ain't broke: le repaire de cartouche, 75011

The other Saturday my visiting friend C and I attended the Lobster Sandwich lunch at Spring,* along with a whole gang of other friends. You can imagine it turned into a long afternoon, after which C and I strolled down rue Faubourg St. Honoré, then, ack, down the Champs-Elysée a short ways, just off which hellish road he showed me the decidedly non-hellish apartment he's been contracted to decorate. There we vegged out for a while, watching 400 channels of television in a number of languages.

It was still Saturday night, though, and C was still in Paris. It seemed a shame to not do dinner someplace. Since all of the places I'd previously had in mind to show C were either too five-coursey or assuredly booked-up or already closed for summer holidays, I alighted instead on the idea of checking out Le Repaire de Cartouche, a divisive natural wine bistro in the Marais-adjacent 11ème that seems to be the perennial fallback reservation of every visiting wine industry person I know.

That's about as great as faint praise gets. And as C and I observed later, after a bracing Velib ride across town, Le Repaire de Cartouche justifies all of it.

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?"