "Buvons Nature" tasting on rue Faubourg Saint Honoré I guessed I assumed it would be a kind of glitzy affair. I frequently have to visit said rue for work and I'm always tripping over small manicured dogs and choking on the perfume of passers-by.

Turns out the tasting was held in what looked like a converted pre-school rec room of the Espace Beaujon. When I passed through on the first night with my friends F and Z, there were small children shrieking and running around the courtyard and Mme Vergé herself was nowhere to be seen. Happily, glamorlessness aside, the event was pretty much what she'd promised it would be: 15 pretty terrific natural vignerons pouring, chatting, and selling* in a pleasant, relatively intimate environment.

I tasted something fairly memorable at at least half the tables, so rather than write it all up in one grand deluge I figured I'd space it out a bit, and begin by discussing the wines of Ludovic Bonnelle at Domaine du Pech, a biodynamic Buzet (southern France, southeast of Bordeaux) estate whose wines, for me, really encapsulate the excitement and the occasional frustrations of deeply natural wines.