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.

n.d.p. in burgundy: vincent dancer, chassagne-montrachet

It was pretty early in the AM when J and I arrived at the cellars of Côte d'Or rising-star Vincent Dancer. I had been up late drinking Corsican rosé the previous night with our friend / host C. A directionless mist of rain was falling or drifting through the air. I found myself recalling, as we pulled into Dancer's driveway, an early blog post where I'd accompanied a rave about one of his wines with a Youtube clip of Elton John singing "Tiny Dancer," and subsequently been questioned about my sexuality by some anonymous commentator.

We exited the car and waved. J was probably thinking 'How can I get this guy to sell me more wine?' I was thinking, 'I wonder if this guy thinks I'm gay?'*

I decided the odds were fairly slim Dancer had seen that post. It would take too much effort to explain. I just followed him and J down into his cellar and we all tasted a great deal of his glowy, precise wines while his cheery dog, barred from the cellar, watched us from the top of the steps.

n.d.p. in piemonte: francesco rinaldi e figli, barolo

In any given wine region, there's bound to be a learning curve for the first-time traveler, as over the course of a few winemaker visits he or she gets a handle on local attitudes. What my friend J and I learned on our first visit in the Barolo region proper, to the estate of Francesco Rinaldi e Figli, was you should never specifically ask to taste a Barolo producer's Grignolino.

first introductions: café de la nouvelle mairie, 75005

For about a year I was in a cross-town relationship with my friend F. In addition to teaching me much of the French I know, I credit her also with getting me into the habit of biking everywhere, without which form of transportation our relationship would probably have been obviated or abbreviated by the hassle of getting to the 5ème from my neighborhood. In less informed days I used to consider the whole quartier kind of a natural wine write-off, and would complain loudly about the sickening moron tourism afflicting rue Mouffetard* whenever we hung out in her 'hood.

Lately, to my continuing bittersweet pleasure, I seem to routinely discover more and more to like about the 5ème. First it was Restaurant Christophe and Les Pipos - a magnificent meat destination and a boisterous bistro à vin nature, respectively - and then earlier this spring I finally got around to visiting Café de la Nouvelle Mairie, a lovely terraced natural wine café just east of metro Luxembourg.

When I stopped by recently, it was to meet my fellow LA transplant T and her rotating cast of colorful friends, most of whom were unfamiliar to me at the time. F dropped by as well, since I was in the neighborhood, and she was there to witness what was perhaps my most catastrophically inappropriate wine choice in my recent memory.

give the pipos what they want: les pipos, 75005

Oddly befitting its location in the university-dominated, student-infested 5ème arrondissement - just off the Pantheon, no less - neighborhood bar à vin Les Pipos can be read as a kind of controlled case study of the transformative effect of the addition of natural wines to an otherwise archetypal Paris bistro.

The results are astounding. Because an insistence on natural wines is invariably a political statement as well as an aesthetic one, the sloppy, gem-laden list at Les Pipos, presented - upon demand - in the usual blithe fashion, has the effect of very discreetly intellectualizing the whole concept. And all the bistro hallmarks that would otherwise provoke only mild annoyance or mild approval - the bumbling service, the simple, richly satisfying cuisine - are rendered respectively more forgivable or winning by the knowledge that, particularly in the 5ème, Les Pipos could really tart up the natural wine angle, but don't.

The restaurant possesses that rare thing for a tourist quartier in a tourist city: genuine offhand charm. Such that, when I popped by the other night with my friends R, E, and IF,* with only an apero and a cheese plate in mind, we instead proceeded to knock back three bottles with a full meal including oysters.

aligoté perversity: drinking de moor at christmastime

In retrospect, it probably wasn't the most inspired decision to open the Aligoté first, among all the wines I'd brought to share with my friends' families in London. It was an academic decision, one that made sense internally - the next white was an ethereal dew-sweet cru Savennieres by Claude Papin, after all - but was in fact kind of a blunder in the exterior world of social propriety, where the occasion dictated that I open something rather more enjoyable first.

Even setting aside, for the moment, the difficulties of presenting any kind of wine to your average bunch of Brits, who as a people seem to submit to the habit of wine much as one submits to, say, yearly prostate examinations: Aligoté is, furthermore, a resoundingly dislikable grape. So much so that when several of those gathered professed to actually like Olivier et Alice de Moor's 2009 Bourgogne Aligoté, which I'd only brought out of perversity and haste, I was pleasantly stunned.

I chalked (ahem) it up to the peculiarities of the British palate,* and to the near-magical expertise of the de Moors, who I'm convinced are to Aligoté what Jenny Holzer is to LED lighting.

scare the girls away: leathery old bordeaux at le garde robe, 75001

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with le vin will have at some time or another experienced the pain of being asked to choose a SUBLIME glass of wine for an expectant friend who, frankly, wouldn't know a sublime glass of wine if it dripped straight from Jesus' wrist.

It's delicate. You just have to choose something obvious and pleasurable and not oversell it and hope that the friend in question is in a generous mood.

Don't do as I did the other day to my poor friend B, and inflict a fairly geeky, intimate, some would say unhygienic vertical tasting of leathery old Margaux that, due to the expense of the wine involved, requires a great deal of glass-swapping among people who have just met.

What can I say, though. I got asked for a sublime glass of wine on particularly great night at a particularly great wine bar - Le Garde Robe - where they happened to have a number of old Château Malescot St. Exupery Margaux open for 9eu / glass. It seemed very possible that a sublime glass of wine would, in fact, be available!*