more fun that way: delobre's unsulfured st. joseph at le dirigeable, 75015

Update: 23/10/2013: I've just heard Le Dirigeable has closed. Bummer. 

Well, I was gently hassling my friend Guy about having served us a different vintage of Burgundy than the one we'd ordered from his list at 15ème restaurant Le Dirigeable. It hadn't been done intentionally; he'd evidently just jumped the gun on updating the vintage on the list and then unknowingly served us the 2008 instead of the 2009.

"It's a big deal!" I teased. (It sort of is, though. 2008 was nothing like 2009; the wines are drinking in wildly different states. That wine from 2009 would have shown a lot livelier, less savoury.)

In revenge, he insisted on choosing the next wine. He produced a Saint Joseph by a small natural Rhône producer called La Ferme de Sept Lunes. I recognized the wine's label and promptly began voicing various protests: how I'd had the wines before, they were a bit polished, how generally I'm not much into Rhône wines, whites or reds,* how I needed something lighter for my steak tartare... I was being an ass, in short.

It turns out what Guy was serving us was the winemaker Jean Delobre's unsulfured cuvée, "Le Chemin,"** which, on the contrary, I was keen to taste. I'm not a hardline no-sulfur flag-waver, but if the one thing I have against a given wine is a slight lack of personality, then bien sûr I'd like to encounter it again in an unsulfured version. It's like catching up with an acquaintance who has in the meantime stopped taking medication and taken up drinking again. There are certain risks - but some people are just more fun that way.

some other, better paris: le dirigeable, 75015

Update: 23/10/2013: I've just heard Le Dirigeable has closed. Bummer. 

Gilles Bénard, owner of another great restaurant, Quedubon, on why he doesn't cross town to see his friends at Le Dirigeable more often: "Ici à Paris, on est très sedentaire..." (Trans: Here in Paris, we're very sedentary.)

Let's see: a 35-hour workweek, an employment-for-life system that gravely disincentivises turnover in any form, lopsided rental law that pretty much prohibits eviction, powerful unions totally opposed to even reasonable sorts of labor reform, whose frequent crippling strikes are viewed as kind of national pastime... No kidding, Gilles! Getting Parisians to cross a medium-sized city for dinner is probably a little like raising the retirement age a wee bit.

But so it goes. Le Dirigeable, one of the city's most well-hidden dining gems, is way out in the 15eme arrondissement. Unless you're an entrenched Parisian family who lives out there, it's a hike. I can enthusiastically attest, however, that it's worth every step. Owned and run jointly by my friends Guy and Franck, this is the sort of natural, unpretentiously fine restaurant that in a perfect world would crown every neighborhood.

Guy & me.

wine list playlist: talulah gosh + old vine grenache

For variety's sake, a little viscious lighthearted song I've been digging all summer. If this song were a wine, it would be a 2006 Vin de Pays de l'Ardeche called "Briand," by Domaine du Mazel, that I drank the other night at Le Dirigeable. Brisk, tart, and deep as a bagel-cut. Neither the wine nor the song is particularly fresh, since by the standards of inexpensive south-central French VdP 2006 might as well be the mid-eighties. Actually there is probably a wider metaphor to be proposed here, about the similar lifespans of pop songs and simple table wines. But then every so often a strange leftfield classic comes along, like this wine, like this song, both of which feel as fresh as the day they were composed.  The wine is an old-vine Grenache and the song is Talulah Gosh.

Image swiped from vin-bio-naturel.fr.