those who know best: le grand 8, 75018

Ask any restaurateur what he or she looks for when dining out, and you'll probably get a perfectly concise description of 18ème bistro hideaway Le Grand 8: simple food, a killer wine list, and, critically, a place that's open on Sundays.

Accordingly, Le Grand 8's dining room positively brims with restaurateurs and natural wine folk, on Sunday evenings in particular. Last week I brought some colleagues there for a meal after our company's showrooms had finished for the day, and upon walking in immediately recognised friends from Autour d'Un Verre, Le Bistral, Le Dirigeable, and the late great Cave de l'Insolite. It took some minutes to actually join the party I'd walked in with, whereupon we sat down to enjoy those same qualities that had drawn all the rest of the town's tastemakers to a few small tables in Montmartre.

not encountering selosse at: caves augé, 75008

You may remember that I had notably failed to meet legendary Champagne vigneron Anselme Selosse at Spring's "Promesse du Vin" tasting a few weeks back, because he was late and I felt awkward waiting around. Well, the other day while I was Christmas shopping at Spring Boutique, my friend Josh (the wine director there) happened to mention there would be another Champagne tasting at the landmark 8ème wine shop Caves Augé the next day, and Selosse was slated to attend.

Pictured above is the barrel where he and his wines ought to have been. 

As my patient, unflappable friend S and I tasted through a lot of other great grower Champagnes in the miserable torrential frozen slush that afternoon, I overheard a Caves Augé employee explaining to someone that Selosse was, in fact, bloqué dans la neige, which is French for "couldn't be bothered to show up in this sickening weather." 

sacred monsters of champagne: julhès paris, 75010

G quizzing the Krug rep, who sported a leather biker jacket under his blazer. He said it was due to the cold. 

Some disconnected observations from the "Montres Sacrès du Champagne"* tasting Nicolas Julhès hosted the other weekend at Julhès Paris, his wine-and-foodstuffs wonderland near Strasbourg St. Denis:

1. Krug tastes quite a bit like fish roe.

I mean this in a beamingly positive sense; this is a wine that's pretty universally impossible to hate on. But it's fishy, with a dewy light corporeality to it, something translucent and ever-so-slightly saline. I say "fish roe" and not "caviar" first because the flavor itself is definitely closer to something from Yo! Sushi, and second because it's just too boorishly facile to come out with a line like "Champagne tastes like caviar." It's like saying "Wow, this alligator skin feels like cashmere."