Not Paris ! Barcelona ! To mitigate the drop in readership that occurs whenever I begin talking about cities other than Paris, I've gotten into the habit of spacing out such posts with Paris coverage. But this has the unfortunate effect of exacerbating what is already a journalistically unfathomable delay between travel experiences and blogging about them...
Anyway, in Barcelona last November on the recommendation of my friend César from Terroir Santo Domingo Imports I visited L'Anima del Vi, Barcelona's only natural wine shop (as far as I know), founded and run since 2006 by Benoît Valée, a Frenchman who hails - if I remember correctly - from the south-west somewhere.
The shop is a pleasantly scrappy space, painted green and red, furnished with cinderblocks and boxes. The ceiling descends over the register area, an unfortunate architectural feature that has the effect of making anyone positioned there seem to be lurking or brooding. Weirdly, when R and I passed by, there was just one other customer, and by enormous coincidence she happened to be another Unspecified International Wine Industry Media Person. I got self-conscious - it felt redundant to ask a round of semi-standard blogger-questions that the person standing next to me had presumably just asked. So R and I just nosed around, got a couple reccommendations, and before we left for lunch I bought a few treasures to lug back for the Native Companion, most notably a zero-sulfur artisanal vermouth by Casa Pardet in the Costers del Segre DO.
