A Letter from Paris

For a wine lover, a journey to France is a pilgrimage. Despite the development of a thriving wine industry in the United States, it’s a widely held view among wine lovers that France remains the nexus of all things wine and my December voyage did nothing to dissuade me from that view. It rained nearly every day but that only served to give the City of Lights a bit of a glow, and fueled my quest for wine breaks in the midst of chilly perambulations through museums, parks and ancient neighborhoods

It may be obvious, but it’s still worth stating that in France wine is not an end in and of itself, it’s inextricably linked with food, with each serving as a vehicle for enjoying the other. You notice this everywhere in the city beginning with the number of wines by the glass (and the pichet, the small pitcher in the photo that’s more rustic and bistro-like than a carafe) at even the humblest of restaurants. There is nothing in Paris approaching the craft beer movement that is sweeping the US, but there is a much saner approach to wine. It’s part of every meal and it’s meant to be enjoyed.

That means every restaurant except the stuffiest outposts of French cuisine have wines covering a broad range of prices. In the US, most restaurants seem to see wine as a necessary evil. Unwilling to admit how expensive their food really is, they keep menu prices low and subsidize their operations by pricing wine at three to four times the wholesale cost.  This makes it difficult for most American restaurants to offer a good selection of lower priced quality wines by the bottle or by the glass. In contrast, Paris bistros generally offer a 50cl pichet (a ceramic pitcher holding two-thirds of a bottle) of a decent, regional wine for around 8 Euros (about $10 at today’s exchange rate). The glassware is usually forgettable but the wines often are memorable. I had a lovely Côtes-du-Rhone the other day with my steak and fries and the entire meal was less than $20.

Because Paris is not in the midst of any significant wine region, restaurants and bistros there tend to feature wines from throughout the country. Alsace, the Rhone, Languedoc, the Loire, Burgundy and Bordeaux were all represented by good regional wines at the spots I visited and other than the Alsatian wine, a pinot blanc, all were labeled only with their region of origin with no mention of a grape variety. In most cases the producer was unnamed on the menu as well – the restaurant put its own reputation behind the wine.

In addition to the regional wines that form the backbone of offerings at many bistros and popular restaurants, most restaurants also have a more extensive list of wines for sale by the bottle. At top restaurants the lists can be quite extensive and eclectic, but most restaurants in Paris stock primarily French wine. I went to dinner one evening at a widely acclaimed local hangout where the wine list (scrawled on a blackboard) offered 30 bottles, only one of which was not from France (it was from Chile). All of the wines were intriguing, and all were reasonably priced, with the average bottle selling for just a bit more than the average main course

Interestingly, the wines are invariably served at a good temperature – reds much cooler than we usually get them in the States and whites chilled but not freezing – they were usually about the same temperature as the air outside. In a week of dining, I was never offered an ice bucket – the assumption seemed to be that I’d finish the wine before it got too warm. Besides, most of the restaurants were too packed to offer space for an ice bucket. Few American wine servers have a clue about proper temperature and those that do report they get complaints from a customer if they offer a white wine without an ice bucket. Both consumers and servers need some education here.

And where do the French need some education? In the film A Good Year Marion Cotillard plays a bistro owner who lectures Russell Crowe on how to be a server. “Remember,” she says, “In France, the customer is always wrong.” I didn’t find anything quite that extreme but I did notice that in more than a dozen meals not once did a server or manager ask me how I enjoyed the food or the wine. I’m not sure it’s because they didn’t care, they just took it for granted that I’d like the food so why discuss it? That was true most of the time, but with a couple of meals perhaps they just didn’t want to hear about something that didn’t work. It does work most of the time in my experience, and France is still the ultimate destination for a wine lover who wants to restore a sense of proportion where wine is appreciated, even admired, and invariably kept in context as part of a meal.

I’ll have more thoughts from Paris next week
Santé,
Lyn