a godsend: bacchus et ariane, 75006

Since my impolitic skewering of whopper misnomer wine bar La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels last summer, a number of that restaurant group's staff have approached me attempting to explain the bar's name. "Don't you get it?" they've asked me. "Sur-natural wine. Supernatural. It's not saying it is natural wine. It means it's better than natural wine !"

How on earth this is meant to make me appreciate the place any more is beyond me. These people seem to be telling me that instead of making a dupicitous play on words on behalf of the entrenched conservative wine establishment, the owners were making a boorish claim on the behalf of the entrenched conservative wine establishment. Complicating things further, I'm told that La Compagnie Yadda Yadda have in the interim actually added to their wine list a small selection of what are widely recognised as vins naturels. The whole affair is Romneyesque in its backtracking and inventive rationalisation, and frankly I wish I'd never said anything in the first place. (I'd certainly be on better terms with the owners, who are by all accounts good people at heart, and whose first three projects I genuinely appreciate.)

If I'm dredging it up now, it's only by way introducing my very belated discovery, via my friend Meg Zimbeck, editor founder of Paris By Mouth, of Bacchus et Ariane, a cave in the marché Saint Germain, just around the corner from La Compagnie des Vins Conventionels. Unbeknownst to me throughout the whole natural / surnaturel huff and my own extravagant complaints about the surrounding arrondissement, Bacchus et Ariane's proprietor Georges Castellato has for the past 14 years been quietly doing much of what that other bar ostensibly claims to: offering a magnificent, well priced selection of wines, drawn evenly from the ranks of acclaimed greats and itinerant sulfur-free upstarts, in a setting that, on a sunny afternoon in summertime, is among the most pleasant in Paris.

n.d.p. in burgundy: françois bertheau, chambolle-musigny

One uses metaphorical language to describe wine because our language is under-equipped with literal terms to describe taste and smell. Whatever scent molecules produce the smell of violets surely have a technical name, but it would be vastly less informative to employ it in describing the nose of a glass of wine. Metaphor, in winespeak, is a form of shorthand. 

Unfortunately, in most other genres, metaphor is a form of indulgence. (C.f. any Tom Friedman column.) It's why reading reams of tasting notes is so tiring. To process metaphor-heavy winespeak in the first place requires a mental adjustment, even for someone who employs such language often. And the impact is diluted the more one reads it. I sometimes fancy that in a perfect world, writers would be penalized for applying such descriptions as, 'An explosion of glimmering blueberry fruit laced with woodsmoke and bacon' to anything found at, say, Tesco's. 

In such a world, where hyperbole were reserved for special occasions, it would be a lot simpler to do descriptive justice to rightly famous mouth-watering appellations like Chambolle-Musigny, and in particular - simply because they're the ones I've tasted most recently - the wines of Domaine François Bertheau, which estate was the last stop of our whirlwind Burgundy road trip last fall.

for those who failed to reserve: les deux maisons, saumur

It's axiomatic that French wine towns contain great bistros. Less of a given, though, is how many great bistros. It often happens that a wine town receives major tourist traffic only at sporadic moments throughout the calendar, with the result that the local economy sustains just one great bistro, and that is precisely where every traveling importer, sommelier, caviste, etc. wants to be at those sporadic moments.

This is how our friend J2 managed to sort of shanghai us in Saumur* this past January during the period of Too Many Wine Fairs (La Dive Bouteille, La Renaissance des Appellations, Le Salon Les Pénitants, to name just the three I attended this year). He had assured the whole gang that, like the year before, he would call weeks in advance to reserve an enormous table at Bistrot de La Place. Then it must have slipped his mind.

So we wound up at what I imagine must fast be becoming a semi-renowned consolation restaurant for traveling wine geeks: Les Deux Maisons, a cartoonishly ugly place in the corporate-provincial style, inauspiciously situated in the parking lot of an E. Leclerc supermarket - in sum, a restaurant where one would certainly never dare to set foot, were one not aware beforehand that since 2005 its been owned by Daniel Haudebault, proprietor of Bistrot de la Place.

ups & downs: avant comptoir, 75006

After fleeing from the malevolent fraudulence on parade at last week's opening of "La Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels," my friends and I found ourselves in the 6ème arrondissement on a Thursday night in desperate need of an actual glass of true natural wine. It was this desperation that impelled us to elbow our way into Paris' least comfortable dining experience, Avant Comptoir, a place I wasn't exceptionally keen on revisiting after having a middling lunch there a few months ago.

Perhaps it was in part the sheer relief of once again being in an establishment that knows, understands, and cares for natural wine, but I had a surprisingly lovely experience at Avant Comptoir that evening. No wait, no undue shoving. A screaming fresh octopus carpaccio, a faintly oriental salade d'oreilles de cochon (pigs' ears), and a bottle of Georges Descombes 2008 Brouilly, kindly fetched from nextdoor for us after a brief back and forth with the manager - all of this was sublime, and the memory is only lightly marred, in retrospect, by the fact that I returned two days later and had a totally abysmal experience, one that regretfully confirmed my initial diagnosis of the place as being a good concept executed with neither grace nor consistency. 

jura bike trip: domaine macle, château-chalon

In Donald Barthelme's short story "The Glass Mountain," the narrator scales the face of a mountain, enduring bitter winds and the taunts and jibes of skeptical acquaintances below, only to be disillusioned upon attaining the summit, where the enchanted symbol he's been seeking turns into an "ordinary princess." The unspecified symbol, with its "layers of meaning," had been worth the narrator risking his life for, whereas a princess, quantified and familiar from fairy tales like the one that inspired "The Glass Mountain," can be discarded without remorse.

After our picnic among the vines below the village of Château-Chalon, we climbed a mountain to reach the cellars and tasting room of Domaine Macle, whose little-seen, essentially undistributed wines remain the enchanted symbol of the whole strange appellation.

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...

gamay, young and old

My friends and I shared a bottle of 2005 Jean Foillard Fleurie a few weeks ago at Le Garde Robe. I for one* was TOTALLY CONSUMED with curiosity, wondering how this keen, floral, graceful cru by a terrific vigneron from a famously tight vintage was unfurling, five years in.

Five years is not a long time for classic wines from stock portfolio regions like Bordeaux, Burgundy, Barolo, Rioja, etc. It's not even very long in terms of 2005 Beaujolais, which was, in general, wound like a tripwire.

On the whole though, I have the impression that Gamay's aging capacity is somewhat underestimated. I do this too, in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary. People tell me stories about tasting Morgon from the 60's, which sounds positively far-out. And I recently tasted a surprisingly spry 1998 Gamay-based Coteaux Giennois (Loire - northeast of Sancerre) called "Biao!" by an organic vigneron called Matthieu Coste, but only after staring at the entry on the wine list at Spring Buvette for 10 skeptical minutes and attempting somewhat pointlessly to interrogate the server as to the wine's continued servability.

character reversal: twin peaks & mâcon-chaintré

To my mind, David Lynch's greatest formal innovation with Twin Peaks - his half-parodical adoption of the "low" genre of television soap opera - was less an innovation than a restoration. The key tropes we associate with soap operas, e.g. hidden lives, sudden character reversals, things being generally never as they seem, are as old as literature itself. They're as elemental to Shakespeare's comedies as they are to Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. What Lynch did was to restore these plot elements, which had fallen to being just that, mere pivots for action, to their proper literary place as descriptors of the human psyche.

And so as we plowed into the strong(er) first half of Season 2, it was only fitting that the Native Companion and I shared a bottle of Domaine Valette's 2007 Vielles Vignes Mâcon-Chaintré, a wine that ended not at all as it began, a wine of two faces, of double lives... A wine I really ought to have researched a little further beforehand, and decanted. (Slaps forehead.) 

if cru beaujolais ever gets too cool...

Then to retain my geek cred I'll start talking up much lesser-known Côte Roannaise reds, named for the town of Roanne, west of the river Loire in the Rhone-Alpes region. (Under an hour from Lyons, I'm told.) Gamay from mostly granitic soil, in the hands of a good producer these are brisk, earthy, acid-packed wines, all rust and wild strawberries. Kind of the Huckleberry Finn to Beaujolais' wilier Tom Sawyer.

I drank a bottle last night as a last-minute farewell nightcap with my friend S, who's had enough of Paris and is leaving today:

More description and a video after the jump.