small victories : septime cave, 75011

Septime le resto, its relative informality notwithstanding, is a destination restaurant. One needs to plan ahead - not to mention budget, both time and money - to enter its almost-too-well-appointed walls and enjoy chef-owner Bertrand Grébaut's acclaimed market menu, which at dinner is offered only as a 55€ (before wine) "carte blanche" meal of at least five courses. One can't resent any of this: these are the hassles that attend high demand, and they're to be expected at any restaurant whose excellence is a match for its ambition.

But the resplendent success of Septime makes all the more laudable that Grébaut's new project, a wine bar-slash-wine shop catty-corner to the restaurant, is basically a shanty stocked with wine and some meat. It is heroically under-conceived. If Septime is the mothership, exerting a gravitational pull on diners citywide, Septime Cave is the dinghy : a little escape pod for tasteful rue de Charonne locals seeking a random weeknight tipple.

comic timing: twin peaks & arbois

One of the great frustrations of Twin Peaks' second season is that, despite sinking ratings and tangled, flailing plotlines leading to nowhere, the show still attracted significant guest talent. Two years before his X-Files breakthrough, David Duchovny shows up as a cross-dressing FBI Agent. And Diane Keaton as guest director on Episode 22 did her darnedest to find genuine wit and warmth in the rambling, silly, overwritten script she was handed. The episodes in general remain watchable partly due to the continued goodwill of the well-intentioned guest stars, most of whom gamely behave as though the show isn't peeling to bits around them.

The Native Companion and I shared a 2005 Arbois Chardonnay by renowned Jura winemaker Jacques Puffeney the other night with Season 2, and it was another case of unfortunate timing, just in the other direction. Where Keaton, Duchovny, et al* arrived too late to the Twin Peaks party, the NC and I possibly cracked this one open a few years too early.

eternal sad little life: wine by one, 75002

This futuristic style of wine retail always reminds me of the sex scenes in Woody Allen's Sleeper, where the participants enter a phone booth-like construction for a few seconds and promptly emerge looking disheveled and postcoital. What's missing is a certain physicality.

I was particularly saddened to see Nicolas Joly's gorgeous Coulée de Serrant cryogenically packed into one of these moron vaults, awaiting a decade until enough suckers passed through willing to drop 20eu (or thereabouts) on 10cl of wine in a Jetson-type environment. These wine IV-systems always promise eternal freshness. On the off chance that there's no such thing, the Coulée de Serrant, being a dense biodynamic beast of a Chenin, actually still has a good chance of remaining drinkable for the long haul. (Nicolas Joly extravagantly recommends drinking it over the course of a week, a glass per night. Like hell we will, Nick!) For the rest of the wines in this sad hypermodern little mortuary, I remain skeptical. 

The dude working at Wine By One actually asked me not to take photos, apparently because their architect is very concerned about someone ripping him off. More photos after the jump!