sancerre bike trip: restaurant la tour, sancerre

The most expensive fallacy of wine travel, to which I habitually succumb, is to assume that, to experience the full breadth of a given region's cuisine, one must dine at least once at a formal restaurant. This is how I convinced myself and my travel companions to dine at Restaurant La Tour, a Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by chef Baptiste Fournier, whose parents owned the restaurant before him.

Fournier previously trained with Guy Savoy and Alain Passard, among others, and in this case the chef's estimable pedigree illustrates why I ought to avoid restaurants like La Tour. High-value chefs tend to produce high-value cuisine, more representative of individual ambitions than of regional tradition. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced at lunch, when chefs don kid gloves.)

In the same way that you can get a Burberry scarf or Gucci luggage in almost any duty-free from Madrid to Dubai, you can enjoy the white-tablecloth cuisine of Restaurant La Tour in almost any upscale rural French restaurant from Puligny to Chablis. Luxury has an anonymising effect. At Restaurant La Tour, this is counterbalanced by an impressive, if not exactly bargain-studded regional wine list that cites the local wines according to village.

you've goust to be kidding: goust, 75002

A magazine I write for sometimes called Punch recently published two interesting pieces about what it means to be a sommelier. The comment threads beneath these articles quickly devolved to something approaching trench warfare, with lines clearly drawn between those who consider "sommelier" a role, like an emcee, and those who consider the term to be more like a title or accreditation, like "PhD" or "Licensed Beautician."

Personally, I would very much like to have already internalized and recited the industry catechism required for certification by any of the big sommelier accreditation bodies. Then my opposition to them could be taken seriously. As it is, any criticism I might offer would rightly have the ring of sour grapes.

I'll stay mum for that reason. I will however say that for a sommelier to emblazon his restaurant's menus with his name and the epithet "Best Sommelier in the World," as title-winner Enrico Bernardo does at his recently Michelin-annointed restaurant Goust, is a laughable act of hubris, one that inadvertently seems to trivialize the responsibilities of a sommelier. It's like calling a certain chair the Best Chair in the World. Ultimately, it's a place where you sit, not terribly dissimilar to the second or even the third-best chair in the world.  A restaurant is a place where you eat and a sommelier is the fellow who helps you navigate the wine list. To truly require the utmost services of the Best Chair in the World or the Best Sommelier in the World, one would in both cases have to be a very demanding ass.

The rest of us who enter Goust planning merely to eat food and drink wine are unfortunately in for a minor letdown, since for all its rigor the sommelier competition Bernardo won had no section on good taste in restaurateurism.