Sideways

Sorry for the detour off the continent over the last few posts. Back to France.

I spent Saturday at the Salon Vins de Terroir in Vincennes with my friend A.L. and a bunch of his French pals. These “salons” come through Paris every few months. Around 100 vignerons, as well as several cheese and sausage makers, set up stands in a pavilion to show off the products of their regions. At Saturday’s salon, there were wine producers from every region in France: Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône, Burgundy, Loire, etc.

It’s difficult to keep French wines straight: they are highly regulated, and labeling requirements are mind-boggling. Most unhelpful is the fact that the grape variety used to make the wine is rarely displayed on the label. Most prominent on the label are geographical clues: region, village, and estate. This helps, because certain regions are told which varieties they can and cannot grow; however, the variety of grape can vary within a region by village or even the specific estate making the wine.

Further complicating things is the Appellation Contrôlée system. It’s supposed to clue you into the quality of the wine. At the bottom is vin de table, which is not heavily regulated and hence considered to be of low quality. Next are the vins de pays, which are tied to certain grape varieties, production methods, and regions. Next is vin délimité de qualité supérieure, followed by the most strictly regulated wines, Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC).

In the U.S., you can pretty much get by just remembering which grapes you like. In France, you have three options to help you remember which wines you like best and which bottles are sympa with which dishes. One, a really good memory for taste. Two, a comprehensive French wine guide. Three, wine tastings, or, as they are called here, les dégustations.

At a salon du vin, you can really get an idea of which bottles you like. Every region and many villages are represented. We spent about 15 minutes at each table we visited. The vignerons would pour us the newest vintage of a particular bottle, then move back through the years, sometimes as far back as 1996. (A St. Emilion producer poured a mystery bottle and asked us to guess the year. It was a 1989, and one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted.) Then they would do the same with another wine.

I realized just how much these people care about wine about halfway into the evening. I had been chatting for about 10 minutes with Christopher Lacaille, a very friendly Beaujolais winemaker who had lived in the States for a while. I had just asked him a question, which he was eagerly answering, when a woman behind me dropped a box of wine bottles. Everything stopped. Before I realized he had stopped talking, Christopher was practically jumping over his table, the jovial winemaker now a solemn first responder. Judging by the look on his face, you’d think a child had fallen out of a third story window. As he gently wiped up the wine that was oozing out of the box, the other vignerons gathered around to support him. It felt like someone was being administered last rites.

Later in the night, as the producers were closing up their displays and the customers—magenta strokes of crusty “wine lipstick” dotting their lips—were stumbling out of the pavilion, I stopped in front of a table to rearrange my bags and make the bottle-hauling a little less awkward. An older French woman, who was on her way back to this table, decided to help me out. She was probably in her late 50s, but made up to look considerably younger. “Oh, monsieur!” she giggled, with a slight slur. In an unsteady and flirtatious voice, she told me that she was going to fix all my bottles up in a nice box. For some reason, this process involved evil grins, sotto voce chuckling, and leaning into me. “Madame Robicheaux, you’re trying to seduce me. N’est-ce pas?”

Finally, after going through half a roll of masking tape, my jerry rigged carrying case was finished. The handle lasted about halfway to the metro. Fortunately, I was holding the box as low to the ground as possible--thanks to the advice from a stranger at the salon who had seen me carrying a bag of wine bottles at waist level--so nothing broke.

Later, I joined A.L. and his copains at his little studio by Pere Lachaise. We were a bit tipsy by this point. A.L. cooked chicken in a garlic, butter, and crème fraîche sauce, while the rest of us polished off his new bottle of 2004 Sauvignon. We spent the rest of the night noshing, drinking red wine, cracking cheesy jokes, listening to Husker Du, and watching old Depeche Mode and KMFDM videos on his computer. It was just like high school, except we had replaced the Doritos and Boone’s Farm with crème fraîche and Bordeaux.