a few beaujolais debuts

Tasting new releases with my favorite Beaujolais producers is often kind of embarrassing. After saying hello and getting the usual optimistic, yet gnomic replies about the character of the vintage, I run out of material. With people like Georges Descombes, Jean Foillard, Jean-Claude Chanudet, Matthieu Lapierre, etc., just about every wine is so reliably, resoundingly delicious that it's hard to think of anything interesting to say about them. More bloody wonderful life-quenching Gamay, eh? Shocker.

I adore the wines of Beaujolais more than almost any others. But finding reasons to write about them is damnably rare. At La Dive Bouteille this year there were at least three: an old-vine Morgon from Descombes' son Kevin, an extremely-limited production Chénas by Karim Vionnet, and the promising Morgons of Anthony Thevenet.

loire salons 2015: la renaissance des appellations, les penitantes, la dive bouteille, demeter france

I found myself with a late afternoon to kill in Angers on the Friday before this years' tasting salons. With the aim of avoiding drinking at all costs, I nursed a café crème on the terrace of a no-name bar beside a parking lot, where I soon ran into Beaujolais vignerons Karim Vionnet and Jean-Claude Lapalu.

They were toting several magnums between them, headed elsewhere. I said I'd see them tomorrow at the tasting, whereupon Vionnet reminded me that they were presenting at La Dive Bouteille, which didn't start until Sunday in Saumur. For the winemakers, evidently, as much as for me and most other attendees I know, the weekend was mainly a social occasion.

I'm guilty of complaining about this dynamic from time to time. The truth is, though, that the pageantry and partying of the Loire salons are signs of a vibrant community, and ought to be encouraged as such, or at very least, gracefully tolerated.  Take, for a counter-example, the Demeter France tasting at Angers' Palais de Congrès, where my friends and I tasted the following morning. Most of the winemakers looked embarrassed to be there, like they hadn't even been introduced to one another. It seemed illustrative of the limitations of merely-biodynamic collective marketing, at a time when even the natural wine off-salons, Vin Anonymes and Les Pénitantes, are metastasizing each year. I missed out on Anonymes this year, in favor of arriving earlier at La Dive Bouteille - a somewhat unnecessary precaution, it turned out, since this years' edition was notably better organised, and seemingly less overrun by local daysippers.  After the jump, some scattered takeaways. Slightly more in-depth posts on a few topics to follow in days to come.

n.d.p. in london: terroirs, covent garden

I kind of went about visiting acclaimed London wine bar Terroirs backwards. It's my fault. I'd read about how two years ago, in partnership with leading British natural wine importer Les Caves du Pyrène, Terroirs opened near Charing Cross, and how the restaurant has since proceeded to upend the London dining scene by introducing strange vivid glorious natural wines by the legendary vignerons (mostly French).* So I was duly eager to visit. But since I was staying way east in Hackney, among a bunch of homebody artist folk who seem to avoid central London the way I used to avoid West LA or Marina Del Ray, my friends and I visited first the newer venture by the Terroirs owners, a much smaller more charming restaurant called Brawn on Columbia Road. This may have been the reason I found Terroirs sort of ho-hum in the end. I'd already seen the beautiful evolution of their concept at Brawn.

But the two restaurants, finally, are shooting different fish in different barrels with different guns. Terroirs, comprising two floors of slick natural wine ambassadorship, situated smack in the big overproduced theatre district, is about as subtle as a bazooka. Walking around central London always feels a bit like Attack of the 90ft Restaurants! but nevertheless it was very strange, after passing so much time in pokey Paris natural wine dives, to see in Terroirs the hugely successful Disneyfication of the natural wine movement.

The place was jammed on the Thursday night we dropped in. So we didn't even eat. Just soaked in the scene, and a bottle of 2008 Pierre Frick Alsace Chasselas "Sans Soufre."

sans soufre dans la rue: drappier drunkenness, 75004

nighthawks at the diner: the newly renovated verre volé, 75010

I have no hipster desire to say anything negative whatsoever about the newly-renovated incarnation of Le Verre Volé. I love the place, outsize popularity and all. My first meal there was the day after I arrived in Paris, and I remember feeling that the whole ethos of the restaurant - unfussy service of great wines, a market menu balanced between novelty and sausages, frank presentation of great things - validated my descision to move to France.

But it has to be said, if only for the sake of critical honesty*: the new wing feels sort of like a diner. The vibe is a little abbreviated. I'm hoping they'll immediately begin to festoon it with all the wine clutter that makes the main dining area so charming.

(Then, a related issue: the new room complicates wine service. This may or may not have been the idea. After all, the more a server can discuss wine selections with you, the more opportunity he or she has to sell you something more ambitious. But if a screamingly busy restaurant like Le Verre Volé has no official wine list, and if the bottles on the walls are mostly empty and bear little or no relation to actual stock, and if furthermore half the guests are seated in a side area where no bottles are visible without resorting to a tedious obtrusive ramble through the crowded front dining room, then I'm sorry but the dream of loquacious upselling has to go out the fenêtre.)

The unadulterated good news is: the kitchen still rocks.

the saga continues: twin peaks & pouilly-fuissé

In keeping with the series' theme of split personalities (or "parallel identities," as Lynch has described them), with Twin Peaks this week the Native Companion and I shared a Mâconnais wine pretty much diametrically opposed to last week's heavenly St. Véran: a self-consciously classic Pouilly-Fuissé from the classic vintage of 2005, by the relatively large, widely lauded Domaine du Chalet Pouilly.

Diametrically opposed, I should say, in all realms but overall quality. Where the Perrauds' wine from last week was sulfite-free and so alive it seemed to swoon around the room, DduCP's Pouilly-Fuissé, while not lacking in personality, is a much more precise, educated creation - sort of a Special Agent Dale Cooper kind of wine.