loire road trip, pt. IV: la renaissance des appellations, angers

I was remarkably intact the day after Catherine and Pierre Breton's off-the-chain bacchanalia in Bougeuil. Not bushy-tailed, by any means, but relatively steady on my feet, considering how little we had eaten - just fugitive handfuls of pommes frites, tartes flambées, and pork ribs all night - and what lakefuls of random wine we'd consumed. My friends J, C, and I sat through a pleasant pokey breakfast in our chambre d'hôte, attacking the weak coffee and yogurts while the proprietress, apparently unfamiliar with hangover etiquette, regaled us with an unrelenting news-anchor-like monologue concerning minute local regulatory controversies, unusually high rainfall, broken fence-posts, etc.

C, a born chatterer and native French speaker, is a tremendous asset in these scenarios. J and I mostly kept our heads down with ours mouths full and spent time petting the menagerie of cute characterful dogs our loud expository hostess had collected. At some point our gallantry failed us and we just wandered off, leaving C to extricate herself from a lengthy explanation of local flora.

We had a wine tasting to get to. The annual Renaissance des Appellations in Angers is the biodynamics-focused satellite tasting to the bigger and less explicitly bio Salon des Vins de Loire. Unlike La Dive Bouteille, a tasting held in the catacombs beneath the Château de Brézé, to which we were headed the following day, Le Renaissance des Appellations is not a public tasting. With 100+ vignerons packed into the Grenier St. Jean that day, presenting mostly biodynamic wines, there was far too much to taste in one day, let alone write up in one fell swoop. But we started with the tasting's lone Austrian stand, the renowned biodynamic Nikolaihof estate.

loire road trip, pt. III: café de la promenade, bourgeuil

We'd been informed esteemed Loire vignerons Catherine & Pierre Breton were hosting a nice civilized sit-down dinner kind of thing. We never have the right information.

loire road trip, pt. II: clos rougeard

Besides the wines themselves, the most unforgettable thing about last Saturday's tasting at Clos Rougeard was mustachioed winemaker Nady Foucault's strange entrance.

My friends J, C, and I had shown up early for our appointment,* along with winemakers Romain Guiberteau (Saumur) and Frantz Saumon (Montlouis), with whom we'd just had a very brief bada-bing-bada-boom sort of tasting at Domaine Guiberteau. By coincidence, they too had an appointment to taste the Clos Rougeard wines that day, so Romain led the way on the short drive to the nearby village of Chacé.

Once inside the unmarked gates of the Clos Rougeard operation, Romain guided us directly down into the dark wet cellar, where we encountered - no one. Romain, who'd been there before, called out a few times, and checked quickly into adjacent corridors, finding no one. We ascended back to surface level and smoked cigarettes for about twenty minutes in the freezing evening breeze, Romain remarking on how eerie it was that everything had been left open and seemingly abandoned.

Soon we were joined by a caviste from Bretagne and his two friends, who had evidently been doublebooked with us for the degustation. They lit cigarettes too.  There were like eight of us by now, standing around like a flock of pelicans, with others still to arrive. We were remarking on the odd incongruity of a nearby palm tree in the courtyard, when the winemaker we'd been awaiting, Nady Foucault, emerged from the same cellar we'd initially checked. He took the time to close the cellar door before balling his big fists at his sides and giving us a look from above his walrus mustache that said something to the effect of "What are you idiots all doing just standing there?"

loire road trip, pt. I: late for domaine guiberteau

I had the tremendous good fortune this past weekend to be invited by my friends J and C on a road trip to several enormous wine tastings in the Loire valley. It was particularly nice of them to bring me along given that I don't have a valid French driver's license*, which condition reduced me to the inessential role of ballast for most of the long hard driving. The Loire valley, I discovered, is vast, and mostly empty.

J, who is the wine director at 1er arr. restaurant / boutique Spring, had snagged us two excellent cellar-visits for that Saturday. The second, which I'll report later, was at the illustrious benchmark Saumur estate Clos Rougeard, in Chacé. The first appointment, for which we ran a bit late, was a few miles away at Domaine Guiberteau, in Mollay, where Antoine Romain Guiberteau makes acclaimed natural Saumur whites and reds that in retrospect seem somewhat palpably (and understandably) influenced by a certain nearby illustrious benchmark Saumur estate.

For our lateness that day, we had any of three excuses.

still relevant: didier gimmonet at caves augé, 75008

In the run-up to Christmas last year, as cavistes all over Paris were engaged in the annual delirious Champagne salesmanship, my patient friend S and I crossed town in the snow to attend a grower-Champagne tasting at Caves Augé, in the hopes of tasting the acclaimed, near-mythical wines of Anselme Selosse, a famous natural vigneron who was, in the end, not present at said grower-Champagne tasting.

It was a let-down. Most of the other barrels outside Caves Augé were manned by vignerons whose wines were already pretty familiar to me. And it was face-crackingly cold and our toes were little ice marbles. But, you know, we'd come all that way, and we had a few hours to kill before dinner, it seemed a shame to just wander off, defeated...

Anyway, these vaguely alcoholic rationalizations yielded the day's most enjoyable discovery: the consumately well-crafted, Chardonnay-driven Champagnes of Didier Gimmonet. 

neil young & aligoté: derain's "allez goutons"

This past autumn I had a lot of fun describing various French Chardonnays in terms of David Lynch's cult television series Twin Peaks. But by now I've finished the series, and so much wine remains. The other night at Autour d'Un Verre I was dining with the team behind the hotly-tipped forthcoming Marais taco / cocktail bar La Candelaria, and one of them, my friend J, brilliantly suggested the career of Neil Young as a rich vein of descriptive imagery for the Aligoté we were drinking.

I had asked for just such a suggestion, of course. He didn't like, come out with it apropos of nothing. That would have been odd, although less so than normal, since the particular Aligoté in question, Domaine Derain's "Allez Goutons," was the kind of far-out glimmering simple beauty that just begs for a few minutes of searching description.

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.

the fashion at the time: l'hedoniste, 75002

Last Saturday the intended cosy casual dinner for two or three with my friend D eventually (and happily) turned into a roving thirsty party of eight, when it turned out a number of other colleagues from NYC and Tokyo were able to join us.* This presented the conundrum of where one might dine not-horribly in the center of Paris on a Saturday with a brigade of people in the middle of fashion week.

Happily, this is just the function in which the recently-opened 2ème restaurant L'Hedoniste excels, for the time being. It is extraordinarily not horrible - even excellent, at times, if one is able to forgive the prices, which are all a notch above what dishes and wine actually merit, and the slightly hapless one-man kitchen, from which most things seemed to leave lukewarm, rather than hot.

But that is the kind of restaurant this is. If it were hot, there is no way I could have invaded on a moment's notice with D et al , and had, despite my criticism, a very enjoyable meal.

too good to be true: twin peaks & dauvissat chablis

It was perhaps perceptible from my uncharacteristic silence on all things Twin Peaks for the past month or so that I have indeed finished watching Season 2. There are no more seasons now. At some point my friend F and I just succumbed to the temptation to race through two or three episodes per night, either because the episode we had previously watched was so gripping, and we wanted to watch further, or because the episode just passed had been totally pointless, so we wanted to fast forward, as it were, by watching further.

The net result is that I skipped reporting on a few bottles of terrific Chardonnay I'd purchased specially to pair with Twin Peaks. Like, for instance, a 2008 Chablis by Vincent Dauvissat, cousin of the legendary Raveneau brothers, and a legendary vigneron in his own right. Dauvissat produces (to my knowledge) four premier crus and one grand cru, none of which I elected to splash out on, when I saw them at Caves du Marais, since the occasion was to be just a simple night in.*

Instead F and I sipped the normale, a wine whose gentle good graces are so predetermined as to feel almost unearned, like Billy Zane's sauve successful rich-kid character John Justice Wheeler, who saunters onscreen towards the middle of Season 2, promising intrigue or character reversal but delivering neither.

correct, naturally: les côtelettes, 75004

I make no secret of enjoying 19ème natural wine bistro Quedubon partly for the warmth and bravado of Gilles, the ever-present owner. So in visiting his other, older restaurant Les Côtelettes (formerly L'Impasse) for the first time the other day with my British friends R and A, I was curious to see which charms stayed consistent without the man himself around. R and I had steeled ourselves for whatever, both finding it odd that neither of us had previously heard much about the restaurant, despite its immediate proximity to an apartment (R's little thimble-sized garret) that we'd both lived in at different times. And we understood that it would only be natural for this little bistro just off the Place des Vosges to play things a bit safer for the tourist crowd.

For some reason I hadn't predicted that I myself would be taken for a tourist. It's probably my mushmouthed hyper-tentative accent that did it. Anyway I found myself getting steered very forcefully away from the one interesting Jura wine on Les Côtelettes concise, principled little list.

kind of sort of open! les trois seaux, 75011

Olivier Aubert on left. 

When I first met Olivier Aubert, he and Nath Acroft were behind the bar at the scrappy Spanish-toned natural wine bar they'd recently opened near the Centre Pompidou, La Bodeguita du 1Vème. They were headbanging along to "Bohemian Rhapsody." In the months since, M. Aubert has evidently been on kind of an entrepreneurial tear, first opening La Bodeguita du IXème near Grand Boulevards, and now, as of last week, a work-in-progress restaurant called Les Trois Seaux on rue de la Fontaine au Roi in the 11ème.

"Les Trois Seaux" translates to "the three buckets," and at the other Friday night's quiet opening party, as my friends M, B, and I surveyed in the fresh red and yellow splotchwork on the walls, I couldn't help wondering whether the bar's new name perhaps derived from a happy afternoon spent with some paintbrushes and numerous bottles of wine. As evidenced by the pace of his restaurant openings, Olivier doesn't seem to be the type to overthink things. I can only hope everyone else in the neighborhood finds the basic ideas as charming as I do: natural wines, informal service, simple tapas...

something else entirely: la bodeguita du IXème, 75009

In the 3ème there is a faddish twit restaurant called Derrière that is outfitted to look like someone's shabby-chic apartment. It is pretty much a playground for inattentive club kids who, knowing nothing of what constitutes good cooking or good drinking, seek a restaurant that offers, as substitute for both, gimmicky things like foozball tables and a "hidden" smoking room.*

The dining area of the recently-opened La Bodeguita du IXème, sister-cave to La Bodeguita du IVème, happens also to look kind of like an apartment. With more emphasis on the shabby side of shabby-chic. But there, happily, the similarities between the two establishments end. La Bodeguita du IXème is not in fact a restaurant, just a solid well-intentioned cave à grignoter. I juxtapose it with Derrière only to provide a contrast between funny décor intended as the crux of a concept - a terrible idea, reminiscent of mini-golf courses - and funny décor as the result of hapless necessity, which is what you find at La Bodeg du IXème. The weird clocks suspended on the walls and the hideous rec-room couch at the latter establishment are basically forgiveable and even kind of charming.

Anyway, what matters is the wine.

the forces of seitan: soya cantine bio, 75011

I like vegetarians fine. But I tend to avoid vegetarian restaurants,* because their common founding precept - that eating meat is unethical or unhealthy or unnatural - runs counter to my own reverence for preindustrial gastronomic and viticultural traditions. Every great western cuisine has contained meat since time immemorial, and most eastern cuisines as well. So part of me is inclined to believe that the late-20th-century rise in vegetarianism in the west is largely a result of a kind of anthropomorphic thinking that is itself only made possible by the modern industry of meat production, which ensures that consumers are never obliged to actually handle animals, except as pets. We now have the luxury of finding it abhorrent, rather than normal for millennia, to kill things for food.

That is the long version of my argument. The short version is: the wine lists a vegetarian restaurants invariably suck, and the food is usually a cultural mishmash of doctored dishes and pathetic meat substitutes. It's like vegetarian restauranteurs, having pre-identified their not-so-gastronomically-demanding market segment,** feel no need whatsoever to impress anyone else.

Let me now get around to saying that Soya Cantine Bio in the 11ème totally won me over, despite all the above skepticism. It would be a rarity in San Francisco or New York, even; in Paris it is downright astonishing: a vegetarian restaurant with an excellent, well-considered natural wine list.

blogging about blogging about the new soup at spring boutique, 75001

I was Christmas shopping at Spring Boutique last month and my friend Josh there introduced me to another Paris food blogger who began taking pictures of the soup I bought. So I took pictures of her taking pictures of the soup I bought.

Wendy Lyn does the Paris Kitchen blog. She evidently has a keen eye for new material.

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."

if you must buy wine at a supermarket: naturalia

I know I rail against supermarkets constantly. It's kind of my raison d'être on this blog, simply because of the frequency at which I am asked the question: 'What is the best wine I can find at (insert horrid cynical supermarket chain where not in a million years will you ever find one honest wine)?'

But a few months back I noticed some actually very nice biodynamic wine available at Naturalia, the 39-location-strong Paris organic market chain. If I didn't mention it then, it was only because I wanted to observe a little longer to see whether perhaps it was a one-off blip, whether they hadn't just purchased some back-stock from some agent's stock liquidation or God-knows-what...

In fact it's true. I passed through a Naturalia again the other day and saw no less than three wines I'd happily drink, at predictably competitive prices.*