paris wine company launch

My good friend and frequent travel companion Josh Adler is launching a company that ships wine from France to private clients the USA. He's called it Paris Wine Company, a name I initially hated but which has grown on me slightly since. Unbelievably, the domaine name wasn't already taken, possibly having been passed over as too faceless or ill-targeted. (Pets dot com, anyone?)

Parisians sure won't be buying much wine from him. Parisians by and large don't spend any serious money on wine, and the few that do don't seem to purchase from anyone they haven't known for generations. Josh will mainly be shipping to our fellow Americans, in an importer-distributor-wineseller circumvention that has already teed off several other industry friends. What's good news for private wine clients, these industry friends argue, is bad news for them and the industry they serve.

I can see both sides of the argument. I delve into them after the jump. But the occasion for this post wasn't soul-searching on my part. It was to mention - all philosophical qualms ceding precedence to friendship - that Paris Wine Company is launching tomorrow, July 6th, with a tasting / party at Verjus Wine Bar (75001) at 2pm, featuring superb Angevin vignerons Nicolas Bertin & Genevieve Delatte and Kenji & Mai Hodgson.

sophie brissaud & sauternes at spring boutique, 75001

Writing about the wines of Bordeaux, I feel perennially obliged, before airing opinions, to quote Plato's Socrates, who said, 'If I know one thing, it is that I know nothing.'

My experience with the greats of the region is more or less reflective of my interest in them. Not that I'd ever turn down a glass of Petrus or what-have-you. But with such a teeming diversity of fascinating wines from less commercialised regions all much more readily available for study, it rarely seems with the effort involved to approach Bordeaux. There's a velvet rope of pure hassle and expense around the good stuff: purchasing it is out of the question, and most tastings that present it - especially the public tastings - are insufferably stuffy and boorish affairs, quite far removed from the "dudes hanging out with bottles" template of the most enjoyable tastings.

It's a happy coincidence that the wines of Bordeaux I find most interesting from an aesthetic standpoint - white Bordeaux and Sauternes - are in general slightly more approachable. Good examples of both wines present unique, opulent flavor profiles found nowhere else in wine, but with the exceptions of Château d'Yquem and Haut-Brion, neither wine category receives anywhere near the attention of the region's reds. One encounters the opposite problem: rarely finding the wines, let alone several at once to facilitate comparison. So when I learned my friend the prolific food writer Sophie Brissaud was to lead a tasting of Sauternes at Spring Boutique last winter, I found myself, for once, genuinely exciting about a Bordeaux tasting.

monk time: julien guillot at quedubon, 75019

Much of the natural wine I rave about on this blog is arguably the result of vignerons' efforts to recall  - under whatever banner, organic or natural or biodynamic - preindustrial viticultural traditions: practices whose logic was necessarily dictated less by market demand for a consistent recognizable product, than by local tastes, and the particularities of the regional environment. 

That wines made with these ideals in mind often show so exciting and fresh and new - that they occasion strange scaremongering newspaper articles in nations so close, at least geographically, as England - is testament not to their actual newness, but to how drastically the product we call wine has changed since it encountered the global marketplace. 

At 19ème natural wine bistro Quedubon's recent "Vivent les Vins" tasting, I was pretty enthralled by the bracing Mâcon wines of Julien Guillot of Domaine des Vignes du Maynes, whose oddity "Cuvée 910" bottling in particular seems to demonstrate the potential - both for quality, and for surprise - of the old ways. 

day brightener: domaine du picatier at quedubon, 75019

Paris' natural wine scene, like any subculture, can get a bit repetitive. I've been in town just two quick years, and already I find few new discoveries at a public tasting like the one held at 19ème bistro Quedubon the other Sunday, entitled "Vivant Les Vins!"  The wines themselves are familiar, if not from the similar line-up Quedubon proprietor Gilles Bernard hosted last year, then from other tastings and dinners around town since then. And the vignerons, cavistes, restaurant staff, and so forth who reliably appear at these things comprise a cast of a hundred or so, no more.

At times it can seem like all that's changed is the vintage. Which, in the case of the entry level wines of reliably good natural winemakers,* does not always imply a markedly new wine. Another slightly oxidative Chenin, eh? More bright Gamay, more Grolleau? No kidding.

It was heartening, then, to encounter at Quedubon that day the surprisingly solid, opinion-reversing red cuvées of Côte Roannaise estate Domaine du Picatier, which fall under the heading of Things I Thought I Knew But Did Not.

oh man, where do i sign up?

In honor of the lamentably hilarious death of owner of the Segway company, who piloted his self-balancing scooter off a cliff, I thought I'd mention a relevant Paris attraction I discovered in the course of unrelated research for this blog: Segway wine tours.

You know how Segways always seem out of place, no matter where they are? Just imagine a fleet of them steered by tipsy tourists, knocking over racks and bottles, breaking glasses, running over pedestrians... An experience no one could ever forget.

I'm seriously in awe of whoever thought of this. Also I just had a good idea for my next birthday party.