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.

alright (for paris): la mer de chine, 75013

On the separate recommendations of both Cyrils from the Verre Volé restaurant and cave, respectively, I went with some friends to check out an unassuming Chinese place in the 13ème the other Sunday called La Mer de Chine.

I ought to mention immediately, just to get it out of the way, that I was hopelessly unable to resist referring to the place as Le Merde de Chine, even before we sat down and some but not all of the dishes justified the scatological wordplay.

poulsard & my first soufflé (possibly last)

We used aged mimolette instead of the more conventional gruyere, in semi-successful efforts to impart a pleasant orange color to the finished soufflé. I think it needed more cheese, but the (recently ex-) Native Companion doesn't take me seriously when I propose adding more cheese, because I am American.

Anyway largely due to her direction and helpful pointers the thing successfully inflated in a very satisfying and soufflé-like manner. We paired it with a miraculously great 2008 Poulsard by Jura vigneron Ludwig Bindernagel, of Les Chais de Vieux Bourg.

j smells: spring buvette, 75001

My friends C and J (both ex-Experimental Cocktail Club) were celebrating some progress on their hotly-tipped forthcoming cocktail / taco venture. I was celebrating selling a short story and a wine article in the same day. By the time we all mosied over to Spring Buvette to get some food in us, I was already tipsy, and they had been celebrating a little longer than I had.*

Which is the only way I can explain the following photo series, in which J can be seen actively nosing everything we ordered, and some things we did not order. (Thanks, Daniel et Sofian!)

proper pre-gaming: au nouveau nez, 75020

Wait, you say.  Didn't he already post about Au Nouveau Nez a few months ago? It sounded like a nice tiny cave à grignoter.*

This is the other location. There are key differences. Foremost among them the other night was the proximity of this location to a 20ème concert venue, La Flêche d'Or, where my friend H and I were planning to see Brooklyn dream-pop band Twin Sister later that evening. La Flêche d'Or doesn't sell tickets in advance, and since Twin Sister are one of just a few contemporary groups that genuinely interest me, I had been somewhat anxious about arriving early enough to get tickets.

That proved unwarranted, since in the end the place was half-empty. But it did give H and I a fine excuse to check out l'autre Nez, where we caught up about his eBook company over a relatively recent - 2005 - bottle of Matthieu Coste's brilliant biodynamic Côteaux Giennois Gamay, "Biao."

joyous naked pagans: natural wine tasting at autour d'un verre, 75009

After making the rounds at Spring's "Une Promesse du Vin" tasting recently, I popped over to meet my friends D and C at Autour d'Un Verre's significantly more informal natural wine tasting in the 9ème.

The differences in atmosphere and philosophy between the two restaurants and their tastings could not be more pronounced. Both places prize fine winemaking and both are very enjoyable. But where Spring very astutely emphasizes the fineness - as in comprehensive luxury, right down to the Aesop soap in the toilets - the scene at Autour d'Un Verre seemed to celebrate rather the winemaking, the physical act itself, with all the attendant sweatshirts, red stains, and mud-encrusted boots.

It's also just the difference between very established vignerons - those at Spring that day, accustomed to high profile wine events in NYC, London, San Francisco, and so on - and the up-and-coming ones, like the ragtag gang of bearded farmer-savants who manned the tables at the Autour d'Un Verre tasting, many of whose delicate unsulfured wines see limited distribution even in France. Some of the wines of this latter category of vignerons are true mystical natural wonders, with a joyous naked pagan quality to them. Others just taste amateurish and unhygienic - 'look what I found in this barrel' wines.

I tasted both that day at Autour d'Un Verre, but for the sake of diplomacy I'll focus on the naked pagans.

revelations: une promesse du vin tasting at spring restaurant, 75001

Wherein this author reveals he is not hardcore enough about this whole wine schtick to wait around for Anselme Selosse to show up. Yes, the Selosse, he of the otherworldly Champagnes from Avize. He arrived late to the tasting my friend Josh at Spring organized in honor of wine writer George Bardawil's book "Une Promesse du Vin," and I'd already moseyed on to the day's next tasting.

I'd like to say I left because after tasting through the stellar line-up Josh had assembled that day - the wines of vignerons who were on time, including masters like Claude Papin, André Ostertag, and Christine Campadieu of Domaine La Tour Vieille - I'd had my fill of heavenly wines for the day.

But really it was just me being in a hurry. To hell with it, I thought, I'll just have to get rich and purchase some Selosse for my own private consumption one day. I was planning to do that anyway.

know thy caviste: françois ecot's "la coulée douce"

No connoisseur is safe from his friends' best intentions. It's why when I throw dinner parties these days I try to include, in the emailed invitations, maps to particular caves that I know won't sell trash to my guests. It's a bit cheeky, but it's also just a logical extension of the answer I give when people ask me how to begin learning about wine: frequent a good cave.

A good caviste will stock nothing but honest wines, wines that truly have something to teach you about a region, a winemaking culture, a particular winemaker. A great caviste will also learn your individual tastes and use that as a basis for his or her recommendations.

My friend Nadine from Au Nouveau Nez actually excels beyond the standards of the latter category, as she proved the other night, when the Native Companion passed by on the way to my place for dinner. "It's for Aaron," said the NC, at which point Nadine promptly sold her a reasonably-priced wine I'd never heard of that nevertheless matched my tastes to an almost parodic degree. I felt, for once, enjoyably predictable and easy-to-read.

cold brains & jousset montlouis: quedubon, 75019

We were fourteen-strong celebrating the birthday of my friend L the other night, who was passing through Paris on tour with his afro-indie band. I'd booked us into Quedubon in the 19ème partly because it was the only natural wine destination that I knew would have the physical space to seat such a large party. Also because Gilles, the owner, is a really heroically fun guy, all booming voice and room-commanding presence.

But it turned out to be an inspired choice mostly for their excellent magnum selection. They have something like 20-30 bottles available in magnum, as I remember it, many of them excellent values. We got through five in total, the highlight being an irresistibly priced (48eu!) bottle of 2007 Montlouis-Sur-Loire by Lise et Bertrand Jousset called "Singulier."

comic timing: twin peaks & arbois

One of the great frustrations of Twin Peaks' second season is that, despite sinking ratings and tangled, flailing plotlines leading to nowhere, the show still attracted significant guest talent. Two years before his X-Files breakthrough, David Duchovny shows up as a cross-dressing FBI Agent. And Diane Keaton as guest director on Episode 22 did her darnedest to find genuine wit and warmth in the rambling, silly, overwritten script she was handed. The episodes in general remain watchable partly due to the continued goodwill of the well-intentioned guest stars, most of whom gamely behave as though the show isn't peeling to bits around them.

The Native Companion and I shared a 2005 Arbois Chardonnay by renowned Jura winemaker Jacques Puffeney the other night with Season 2, and it was another case of unfortunate timing, just in the other direction. Where Keaton, Duchovny, et al* arrived too late to the Twin Peaks party, the NC and I possibly cracked this one open a few years too early.

savoie-faire pt. 2: savoie reds at la cave de l'insolite, 75011

Adrien Berlioz of Domaine du Cellier des Cray and Frédéric Giachino of Domaine Giachino.

It's possible to turn up the occasional vin de Savoie in the more forward-thinking restaurants and wine shops in the states, where somms and wine geeks are often looking for the next keen blistering white to ratchet up the acid. (Hence the relative geek cache of Vermentino, Pecorino, Aligoté, etc.) Whereas in my experience, rich Savoyard reds, based primarily on the Mondeuse grape, remain on a whole other level of obscurity.

I tasted through quite a few at the Vin de Savoie tasting at La Cave de l'Insolite last month, and while I can't lie and say they screamed COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITY*, they were on the whole much more aligned with contemporary wine tastes that I'd expected.** 

the OTHER trou normande

Traditionally, a trou normande (or "Norman hole"*) is a small glass of Calvados taken between courses in order to help aid digestion and encourage total besottedness throughout a meal in Normandy. This seems reasonable to me. The weather up there is kind of English when it's not summer, and unless you hunt or farm trout or harvest apples, I'm not sure what else there is to do besides quietly resent your tablemates and crave hard liquor.

savoie-faire, pt 1: domaine belluard at cave de l'insolite, 75011

Michel, owner of La Cave de l'Insolite, who organised the tasting.

As I complained in an earlier post, on one Monday early this past November there were something like eight or nine very good wine tastings happening all around Paris. On the day of, this presented obvious logistical problems that prevented any one oenophile from getting through all of them. (Torrential rain did not help.) Now in the aftermath I find I'm still wading through a surfeit of blog material, much of which seems valuable and worth communicating, slowly fading into irrelevance with the unstinting passage of time...

Anyway, I thought I'd say a few words about the Vin de Savoie tasting held that day at La Cave de l'Insolite, before, like, the next vintages are released. And conceivably a few of you out there in Readerland will be passing some winter vacation on ski trips in Savoy, in which case a survey of the best or more scrupulous wine producers could prove very useful indeed.*

ping ping ping: champagne and high fashion

I'm continually harping on about the basic interconnectedness of most aesthetic fields - wine, music, fashion, art, literature, etc. But I should stress that this tendency of mine should not imply a de facto endorsement of opportunistic cross-industry cash-in nonsense like the above "collaboration" between fashion house Viktor & Rolf and Champagne house Piper-Heidsieck, which I saw at a Champagne tasting a few weeks ago.

For one thing, the premise of the parties' involvement is miserably facile. Fashion and wine are both, at their very worst, luxury industries. A necessarily simplistic idea of luxury is all these two brands have in common.

For another thing, the glasses themselves are monstrously ugly and impractical. I stood and watched that day as the hapless Piper-Heidsieck representative attempted to take them out of their specially-built case and in doing so broke three at their stems. Ping, ping, ping.

some sweetheart deal: au bon coin, 75018

Let me begin by relating a certain suspicion I have.

Have you ever wondered about all the interchangeably anonymous loser cafés hunched on even the most desolate, least-trafficked Parisian streetcorners? For every thronged Le Progrès or La Perle, there must be another thousand sad unseen cafés, replete with formica counters, tables the size of euro-coins, and surgically bright lighting that serves only to highlight a conspicuous and enduring lack of patrons. How do these joints afford their rents, which, if residential real estate is anything to go by, must be stratospheric?

I'm have no hard information on the subject, but I assume there's some combination of government subsidies and death-grip rent-control at play.* Au Bon Coin, a gem of a café on a quiet corner on the low-key side of Montmartre**, is emphatically not a loser establishment, but something tells me they either own their building, or have not seen rent increases since sometime around the end of the second guerre mondiale. The prices on their tasty, simple menu, and on their emminently quaffable, never-updated wine list all evince a kind of unhurried attitude towards making money or staying afloat. Many of the bottles are around 16eu.

thanksgiving in paris: three magnums & la dinde

It's a curious sign of expat-titude that you forget about Thanksgiving. All ten of us who managed to meet up - seven Americans in total - happily managed to whip it together with all of two days' notice this year. It helped that, in what was perhaps a telling display of priorities, Josh from Spring had already ordered la dinde from a fellow at the market, even before remembering to invite anyone.

It's was also a great joy to do Thanksgiving with a few fellow wine geeks for once, rather than, you know, actual family.*

bordeaux below the radar: l'homme cheval at quedubon, 75019

At the close of the other night's rocking, many-magnum'd dinner at Quedubon with LA afro-indie band Fool's Gold, Gilles, who owns the restaurant, strode over and said he had someone to introduce me to. It turned out to be Dominique Léandre-Cheval, a natural Bordeaux vigneron whose playfully-branded Côtes de Blaye wines I recognized from great natural wine shops all over town.

(The wines are ascribed simultanously to Dominique Léandre Cheval, to Château Le Queyroux, to "DLC" - a pun on the famed Burgundy estate - and to L'Homme Cheval, the French for "centaur," which jeu de mots Dominique explains is in fact the etymological root of his family name.)

He happened to have three of his estate's wines open and available to taste, one of which I suspect won him the beginnings of an enthusiastic cult audience in Los Angeles.

christmas profiteering: the not drinking poison gift guide

Image nicked from purecashmagazine.com.

Every year people ask me what to buy for the wine geek or aspiring wine geek in their life. Every year I write the same few book titles on the backs of a few napkins, which are presumably still balled-up in these same people's jacket pockets, having been instantly forgotten, and laundered into oblivion by now.

This year is going to be different. I've created a Not Drinking Poison Gift Guide!

n.d.p. in madrid: common decency at bocaito

After a few nights spent careening around Madrid en masse guided only by iPhones and good intentions, it was a tremendous relief on our last night to actually have a reservation in our name somewhere. My friend D's friend C, a Madrid native, had made the res from London and then moved heaven and earth to arrive in time for the main course.

I suspect that D had made us intentionally late for C's sake, actually. We all trooped into Chueca-district restaurant Bocaito loopy on sherry and about an hour late, prompting the matronly proprietress to unleash a wild tirade on impoliteness and ethics to the only member of our party who could understand her, which happened to be Y, the curator of the group show in which D's wife E was performing. We all seated ourselves red-faced with heads bowed - but grinning, since at very least we were seated, and at a restaurant that promised to be decent, even.

n.d.p. in madrid: a few quick splashes at taberna tempranillo

It's hard being a walk-in party of ten on a Friday night. You might as well all wear matching signs that say "Sucker." The fact is, any restaurant worth sitting down at will be booked solid on a Saturday night; the ones that are not are the strugglers and failers, whose general sad desperation is reliably reflected in that of the waitstaff, who will rob you blind without blinking.

But in Madrid that is the situation we found ourselves in. My friend D and I had a few tip-offs for chaotic tapas bars, but everyone (notably his wife / my friend E, the reason we were all in Madrid in the first place) preferred to sit down after a hard days' museum viewing. For twenty minutes all ten of us ricocheted around Calle Cava Baja, rejecting restaurant after restaurant for being either too slammed or too disturbingly calm. Finally D made an admirable well-intentioned capital-dee Decision and convinced everyone to wait still longer for a half-promised table at a what was quite plainly a sinister rip-off joint for old-school geezers.*

Everyone but me. Immune to shame, I told everyone I'd return when the table was ready and I popped off solo to revisit one of the recommended manic tapas bars we'd passed earlier, Taberna Tempranillo.

n.d.p. in madrid: the vision of la venencia

I actually spent about 90% of my time in Madrid viewing sculptures, paintings, and installations at the city's numerous well-appointed museums and art spaces. My friend E's performance at La Casa Encendida consisted, in a purely visual sense,* of the artist alone in a sailing ship suspended by cables from the roof of a large hall above an artificial tempest of whirring air-blowers. It was pretty striking.

Now, for the sake of encouraging interdisciplinary appreciation, and at the risk of sounding like a total philistine, I'm going to aver that the scene at La Venencia - the rightly famous sherry bar in central Madrid where we all went after her performance one night - moved me in a similar fashion.

n.d.p. in madrid: hangover cuisine at almendro 13

Posting about this place not because it was particularly spectacular by any measure, but rather because I found it illustrative of the general joyous brutality of the whole tapas concept.

You walk in and fight - almost literally fight - your way to a table still cluttered and smeared with the greasy debris of its last occupants, where you wedge yourself in and immediately employ coats, scarves, and handbags as vital seat-holders for whichever poor souls among your party are kind or credulous enough to volunteer to fetch food and drinks, neither of which can be ordered from the table you just fought for. You must leave your seat and visit either the bar (either floor) or the kitchen (ground floor only), which venture risks inviting invasion by hawk-eyed seat-stealing Spanish women with lip-rings.

n.d.p. in madrid: rocking txakolina in la latina

A common misconception, when I drag tired friends from bar to random bar in a foreign city, is that I'm searching for The Best Wines. Usually I'm too busy urging everyone onwards and researching other addresses to even begin to clarify that greatness isn't what I'm after - that all I'm after is typicity*: something that speaks of a particular area or a culture.

So while killing time before my friend E's art opening this past weekend in Madrid, I was quite thrilled to have several healthy glasses of random fizzy Txakolina at Lamiak in the La Latina neighborhood. (Admittedly much of my good mood may have derived from watching the bartenders.)

savant chinois: q-tea, 75009

Instead of offering a straight informative review of Q-Tea, a criminally unassuming Chinese restaurant in the 9ème, I'd like to sketch a blurb of a pop-academic article I'd like to write someday, on the subject of selective aesthetic blindness.

(When greatly moved by something, I get the instinctive urge to produce a response commensurate, in ambition, to whatever it was first moved me - in this case, the greatest Chinese food I've ever tasted.)

estoy perdido!

Image swiped from chnm.gmu.edu.

The recent uncharacteristic radio silence is not because I have stopped drinking, or thinking too much about drinking.

It's because I've been bumbling around in Madrid for the past three days, sherry glass in hand, largely incommunicado.  

Once I change into some clean socks and get my thoughts in order I'll begin posting all about it.

champagne 101: salon du champagne @ julhès paris, 75010

It figures that what was, objectively speaking, the least interesting tasting on my calendar this month proved to be probably the most satisfyingly educational. My landlady and her husband had invited me to a Champagne tasting at their strangely-named cave of choice in the 10ème, and since I'd flaked on similar invites in the past, I joined them this time, even though it was a rainy Saturday morning, and no vignerons were slated to attend, and after getting a late start I still had a sack of sopping groceries in my wobbly bicycle-basket.

The cave, it turns out, is named after its propietor, Nicolas Julhès, a charming, energetic, slightly elfin gentleman with very much the right ideas about wine. And the tasting was so edifying precisely because it was so simple: 8 large-to-enormous Champagne houses pouring two wines each, their basic and a selection cuvée, which presentation caused me to realise that despite having tasted all these wines before on various occasions, I'd never actually had the opportunity taste them side by side in quick succession.*

impromptu mas foulaquier tasting: spring boutique, 75001

The other night I promised myself just an apéro at Spring Boutique with Josh and my friends D and C. But then the arrival of Josh's excellent friend T prompted us to have a further bottle of Riesling. Then, no sooner had we unscrewed the cap of said Riesling than in strode the snazzily-bespectacled wine agent Sylvie Chameroy, with Blandine Chauchat, of Mas Foulaquier, and a truly dizzying array of biodynamic Pic-Saint Loup samples.

I start with good intentions and I wind up with red teeth.

honorary member: twin peaks & vin de pays de sainte marie la blanche

I'm not cut out for sticking to themes. Faced with a choice between two mid-range organic Mâcon Chardonnays that I knew to be a little heavy around the waist and Emmanuel Giboulot's crackingly great (and great value) "Terres Burgondes" blanc, I had to spring for the latter, even if, not being Chardonnay, it threatened the thematic integrity of my blog series.

Giboulot's "Terre Burgondes" is 100% Pinot Beurot, which is the name they use for the smattering of Pinot Gris in Burgundy. Pinot Gris is in turn synonymous with the grape many Americans request when they desire a wine with no character at all: Pinot Grigio.*

So I sat around with the Native Companion the other night watching Twin Peaks drinking a bottle of PG.

how did i manage to overlook: caves du marais, 75004

Actually, it's no shocker that after a year and a half here in Paris, including two months living just a few blocks away in the Marais, I hadn't noticed Caves du Marais. It totally blends in.*

There's also the question of the name. Dry, grey names like this, that reference only the what a place is and it's location, are always a toss-up - they can either be cruddy no-nothing corner establishments, or they can be, like, the Union Square Café. Sometimes, as with Caves du Marais, you can't really tell from outside. I only wandered in because I noticed some of Antoine Arena's good Corsican wines in the window.

minor casualties: oysters & chablis dinner

The occasion was there was no occasion. Oysters are plentiful and cheap and in season, and for a few more days last month, I still had run of my landlady's superbly tricked-out kitchen in Belleville. So the Native Companion and I invited over a crowd of friends and asked that everyone bring either oysters or decent Chablis.

Then we got shuckin'. Or everyone else did. I concentrated on putting the finishing touches to an enormous pot of clam-and-cockle chowder.*

cocktail curiosity shop: izrael, 75004

One key piece of advice for drinking in Paris: almost never order cocktails. They just plain suck here. With the notable and laudable exception of the Experimental Cocktail Club mini-empire, the cocktail scene in Paris is about as sophisticated as a half-stocked BU frat party in the mid-to-late nineties. For evidence, just look to the ubiquity of mojitos, which in the rest of the civilized world ceased being cool, and began to be recognized as just a watery hassle, about a decade ago. (I can and will write a whole separate post on how keenly I wish for that drink to disappear.)

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.

viré-clessé anarchy: catherine vergé @ avn dégustation, 75019

The Association des Vins Naturels held its Grand Dégustation on Monday at the Pavillion in the Parc du Buttes Chaumont. I'd actually never been to a more anarchic tasting. Tables were seemingly themed according to general aura ("vin sérieux," etc.) rather than by region or vigneron, and everywhere you looked there was a crushed melee of raincoats, umbrellas, and wet scarves, on account of a vicious unrelenting rainshower outside. By noon when I arrived with my friend D, all bottles had traveled very far from their vignerons, and whatever information you wanted on the wines, you had to kind of fight for.

Nevertheless, a highlight for me was meeting Catherine Vergé, the vigneron behind a bizarre oxidative Vin de Table I raved about recently, best known for her and her husband's acclaimed range of Viré-Clessés. When I spotted her she was sporting her AVN tag on her forehead, looking pretty bemused by the whole situation. (I wish I'd taken a picture then.)

josé peña sardine tasting: spring boutique, 75001

One of the many reasons I dig Spring Boutique is they are totally unabashed about their enthusiasm for obscure delicacies, no matter how unmarketable.

beef? or salad? you order first.

One of the comic highlights of my recent trip to Reims came shortly after exiting the station, when we passed this restaurant:

You have to give them credit for choosing a theme and sticking to it. No Asian fusion or funny foams and reductions going on here. No oyster nights or "art" exhibitions or tango lessons on the weekend. I can just imagine having a business luncheon here among a bunch of provincial Frenchmen:

"Bon, qu'est-ce que tu prends, toi?"
"Bah, je sais meme pas encore..."
"Moi non plus. Soit le boeuf, ou..."
"Il y a la salade, aussi, ils en ont de la salade."
"Soit le boeuf, soit la salade, oui, c'est claire."

simple comme un boujour: autour d'un verre, 75009

Revisited Autour d'Un Verre the other night, Kevin Blackwell's cave à manger hideaway in the 9ème. I'd first been some months ago with my fellow American expats D and C who live just up the street, and it was with these same folks I returned, along with our visiting friends L and B, from the LA band Fool's Gold and the Rome fashion / lit mag Grey, respectively. It was like the summit of the far-flung Americans.

pho-k me: pho 14, 75013

I finally got around to checking out Pho 14 in the 13ème. No wine interest whatsoever there, so I won't go into it at length, except to say that it was probably the best pho I've had in my life.

I used to live in LA, where it's sort of a given that the tiny ethnic joints - Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, El Salvadorian, etc. - contain the best food in the city. Paris couldn't be more different; too often the foreign food here is miserably over-adapted to the local tastes, which means a total lack of salt or spice.* Not so at Pho 14, where the pho was also distinguished by the freshness of the beef, the fineness of the tripe, and the focused clarity of the broth. I was kind of blown away.

*We watched as the two teenage French girls next to us carefully removed everything flavorful from their pho, right down to the last onion sliver and coriander leaf, before tucking in. 

Pho 14
129, avenue de Choisy
75013 PARIS
Metro: Tolbiac
Tel: 01 45 83 61 15
Map

terrific pipsqueak wines: gustave et jules, 75011

One of the central ironies I first confronted, as a wine geek arriving in Paris from the remote asphalt plains of LA, was the shocking difficulty of finding an honest glass of natural wine in a bar here.

It's not actually as easy as you think. Glass pours in all but the best of bars are routinely selected on a basis of either lowest-common-denominator pleasurability, or a proprietor's personal relationships with the vigneron or agent, or some combination of these factors. Neither encourages typicity or expressiveness in glass-pours; in fact they tend to discourage these qualities, which are all I'm really looking for in a glass of wine in a bar on an evening after work. Not miracles, just honesty. 

Now: having defined what little it is I'm seeking in a good neighborhood wine bar, I can set about heartily endorsing the subject of this post, Gustave et Jules. It's an unpretentious little wine bar just down the road from the MacDonald's near Metro Parmentier, and it's remarkable for a wine list that contains almost nothing but brisk inexpensive vivacious dirty life-sustaining natural pipsqueak wines.

almost fun not knowing: twin peaks & côte roannaise chardonnay

Alright. In my search for exceptional French Chardonnays to pair with episodes of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, I got a little too optimistic the other day, and dropped 10eu on a bottle of intriguing Vin de Table Chardonnay by Domaine du Picatier, from the Côte Roannaise, a Rhone-Alpes region best known for good-value granitic-soil Gamay.

It made for an appropriate, if totally unenjoyable, pairing with Episodes 16, 17, & 18, which together constitute roughly the point where, Laura Palmer's killer having killed himself after confessing, the series loses all suspense and descends into silly time-wasting anarchic nonsense. The wine, whose lot number leads me to believe dated from 2008, tasted like a hasty rough draft of itself, colorless and fade. It was like a page on which you have a setting, a few scraps of dialogue, and a big question mark where you've perhaps intended, at some later date, to add a plot. The Native Companion and I eventually just wrote it off, like pretty much any scene involving the Dick Tremaine character: