jean-luc poinsot (la badiane) tasting: le garde robe, 75001

Z, P, et M. Poinsot

On the night we attended last week's Jean-Luc Poinsot tasting at Le Garde Robe, my New Zealander friend Z informed me she had an "unusual surprise" for me. I assumed the surprise was simply that her excellent, occasionally somewhat reclusive husband P was actually going to join us for once. (P designs for Lanvin and is accordingly perpetually swamped with work.)

Although P did indeed end up joining us, it turns out she had been referring instead to a small green guava-like fruit called a feijoa, which she had been delighted to find at a market here in France, and which she placed in my hand and told me to eat later.

According to Z, everyone in New Zealand has a tree just bursting with feijoa in their back yards. I've yet to eat the thing - it seemed unripe so it's still sitting on my desk - but I really appreciated the gesture, since, as perhaps Z noticed, the guiding philosophy of what I drink and how I eat and this blog as a whole is essentially just a reverence for the native peculiarities of any given region. I'd never even heard of a feijoa.*

Anyway, all this is long preamble to why I dig Jean-Luc Poinsot's wines (thus, why me and Z and P were out that night in the first place). His strong, distinctive range could come from nowhere else on earth but  Provence - the first proof being the winemaker's exclusive use of local varietals, like the strange, scented candle-y Tibouren rosé I covered in a previous post.

follow your nose: au nouveau nez, 75011

In a perfect world - one with no shortage of material, and natural wine available everywhere - I would decline to post anything about Au Nouveau Nez, the blip-sized little cave à grignoter in my neighborhood, because doing so only increases the chances that, when I next stop by seeking a divine St. Véran and a plate of charcuterie, both tables will be occupied. There are only two tables. (If you read this and subsequently crowd the joint, you have to let me pull up a stool.)

I went there for what turned out to be a long apero with my British friend B the other day, and we lamented the impossibility of anything like Au Nouveau Nez ever turning up in London* in the near future. In London everything would require too much explanation, we reasoned. The fresh charcuterie and well-judged cheeses on offer, the slim selection of natural wines, the rotating what-ever-we-have glass pours - all these things would get fussed-over, exoticized, over-presented. There would be a coherent graphics package. Whereas in her tiny outpost in Paris' 11eme, the friendly and punctilious proprietress Nadine serves everything rather comme il faut.

wine list playlist: talulah gosh + old vine grenache

For variety's sake, a little viscious lighthearted song I've been digging all summer. If this song were a wine, it would be a 2006 Vin de Pays de l'Ardeche called "Briand," by Domaine du Mazel, that I drank the other night at Le Dirigeable. Brisk, tart, and deep as a bagel-cut. Neither the wine nor the song is particularly fresh, since by the standards of inexpensive south-central French VdP 2006 might as well be the mid-eighties. Actually there is probably a wider metaphor to be proposed here, about the similar lifespans of pop songs and simple table wines. But then every so often a strange leftfield classic comes along, like this wine, like this song, both of which feel as fresh as the day they were composed.  The wine is an old-vine Grenache and the song is Talulah Gosh.

Image swiped from vin-bio-naturel.fr.