jean-luc poinsot (la badiane) tasting: le garde robe, 75001

Z, P, et M. Poinsot

On the night we attended last week's Jean-Luc Poinsot tasting at Le Garde Robe, my New Zealander friend Z informed me she had an "unusual surprise" for me. I assumed the surprise was simply that her excellent, occasionally somewhat reclusive husband P was actually going to join us for once. (P designs for Lanvin and is accordingly perpetually swamped with work.)

Although P did indeed end up joining us, it turns out she had been referring instead to a small green guava-like fruit called a feijoa, which she had been delighted to find at a market here in France, and which she placed in my hand and told me to eat later.

According to Z, everyone in New Zealand has a tree just bursting with feijoa in their back yards. I've yet to eat the thing - it seemed unripe so it's still sitting on my desk - but I really appreciated the gesture, since, as perhaps Z noticed, the guiding philosophy of what I drink and how I eat and this blog as a whole is essentially just a reverence for the native peculiarities of any given region. I'd never even heard of a feijoa.*

Anyway, all this is long preamble to why I dig Jean-Luc Poinsot's wines (thus, why me and Z and P were out that night in the first place). His strong, distinctive range could come from nowhere else on earth but  Provence - the first proof being the winemaker's exclusive use of local varietals, like the strange, scented candle-y Tibouren rosé I covered in a previous post.