n.d.p. in lyon: le fleurie, 69007

Far-flung Lyonnais wine bistrot Le Fleurie exists in a wonderful parallel universe where the old Léon Daudet chestnut - that Beaujolais wine comprises the “third river” nourishing Lyon, after the Rhône and the Saône - still rings true.

Le Fleurie’s cuisine is solid and satisfying and co-proprietor Jacinthe Gomes’ concise, inspired wine list is the model of what a fine Lyonnais list should like: reds divided evenly between Beaujolais and the northern Rhône, with whites deriving mainly from Burgundy, the Mâconnais, with a dab of Rhône. Classic selections all, and at great prices!

Yet the fact remains that the population of Lyon, at time of writing, famously prefers almost anything to Beaujolais, and tends instead to identify with Rhône wines. Just why is a matter of speculation, into which I’m happy to delve at length later. For now, another fact remains: most people are idiots. Most Lyonnais, most French, most Americans, most drinkers, most humans. The rest of us are happy to go out of our way for lunch at Le Fleurie.

the seven sins of wine and social media

It's that time of year again. The Loire salons are approaching, and with them, the annual tempest of facile social media emissions recording an infinity of superficial encounters between historical wine cultures and contemporary social media. We're all guilty: journalists, sommeliers, retailers, importers, distributors, even a few winemakers.

Every gesture on social media is necessarily an advertisement for oneself. But there's good advertising and bad advertising. Bad self-promotion is wearisome and slowly turns us against the perpetrator. When we engage in it ourselves, it can turn us against the wine industry as a whole, which in dark moments can resemble a festering cesspit of forced enthusiasm and transactional endorsements.

In the interest of elevating the general discourse, I've assembled here a list of seven things to bear in mind before hitting "Share." You could call them the Seven Sins, but the list is assuredly incomplete. (Before anyone points it out, I'm no saint myself.)

ma dai ! : procopio angelo, 75010

There would not, initially, seem to be much purpose in my writing anything at all about Procopio Angelo, the eponymous restaurant of a popular Tuscan chef in Paris, once based on rue Faubourg St. Honoré, now transplanted to a back road near Colonel Fabien in the 10ème. Procopio's Italian wine list is representative of the genre as one typically encounters it in Paris: a seeming panoply of regional wines, which upon closer inspection turn out to comprise little more than the diverse ranges of a few titanic producers of supermarket wine. Then you have poor Marco Parusso's decent if overmodern Barolos - always the current vintage - sitting there like duck-decoys for the big spenders who stray in.*

But Procopio keeps cropping up in any discussion of Italian food in Paris. No less than two friends whose culinary opinions I otherwise respect have proposed his restaurant to me as an example of "real Italian."

Sociologist Peter L. Berger famously argued that reality itself is a social construction, an interwoven fabric of institutionalised social perceptions. Procopio Angelo is real Italian cuisine, if, like many Paris diners, one disregards the last twenty years' of Italian restaurateurism and continues to define Italian cuisine in opposition to the technique and complexity of a serious restaurant.

n.d.p. in roma: kindred spirits: the jerry thomas project

The Native Companion who I reference from time to time in posts on this blog doesn't (yet) share my enthusiasm for wine, or not to the same extent. Her thing is cocktails, for which I happily also have a minor thing, if not to the same extent.* So she and I had made a deal: she'd endure my relentless quests to locate good restaurants, and my eternal dithering over their wine lists, if I'd endure a potential goose chase in search of good cocktails in Rome.

"Good luck" and "No chance in hell" were the responses the NC and I received from those we contacted in our preliminary cocktail research. It appeared there simply wasn't a scene in Rome. Even our friend L, a native Roman born-and-raised, professed to know of no good cocktail locations in the city. Nevertheless she agreed to accompany us to the nearby Jerry Thomas Project, a speak-easy tip-off the NC had received from one of her bosses in Paris.

It was twilight - about 19h30 - when we knocked on a door that said "Prof. Jerrj Thomas" (sic), on a nothing / nobody street not far from where we'd been sitting in the Piazza de Campo dei' Fiori. After a moment's delay, the door cracked open and a beautiful woman wearing a sweatshirt and enormous insectoid false eyelashes asked us in English what we were doing there.

The NC told her we were thinking of getting a drink. The woman said they didn't open until midnight. We said okay, we'd return later that evening, and the woman bid us goodnight, closing the door.

We were wandering off, halfway up the street, when the woman called after us, "How did you find out about us?"