not drinking poison in paris

In writing about the generation of young Anjou vignerons I've come to call the Angevin Clan, my chronology has inadvertently worked against central figures Nicolas Bertin and Geneviève Delatte of Domaine Bertin-Delatte. They're the last of the clan to be discussed, when in fact it was Delatte who introduced my friends and me to Cédric Garreau, and it was at Bertin and Delatte's unfinished house that we all gathered for lunch after tasting with Garreau and Kenji and Mai Hodgson.

Having founded their 3ha estate in 2008, Bertin and Delatte have a few years more experience than the other vignerons at the lunch table that day. But Bertin only gave up his part-time job tending vines for nearby estate Domaine Pierre Chauvin the week before we visited. (Cedric Garreau, for his part, still does vineyard work for other estates to make ends meet.) Bertin may have encapsulated the challenges facing a young vigneron in the Coteaux de Layon when we asked him whether he'd ever tried his hand at making the region's eponymous sweet wine: No, he said, because he doesn't like drinking it, it's hard to make, and it's hard to sell.

Bertin and Delatte make just one wine in any appreciable quantity: L'Echalier, a mostly young-vine dry Chenin that, I was to realise over lunch that day, I had always been drinking too young. Can I be blamed ? It's what one usually does with young-vine Chenin in that price point. How was I to know, before meeting and tasting with the winemakers, that "L'Echalier" positively blooms in the bottle after two years?

Before lunch we various parcels from barrel in the winemakers' newly constructed cellars. Most interesting was a parcel called "Clos des Noels," whose 84yr old Chenin vines are interplanted with Grolleau Noir and bits of Bacco. The red component in the white wine seemed to manifest itself in a savoury tannicity atop the wine's bedrock minerality.

Interesting in a more euphemistic way was Bertin's first experiment with Sauvignon, which he says he harvested too late. Additionally fermentation stuck before completion, yielding a lozenge-y wine with 30-40g residual sugar. (Ironically, something suggesting the sort of wine he says he can't drink, can't make, can't sell...)

It honestly wasn't until we tasted a vertical of L'Echalier at lunch that I grew excited about Bertin-Delatte's wines. With an estate this young, of course, the vertical was only four years / wines long. 2011 and 2010 tasted quite a bit as I remembered them tasting from bottles I'd consumed in Paris: tight, clean, lean Chenin, citrus-pithy and concentrated. I remember liking the wine well enough, but mainly as an alternative to what even then was beginning to seem like a tidal wave of sloppy oxidative natural Chenins in Paris bistrots and wine shops.

2009, at 14.8º, showed the hallmark of its warm vintage. But throughout the ripe peach fruit ran a Jasnières-like skein of acid keeping everything taut and in balance.

The nose of 2008, meanwhile, was markedly more expressive than the other vintages. It was like something had internally snapped into focus, and voilà, stone fruits and rainfall and lemon zest. The wine was neon-bright and urgent, having apparently aged the way Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes once said he'd like to : just going faster and faster with ever greater enthusiasm and energy.

In the grand scheme of things, waiting four years for a wine to show tremendous secondary improvement is kind of an eyeblink. And that Bertin and Delatte achieved such a wine in their first vintage deserves major applause. It would, unfortunately, surprise me if anyone besides the vignerons themselves had been cellaring their first vintage of Vin de France Chenin. The grape, belying the magnificent ageless heights it routinely reaches, is prone to oxidation, and my impression is that in the realm of natural wine Chenin is often produced with more enthusiasm than skill.

Bertin-Delatte also make hands-down the best cheap Chenin pétillant naturel I've ever had, the pristine, green-pear, razor fine "Pop Sec."

Whereas what struck me about tasting the "L'Echalier" Chenins together was their sense of purpose and of planning - the sense that Bertin and Delatte have thought hard about how to do something subtly ambitious with an undervalued terroir known mainly for unsellable sweet wines. In the same way that Ghostface Killah, later widely acknowledged to be the Wu's most consistently original member, initially waited several years to drop his debut solo effort, instead guesting on almost all of the Raekwon classic Only Built For Cuban Linxfirst, Bertin-Delatte's "L'Echalier" is a quiet-storm of a Chenin, a minor groundbreaker waiting to reveal itself.

Nicolas Bertin et Geneviève Delatte
Allée des sablonettes
49750 RABLAY-SUR-LAYON
Tel: 06 87 26 03 00 / 06 74 53 09 09

Related Links:

An offer of Domaine Bertin-Delatte's wines at my friend Josh Adler's site, ParisWineCompany. (Free registration required.)

Angevin Clan Pt. 1: Mai & Kenji Hodgson, Rablay-sur-Layon
Angevin Clan Pt. 2: Cedric Garreau / Gar'O'Vins, Chanzeaux

In researching this piece I was amused to note that among the first search results on the subject of oxidative Chenin is my friend Thor Iverson complaining in great detail about various bottles at OenoLogic.

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.

So, the industry position asserts that grey market wine sales - by which I mean anyone working around the traditional US importer-distributor-retail or importer-retail model (Paris Wine Co. or various other agents and dealers operating in a similar way) - hurt the vignerons and the people who sell their wine by disturbing the balance of the US wine market. Allowing certain private clients access to wines at import prices theoretically makes the same wines harder to sell in larger volumes to restaurants and retailers. I can sympathise with this point, not because I feel like the existing network of importers are a bunch of pioneer-saints who have struggled selflessly their whole lives to bring us good wine for cheap, but because I and most of the people I know have always purchased wine via restaurants and retailers. We were / are too poor or space-deprived to purchase wine by the caseload, which is what Paris Wine Company offers.

So if the estates working with Paris Wine Company were to lose their traditional distribution entirely, I would consider that a bad thing, because it would mean their wines would become inaccessible to common consumers like myself. It would also mean that those estates would lose the wide exposure that comes with traditional distibution systems, an unsalutary development in the long run. I'm reminded of a lunch in Serralunga d'Alba where we encountered a British importer who had exclusive contracts on the wines of numerous great Barolo producers, Cavalotto among them. He declared that he never sold to restaurants or retailers, because it was a hassle and they never paid on time. As I wrote at the time:

It would seem to me that a market structured that way would make the experience of many fine wines essentially inaccessible to all but the über-rich. You would then have a market in which the mass discourse about wine is fundamentally stunted, i.e. Britain.

But it would seem to me that one's acceptance of grey-market or domaine-direct wine sales is dependant upon one's optimism about the industry as it stands in the US. It could be argued that, given the relatively low proportion of wine consumers who actively troll the internet looking for deals and ordering wine for delivery later in the year with the intention of cellaring it for years, domaine-direct sellers like Paris Wine Company will have little effect on the traditional retail model. Ambitious wine collectors can order it one way (at a computer), and ordinary consumers can order it another (at a table in a restaurant, or at a wine shop counter), and the twain won't likely meet too often.

It does admittedly become trickier on the importer-distributor side if wine buyers for restaurants and retailers also turn to domaine-direct purchasing. While this happens to some extent already, it's worth considering the potential consequences of a large-scale decentralisation of the wine distribution market. Prices would fluctuate more; it would become a more burdensome administrative task for restaurants and retailers to stock wine (as they'd have to deal with many more suppliers); vignerons themselves would face greater uncertainty from vintage to vintage, as traditional allocation methods would be somewhat scrambled. Not an ideal situation at all, but arguably one to which the industry will have to adapt sooner or later, given the looming predominance of e-commerce in most commercial spheres, wine included.

Anyway, ambivalence is where I stand on that. I have seen the future and it is murky.

But there are several key services that Adler will be providing that strike me as more benign. Paris Wine Company seems fine as an initial distribution method for young or newly-installed domaines who don't yet produce enough wine to have any significant bargaining power with major importers and distibutors. (Vins Hodgson and Bertin-Delatte both fall into this category.) Adler makes informative promotional videos with many of the vignerons he works with, which helps compensate for the lack of traditional exposure. Additionally, PWC will offer clients stateside shipping on wine, whether or not its PWC's wine. For any wine afficionado passing through Paris this is a supremely useful service that most of the city's big-fish retailers don't offer, let alone the minnow-scale cavistes I prefer to patronise.

July 6th, 2013: 14h-18h: Paris Wine Company Lauch Party, featuring Vins Hodgson and Bertin-Delatte

Verjus Wine Bar
52, rue de Richelieu
75001 PARIS
Métro: Palais-Royale or Pyramides
Tel: 01 42 97 54 40

Related Links:

Angevin Clan pt. 1: Vins Hodgson
Angevin Clan pt. 3: Bertin-Delatte

As preamble to what I'm about to say about new 11ème wine bar Touller Outillage, I thought I'd introduce readers to its surrounding Parmentier neighborhood, where I've been living for the past four years.

Two parallel roads descend southwest from Menilmontant, one of which, rue Oberkampf, I've previously described as "a waterslide of vomit" until it hits métro Parmentier. There are student bars, concert venues, dire nightclubs, and leery downmarket bistrots straight out of a Jeunet film. The other road, rue Jean Pierre Timbaud, is first occupied by a mosque and the related Islamo-paraphernalia industry, arrayed around a dusty pigeon-painted public square; but southwest of this pious interlude the road resumes the habits of its neighbor and becomes a debaucherous slag-heap of strong beer and kebabs. Bisecting these two roads is rue Saint Maur, a nice enough road further south-east, but one which along this particular stretch houses both a miniature skee-ball hall and a deserted bar themed around race-car simulators.

When diners, both Parisian and international, complain, with certain justification, that natural wine has become a trendy luxury, they are most certainly not referring to my neighborhood or my street. Which is why I take it as a salutary development - a sign that natural wine is reaching new audiences - when Said Messous, owner of Jean Pierre Timbaud nightclub L'Alimentation Generale, reveals himself to be a closet natural wine fan, and helps his cousin Farid Meza open a roomy, egalitarian, helplessly unhip wine bar like Touller Outillage right next door.

Messous also owns natural wine pizza joint le Bar du Marché in Montreuil, so he's been down this road before. But Meza, the actual owner of Touller Outillage, is by his own admission not really a fan of natural wine. ("I'm more a fan of strong alcohol," he joked, when I asked him how it came to be that Touller Outillage had a natural wine list.)

Presumably one can thank Messous for Touller Outillage's wine list's less-than-obvious delights, like my friend François Blanchard's fearsomely exotic unsulfured Sauvignons, and organic Jura vigneron Henri Le Roy's superb, refined Côtes du Jura bottlings. Wines at Touller Outillage are very approachably priced, though at this stage it's difficult to discern whether this reflects a desire to make natural wine approachable to people who've never tried it, or rather just the usual bait-and-switch limited-time low pricing most Paris restaurants engage in when they open.

The extremely nice staff at Touller Outillage have little idea what they're serving. This is to be expected, since asking a knowledgeable wine guy to work on JP Timbaud would be like asking a marine biologist to sell goldfish in a strip mall. But the welcome one receives at Touller Outillage is genuine, and the staff are earnest enough to offer numerous tasting pours for comparison, in lieu of being able to explain the wines.

Food is simplistic and serviceable, with the menu looking more than a little bit like a dumbed-down version of what they offer at Aux Deux Amis, the ragingly successful wine bar located just southwest of métro Parmentier, where rue Oberkampf encounters civilisation.

There's an edible tortilla; a healthy portion of pleasantly piquant marinated anchovies; tinned-looking mussels in tomato sauce; and some very bad octopus the texture and flavor of packing material.

Happily staples like rillettes and saucisson and cheeses are of perfectly enjoyable quality.

You can find the same things everywhere, in Paris, yes ; and by all means the menu and the wines and the crowd are all more beautiful at Aux Deux Amis down the road. But what Touller Outillage presently offers, which I find tremendously useful, is an escape from all that: a place far from flash-worthy food and waitlists and warfare for barspace, where one can just roll in and share a bottle of quality wine. Touller Outillage is perhaps a few months ahead of its time in the neighborhood: at time of writing, it's almost as dead as the racing-car simulator bar. My friends and I were a walk-in eight-top on a Saturday night, a proposition that would be a punchline in most other Paris natural wine spots.

On that occasion we shared several bottles of the aforementioned wine of Henri Le Roy, whose Côte du Jura, I gather, only begun really raising eyebrows in 2010. His style is on the safer, more precise and market-friendly side of natural, and his estate in still in the process of conversion to organic viticulture. The 2008 "En Griffez," from an old Chardonnay vineyard containing some vines of up to 100 years, tastes somehow transitional, savoury and stolid, satisfying but short on grace notes.

The 2010 "Derrière La Roche," however, hailing from a tiny vineyard of 50yr old vines of a Jurassien Chardonnay variant called Melon à Queue Rouge, positively shines with polished minerality, stone fruit, and the regional yeast-memory, a flavour between smoke and laundry and pecorino sardo that even marks many of the region's non-sous voile wines.

Given that the ownership is plainly unconcerned with natural wine or wine in general, it seems uncertain that Touller Outillage will remain a serviceable destination for the stuff.

But I can't help feeling that natural wine - the whole fractured, cliquey, hazily-defined idea of it - needs more bars like Touller Outillage. It's unhealthy for the idea of natural wine if we only encounter it at self-consciously chic restaurants, if all we remember of wine at a meal is how much we overpaid for Prieure Roch Gamay or Ganevat's "J'en Veux," or any other vin de soif presently fetching absurd prices in Paris and abroad. Whereas forthrightly plebian bars like Touller Outillage and Thierry Breton's recently-opened La Pointe du Groin in the 10ème represent the home front in the ideological conflict for the future of wine in France. Foodies, tourists, Anglophone wine writers: these are not the hearts and minds anyone needs to win, as we're by definition a fairly open-minded audience, delighted by new things.

The natives in my neighborhood, on the other hand, might need some cajoling to let go of Kronenberg and Franprix Côte du Rhône. No one's going to hold their hand at Aux Deux Amis, Le Chateaubriand, Le Dauphin, or any other already-famous place with zero customer service. Enter Touller Outillage, which, for all its clumsiness, is as good a place as any to discover natural wine.

Touller Outillage
68 rue Jean Pierre Timbaud
75011 Paris
Métro: Parmentier
Tel: 01 43 57 80 14

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Related Links:

Aux Deux Amis, 75011

Chair de Poule, 75011: another pokey natural wine place in my neighborhood, but one which, sadly, has really gone downhill since I wrote about it.

Cave Fervéré, 75011: My friend Olivier's extremely casual but more or less reliable bistrot, right nearby.

La Pointe du Groin, 75010: A groundbreaking new pokey wine bar by Thierry Breton.

Good or bad, a meal never quite gets replicated, because too many variables are in play. Menus change, weather shifts, vintages turn, staff move on, tables break, bars get worn, hype evaporates - and so on. In Paris, where even basic hospitality remains touchingly uncommodified, restaurants are even more protean than the norm, with the quality of a meal often coming to depend overwhelmingly on whether one's server feels chipper on a given day. A critic's challenge is to arrive at conclusions that apply to more than one experience.

The most challenging subject, therefore, is a restaurant that unceasingly challenges itself. My friend James Henry's new-ish place Bones is one of these. Tucked on a side street off métro Voltaire, the northernmost border of the culinary renaissance currently occurring in the Faidherbe-Charonne area (Septime, Le Six Paul Bert, Rino, etc.), Bones was a barnstorming success from the get-go. I could have raved about the meal I had there back in January, a tour-de-force that crested with an unforgettable dessert of fresh almonds, coffee mousse, goat yogurt sorbet, and lemon. But had I done so I couldn't have reported simultaneously on the subsequent expansion of the bar menu far beyond pulled-pork sandwiches; the restaurant's brief flirtation withà la carte service; and the flourishing of its by-the-glass list, which bests most restaurants in Paris in both breadth and quality.

I also would have missed the steady improvement in Henry's bread-making skills. He has good reason to want his bread to succeed: as Americans are to scrambled eggs, so are the French to bread, a subject on which even the dullest nitwits feel entitled to nitpick. When one sits down to dine at Bones, one is treated to a hat trick of forcefully flavourful house-made products - charcuterie, butter, and the bread - that serve as a kind of clarion, a wake-up call to any guests who, perhaps on the basis of Bones' bare décor, were expecting a simple bistrot meal.

Enough can't be made of the wonderful irony that to create Bones - by any measure, among Paris' most ambitious restaurants - Henry partnered with the owners of Au Passage, his former employers, some very chill guys with whom he'd helped create the latter groundbreaking restaurant almost by accident. They had intended to open a simple wine bar, probably in line with numerous other dirt-simple establishments they own or co-own around town. (L'International, Populettes, L'Orillon, etc.) Henry had intended to leave France. He thought he'd help them set up the kitchen first...

East Paris is richer for having kept Henry. I have little criticism to offer of the kitchen at Bones. What comes out of it is almost uniformly superb: from smoked oysters, to scallops with horseradish, urchin and nuts, to duck with burdock, onions, and heliantis.

Oddly, for a restaurant whose name evokes a charnel house, the majority of a meal at Bones is composed of fish and shellfish. My pescatarian friends from New York had no trouble whatsoever navigating the menu, which at time of writing is either four or five courses (depending on whether one takes cheese), not including amuse-bouche or occasional surprises from the kitchen.

Some Japanese friends I took to Bones on an other occasion seemed slightly less impressed, and it occurred to me that what Henry does to French cuisine is not totally dissimilar to certain delicate Japanese interpretations. (I ought to have taken those friends for steak frites at Bistrot Paul Bert.)

On yet another occasion I met a crowd of vegetarian friends at the bar, where they shared some asparagus and, probably at my behest, too much wine, and then promptly asked me, "So where can we go for dinner after this?"

Suffice it to say that Au Passage remains a better bet for anyone planning to stick to piles of beets and ricotta. Which is a shame for them, because from a social perspective, Bones' free-wheeling bar area offers perhaps the city's best overall vibe outside of Le Mary Celeste.

The natural wine list at Bones is respectable, and wine buyer Pierre Derrien has succeeded in getting admirable allocations of certain sought-after natural producers (Pfifferling, Ganevat, Cornelissen, etc.). Mark-ups are mostly fair for Bones' genre.

Derrien; Rousillon négociant Anne Paillet, chilling after a tasting at Le Six Paul Bert.

Derrien also deserves a lot of credit for actively expanding the list, pushing boundaries, and offering clients more than what they might otherwise demand. I hope he'll forgive me if I still suggest that the list at Bones could use slightly better oversight, more staff training, and faster service.

After all, I say that about every natural wine bistrot in Paris... In this case, I once paid too much for Domaine Belluard's entry-level Savoyard sparkler "Ayse" (which I suspect someone at the restaurant had confused for his superior and more expensive "Mont Blanc" sparkler, also from Ayse).

On two occasions (the second to verify the first) I got served a badly oxidised lot of Domaine Lambert's Chinon Blanc. On another occasion, on what I was told was among the restaurant's slowest nights since opening, the bottles of wine my party ordered at the bar were just plain forgotten, twice.

It's all run of the mill for Paris. But Bones' kitchen isn't, which makes for an uncomfortable disparity, if not so wide a disparity as at, say, Le Chateaubriand, where service is not only inept but somewhat cruel. The team at Bones are good guys.

And Derrien will tell you when something is showing well, as in the case of Frank Cornelissen's "Susucaru 5," a tense, wolfish skin-fermented Etna Rosato my friends and I drank in two seconds flat the other night.

So I forgot to take a picture. Sue me.

It might have been the heat. Bones, like almost every Paris restaurant, is defiantly un-air-conditioned, something I approve of in theory but detest when sitting through a six-course meal. The right bottle of rosé, at the right temperature, at the right time in a meal is a ray-of-God moment of pure nourishment. With the "Susucaru," I suspect it's also crucial have to have the right vintage at the very perfect time in its existence - in my experience the Sicily-based, Belgian-born winemaker's wines can be vexingly inconsistent and overpriced.

Cornelissen at a tasting at Le 104, circa 2010.

(For me, the white is a washout, the "Contadino" an occasionally rewarding crap-shoot, whereas the "Magma" is consistent in its inutility. I am almost never in the mood for anything that broody and supergravitational.)

I seem to order Cornelissen wines at Bones quite often, come to think of it. This is from a different occasion.

When the wines are on, though, they're on. The "Susucaru 5," corresponding to the 2012 vintage, was grippy and mineral, with curranty fruit and vitamin crunch and a majestic, pre-ordained sort of balance, like one of those Andy Goldsworthy rock sculptures, which are no less impressive for being fundamentally fleeting iterations of one great idea.

Bones
43 rue Godefroy Gavaignac
75011 PARIS
Métro: Voltaire
Tel: 09 80 75 32 08

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Related Links:

Au Passage, 75011

A note on Bones by Sarah Moroz at NYTimes T Magazine.
A terrific review of Bones by Alec Lobrano at HungryForParis. He and I seem to agree on everything except that almond-lemon-coffee dessert.

Vis à vis this howler of an article published earlier this month by Wall Street Journal wine critic Lettie Teague, I'm like the medieval juror who shows up late to court only to find the guilty defendant has already been executed. My work here seems to be done.

Teague's article was so journalistically bankrupt, however, and betrayed such an objectionable misunderstanding of the subject of wine in general, that I thought I might blow on the embers around the stake a bit before I return to my day job.

My few French readers might quite like my chief criticism : that Lettie Teague passed public judgment on an arguably French phenomenon without quoting any French people whatsoever. It's like asking Europeans to define barbecue, or brunch. The sources she quoted (full list presented in all its absurdity after the jump) seem to have been chosen at random, or perhaps in the course of research for unrelated articles. Teague's conclusion, after sampling no self-identified natural wines and speaking to precisely one person with more than a peripheral relationship to the scene (Alice Feiring), is that some wines considered natural taste good, others don't, but she doesn't want to hear about it either way. She just wants a nice beverage.

That this presents a rather narrow view of the role of wine critic is an understatement. It means approaching the subject as it is understood by the very least-informed of readers. Like the career of Sarah Palin, it represents total parity of expertise between authority and audience. Any lay writer could have pulled sources for a natural wine article from the same hat Teague used. Here they are, with Teague's own justifications for choosing them:

William James: "not only a famous philosopher, but a source of some pretty memorable quotes"
Alice Feiring: "a natural-wine authority"
Jared Brandt: "a well-regarded natural winemaker and proprietor of Donkey & Goat Winery in Berkeley, Calif."
Stu Smith: "of Smith-Madrone Winery in the Napa Valley," "[not] a natural grower by naturalist standards (which he rejects), though he, too, makes well-regarded wines."
Michael Andrews: "of the Natural Wine Co. in Brooklyn, N.Y."
An Unnamed Clerk: [at] "Wine Hut in Manhattan"
Charles Massoud: "of Paumanok Vineyards in Aquebogue, N.Y., who has researched the topic."
Andrew Chen: "of New York's Flatiron Wines & Spirits, another retailer specializing in natural wines."

Now, I've never lived in NYC. But from my perch in Paris, I'm still surprised she didn't think to consult Fifi Essome from Ten Bells, my friend Zev Rovine of Zev Rovine Selections, or the folks from Chambers Street Wine Merchants when writing about natural wine in NYC or the USA at large. It's unsurprising her sources gave her differing definitions of natural wine, because, who the hell are they ? Have they even heard of each other? The only common thread among them is they all work in the US wine industry.

That's the problem. As Feiring neatly summarised in her response to Teague's piece, the term "natural" as applied to wine originated in wine bars in Paris in the latter half of the 1980's. I'd argue that the term attained useful meaning, and largely still retains it, mainly in reference to the France's natural wine scene.

Only in France, thanks almost entirely to the influence of Jules Chauvet and Marcel Lapierre, does one encounter such a concentration of natural winemakers. Only in Paris are such a plethora of their wines available. Only in Paris do you have an entire generation of experienced buyers who throughout their careers have, incidentally or not, come to define natural wine : people like Michel Moulherat (formerly of La Cave de l'Insolite), Olivier Camus (Le Chapeau Melon), Philippe Pinoteau (Le Baratin), Pierre Jancou (ex-La Cremerie, ex-Racines, now Vivant), Cyril Bordarier (Le Verre Volé), Bertrand Auboyneau (Bistrot Paul Bert), Michael Lesmasle (Cru et Découvertes)...

Michel Moulherat

Ardêche natural winemaker Gerald Oustric; Michael Lemasle

Pierre Jancou

(This is to say nothing of the role of winemakers like Catherine Breton and Nicolas Joly and Thierry Puzelat, and writers like Sylvie Augereau, all of whom organise or have organised influential tastings that have played a major role in defining natural wine.)

The Renaissance des Appellations is one of at least three significant natural wine tastings held every January / February in the Loire.

Outside of France, winemakers working in a natural way might have a real use for charters and legally defined terms. In France, and particularly, Paris, the fundamental cliquiness of the scene operates as a system of mutual oversight.

In her article, Teague finds it problematic that natural wine "has a lot more to do with individual belief than it does with incontrovertible fact." But if a community of individuals, as cited above, all comes to believe similar things, then you arrive at a functional idiomatic definition, which I'd argue is the only non-disastrous way of defining natural wine. Once a definition becomes law, as in the case of the term "organic," the meaning is frozen is such a way as to permit large-scale abuse. After all, the only entities with financial wherewithal to influence the drafting of agricultural legislation are the ones who, not coincidentally, have the most incentive to want it watered down as much as possible.

Hence perhaps the easiest definition of natural wine: if you are stocked at the aforementioned Paris establishments, or demonstrably make wine much like the vignerons who are, you're making natural wine.

Gilles Bénard's annual natural wine tasting at Quedubon.

Of the wine Teague sampled in her survey of natural wine, precisely none are stocked in natural wine restaurants and wine shops in Paris. As she writes:

"I purchased 15 wines altogether, ranging from $15 to $40 a bottle, from France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the U.S."

That she would expect to find common "natural" traits between wines from such disparate places betrays a misunderstanding of natural winemaking as an ethos, perhaps even of terroir and the basics of wine appreciation. Natural winemaking is largely about not doing things, in order to let the nuances of terroir and vintage express themselves. As such there should be very few common "natural" traits between the natural wines of the US and of France. Shared traits would derive from specific viticultural or cellar practices, or basic varietal character. The wines could share something in spirit, or personality, but when those terms come into play, how can one reasonably complain about the vagueness of the term "natural"?

And if one were after a way to get at that spirit, that personality, wouldn't one simply taste self-identified "natural" wines beside conventionally made wines from neighboring domaines in the same vintages? Not the easiest tasting to organise, admittedly. You'd almost have to be, I don't know, the wine critic for a major mass-market publication or something.

There's still a teachable moment to be salvaged from Teague's dunder-headed fumbling in the world of US wine retail: is "natural" wine as useful a term when applied outside of the limited French market? In France when you enter a wine shop, you find mainly French wine, with a smattering of overpriced Italian, Spanish, and Greek wines thrown in for variety. In the USA, wherever Teague and those like her shop, one finds wines from all over the globe, presented in impressive scope and breadth. It seems understandable that, scattered in the latter retail setting, "natural" wines might seem a bit lonely and suspect.

To figure out what unites the wines of winemakers as disparate as Paolo Bea, Emmanuel Houillon, Eric Pfifferling, Claude Courtois, Elisabetta Foradori, Stefano Bellotti, and so on, one might have to read the labels, or do a little research. But that is not Teague's job, not how she sees it.

The idiomatic definition of natural wine - the one I personally apply, and the one I find most useful for explaining natural wine outside the context of France - is this: it is a spectrum with just-barely-more-than-organic wine at one end, and totally non-interventionist unsulfured biodynamic wine at the other end.

When I need to refer specifically to unsulfured wines, I just say "unsulfured," which is not so divisive a term as "natural" in the narrower, sulfur-free definition, and which has just one more syllable. (I'm aware that this puts me at odds with many of the self-identified natural winemakers I admire. But it seems relevant that with the exception of Vivant, all the Paris natural wine establishments I mentioned above stock some wines that see light sulfur addition at bottling.) I personally don't consider light sulfur addition at bottling too heretical or non-natural, though I sympathise with those who do and their beliefs don't frustrate me.

I just figure that the definition of natural wine, like the changeable, soulful, market-disoriented wines themselves, will necessarily have to remain somewhat fugitive.

Me, my friend D, and the remains of a bottle of 2000 Marcel Lapierre Morgon beside the river in Isle-sur-Serein recently.

Related Links:

Lettie Teague's original article in the WSJ.

A very diplomatic response to Teague by Alice Feiring at TheFeiringLine. Contains a great mini-history of natural wines in Paris - which, as discussed above, is in my view utterly critical to arriving at a useful definition of natural wine.

A thoughtful rebuttal to Lettie Teague at InsideItalianWineMerchants. The author brings up a helpful comparison to obscenity law : narrow definitions of anything only aid those seeking to abuse the wider, idiomatic definition.

A intelligent but slightly sneaky apologia for Teague's conclusions at Fermentation.

A hilariously restrained response to Teague's article at OrganicWineJournal. The author's point ? That all wineries espouse a philosophy, whether "natural" or not. This is true. But in regards to Teague's article it's a little like arguing that the First Amendment is okay because we all speak freely sometimes, not because it's a cornerstone of democracy or anything.

Hey, One-Percenter ! Ever wished to enjoy a simple French bistrot experience, only significantly nicer, at marginally greater cost ?

Haven't we all. I'm barely solvent, and still I routinely find myself wishing I could simply pay more for a civil experience in Paris. There's a cultural chasm in contemporary French restaurateurism, between the segment that whorishly lunges after money and modernity, and the rest, to whom the very idea of money is vaguely offensive, like a horse suggesting horse-riding to other horses.

The great thing about 8ème arrondissement power-bistrot Le Griffonnier is it's the sort of establishment one thinks must exist, and turns out, in fact, to exist : a place where politicians and bankers eat the same unimprovable French village staples as you do for lunch every day, only their plates arrive with a glistening side of wealth, by which I mean serious service and serious wine.

I read via ubiquitous endorser of almost-everything Gilles Pudlowski that the restaurant has been run for the last eight years by Cédric Duthilleul, a former hotélier. But it was my friend J who initially hipped me to Le Griffonnier's existence. I believe he discovered the place through a Burgundy dealer he works with. J's stand-alone description of a lunch at Le Griffonnier? "They have Clos Rougeard by the glass."

I was sold. Unfortunately the information was no longer current by the time I visited for a quasi-business lunch with my gallerist friend D. So instead as we perused the substantial, almost bargain-free wine list, we shared glasses of Benigné Joliet's 2006 Clos de la Perrière 1èr Cru, the renowned former Grand Cru of Fixin blanc.

It showed appreciably less wirey and briney than the time I tasted it two years ago at Les Itinéraires. Taking that as the lesson it probably was - only buy serious Burgundy by the bottle - we ordered a 2009 Savigny-Les-Beaune 1èr Cru from Bruno Clair, a reliably classic, widely-distributed Marsannay-la-Côte based producer, but one whom my wine director friend Taylor Parsons of the Mozza group in LA recently came back from a visit positively raving about.

This particular Savigny-les-Beaune withstood our raised expectations. It was handsomely feminine; with fullness and forthrightness to its refined raspberry-tart fruit. If it were a singer it would have been Eleanor Friedberger, who in her classic, 70's Asylum-style songwriting patiently wrings perfect nuance out of her limited, school-librarian range.

The menu at Le Griffonnier possesses a conservative froideur that I find absolutely majestic. It's a wave from the wrist from a balcony. No humour, no style, and no innovation - no need.

It's note-perfect uninventive cuisine for people who appreciate food but have no wish to dissect it or speak about it for hours, because there are other pressing issues at hand, such as money. The contemporary trend for minimalist menu design - the austere list of ingredients and commas - is mere preening next to a genuinely minimalist menu, where nothing need even be explained. What is a filet du boeuf ? What is celerie remoulade ? Get out.

The time other restaurants' service staffs spend explaining preparations or, more frequently, holding unhurried meteorological conversations with rose-vendors and passing strangers, Le Griffonnier's spend working, crisply and politely. The lunch D and I shared that day was gargantuan by our normal standards - aperitif entree plat fromage wine coffee - but it took no longer than usual, because we wasted no time attempting telekinesis with second courses or bottles of eau gazeuse. Things arrived. The bill did too, 180€ for two.

So anyway the good news is that to get a great lunch in Paris all you have to do is attend the best schools and go work for the Ministry of the Interior.

Le Griffonnier
8, rue des Saussaies
75008 PARIS
Métro: Miromesnil
Tel: 01 42 65 17 17

View Larger Map

Related Links:

An account of what seems to be a typically stunning meal at Le Griffonier at GillesPudlowski.

Another experience of Benigné Joliet's Clos de la Perrière, in 2011 at Les Itinéraires, 75005

Other great steaks in Paris:

Bistrot Paul Bert, 75011
Le Severo, 75014

I had a mildly embarrassing moment the other day at U Spuntinu, the colourful Corsican épicerie I've been frequenting for sandwiches lately. I walked in, ordered my warm omelet sandwich and tomato-and-brocciu salad as usual, paid, and left.

Then I walked back in, having resolved, finally, to purchase one of the many bottles of Corsican wine on offer so I could justifiably say something nice about the place on the blog. U Spuntinu is a mildly exotic and utterly unpretentious lunch takeaway destination operated in a highly-routinised kaizen fashion by a team of formidable Corsican ladies - and what's more, they stock the wines of actual reputable estates like Yves Leccia, Clos Nicrosi, and Domaine Giudicelli, among others. (Domaine Antoine Arena is notably absent.)

But then I said to hell with it and walked back out again, because really what is the deal with the abysmal price-quality ratio of Corsican wine in general.

U Spuntino's wines are not priced as kindly as their sandwiches, but it's not their fault. The uncompetitiveness of Corsican wine was something I noticed way back in 2006, when I was buying wine for an Italian restaurant in LA.

My list at the time was nominally entirely Italian, but I liked to stretch the definition slightly by including the wines of border regions, like San Marino (a micro-state contained in Italy), Slovenia, and Corsica. I bought Yves Leccia's and Antoine Arena's wines from Kermit Lynch, and, somewhat unsurprisingly, they didn't sell that well. Mainly because more characterful Vermentino could be found cheaper from Sardinia and even Liguria, and more characterful Sangiovese positively overflowed - also more cheaply - from Tuscany, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna.

I can't pretend to have done any in-depth research on the subject. I've never even been to Corsica. There are nonetheless a few factors I can think of that might explain the discrepancies in price and overall quality between the wines of Corsica and a vaguely comparable region like Sardinia.

Corsica is smaller and more mountainous, for one thing. There's no underestimating the effect of the landscape on the costs of cultivating vines.

There are presumably governmental factors. French labour law is famously constrictive. I'd be curious to see how labour costs compare between comparably-sized domaines on the Corsica and Sardinia. (Not that Corsica's administrative apparatus is reputed to be any less free-wheeling than Italy's.)

I also wonder whether cultural differences might explain certain personality differences in the two islands' wines. Are winemakers making wines with vastly different ideals in mind ? Am I the only one who finds Corsican wine overall to be significantly more rigid and uninspired, stylistically-speaking, than wines made from the same grapes in neighboring regions?

As far as I can tell, the only Corsican domaine with any significant presence in quality Paris restaurants is Domaine Antoine Arena, about whose wines I remain very much on the fence. Arena's Muscat de Cap Corse is, admittedly, fantastic - more agile and more pure-fruited than any other example I can remember tasting. But I hope I'll be forgiven if I suggest that the popularity of their dry whites and reds seems more related to the likability of the winemakers than to the wines themselves, which typically strike me as stolid and - yep - overpriced.

Anyway. U Spuntinu remains awesome, despite my reservations about the entire Corsican wine industry. For one thing, U Spuntino is the only place I've found near my office that serves take-out cheese omelets with fries, a universal hangover remedy.

Their sandwich selection is also noteworthy for containing relatively unusual ingredients - things like tomme de corse, the aforementioned brocciu (a ricotta-like lactose-free whey cheese made from sheep or goat milk), and anchoiade, an anchovy dip or spread akin to the Italian bagna cauda, only not hot.

But what's so winning about the fare at U Spuntinu, finally, is that it's not presented as exotic at all. The tomato and brocciu salad I dig so much is presented next to an array of biddy-ish pan-Française salads like celerie remoulade, carrottes rapés, pasta salads involving corn, etc. To complete the cultural clash, the place offers couscous on Thursdays. There's a line down the block.

I seem to remember one of the ladies who works there telling me the place has been owned by a man called Henry Ceccaldi for around for 30 years - which means they've been bending cultural conventions in their own small way since long before kim-chi tacos and David Chang's soft-serve.

U Spuntino

21, rue des Mathurins

75009 PARIS

Métro: Havre-Caumartin or Madeleine

Tel: 01 47 42 66 52

N.D.P. in Champagne: Aux Crieurs de Vin Bistrot, Troyes

N.D.P. in Champagne: Ayx Crieurs de Vin au Marché des Halles, Troyes

A good 2013 interview with Olivier Horiot about Rosé des Riceys at Louis/Dressner.

My chef friend G's last night in town the other evening unfortunately coincided with what you might call the Mariana Trench of August in Paris: that deep lightless ravine of restaurant closures across the city, occurring mid-month, where life as we know it cannot sustain itself.

We decided to go to chef Bruno Doucet's La Régelade Conservatoire, which had remained open because it is attached to a hotel. I'll put off any qualitative discussion of the meal for later, because I'd like to visit the other two influential Régalade locations (Saint Honoré and the original on ave. Jean-Moulin) before I go shooting off my mouth at length.

But one facet of the meal we had warrants individual attention. We were, without being asked, given English menus. For G this was fine, as he doesn't speak French. The problem was that, as it turned out, neither of us spoke the pidgin English of the translated menu, which was astoundingly misleading. We received dishes that bore little relation to what we'd ordered in English, and it was only when, mid-meal, I asked to see the French menu, that I saw what had gone wrong.

G had been curious seeing that an entree contained an ingredient called "cuttlefish water." It turned out to be your average squid ink, a fact which would have been readily apparent had I been looking at the French menu.

A "Cold duck and monkfish foie gras terrine" suffered from unclear wording. I'd expected a duck terrine involving monkfish liver. What arrived was instead an enormous hunk of duck foie gras separated by a sliver of monkfish liver. Again, this was only clear in the French, which notably didn't even include the word terrine: "Pressé de foie de lotte et foie gras de canard, tetragone."

Meanwhile a "poitrine de cochon," a self-proclaimed specialty of La Régalade, had insensibly been translated as "pork breast" rather than what is was, which is pork belly.

In all three cases, had we been shown the French menu, we would have ordered something else. Menus in Paris should either be in French alone, or French and English. I have never seen any Anglophones jump out of their skin at the mere sight of accent punctuation. Bilingual menus simply offer the opportunity for monolingual Anglophones to get less monolingual, at least at the dinner table.

I left the meal at La Régalade Conservatoire wondering on how earth it could it be possible no one involved in the translation of their menu was familiar with culinary English. It's forgivable and touching when one sees things like "leg of lamp" on a menu written in both French and English, as used to feature on 5ème bistrot Restaurant Christophe's menu. Or when, as I once saw on a menu in Annecy, "avocat" in a salad is translated as "lawyers."

But it's just mystifying, borderline perturbing, even, when mistranslation this bad occurs on monolingual menus offered automatically at a renowned chef's third location, particularly when said location is attached to a hotel serving mainly international clientele. Suppose they were to translate cacahouette as "bean," crévette as "necktie," or lait as "water of cow"? People could die.

Or what if they called an avocado a lawyer, and my family had been eaten by cannibals, and I were sworn to take revenge on restaurants whose menus include long-pigs - even lawyers?

It just goes to show you can never be too careful with menu translations.

Ever since moving to Paris I've found London frightful. I think this is because I've come to define quality of life in terms of short commutes and availability of good bread and wine.

It's also because London, despite technically existing in Europe, gastronomically seems to comprise part of the big blank New World. Early industrialisation and the culinary privation of the last century's wars are two factors among many that have conspired to essentially delete the traditions binding the populace to native British cuisine, leaving Brits, like the average American, ahistorical, open to suggestion, lost in the supermarket. What I see when I visit restaurants in London, for the most part, is Manhattan: everything feels market-tested, branded to death, fat with investment - as though marketing execs and interior designers were more important to a restaurant than chefs and restaurateurs.

So, unlike seemingly every other press outlet, I won't congratulate Michael Greenwold, co-chef of 20ème market menu gem Roseval, and James Whelan, propietor of 10ème bar L'Inconnu, merely for bringing a little bit of London variety to Paris with the opening of Paris' first fish'n'chip shop, The Sunken Chip ! (Their exclamation point, not mine.) I find the concept chirpy to the point of being unsettling, and the décor could use roughing up and rethinking. I will instead congratulate Greenwold for coming up with a positively revelatory plate of fish'n'chips, several components of which are a benchmark for both cities, not just Paris.

Speaking of benches, the ones in The Sunken Chip are the most obstructive design idea since Richard Serra's Tilted Arc.

They seat 18 comfortably, or rather uncomfortably, since two couples will have to get up if the couple trapped against the wall needs to leave. The same number of guests could have been accommodated at moveable tables and chairs. Or better yet, they could have forced people to stand at high communal tables and counters along the wall, thereby encouraging take-away service and discouraging the scourge of small spaces in Paris, namely lingering Parisians.*

Other design missteps include the central neon take-away sign, which bathes everything in a Lynchian red glow and should be a different colour, and the open salt containers, which on the occasions I visited did not contain any serving spoons and instead probably contained traces of many other clients' greasy fingers. The collection of UK-nostalgia sodas (IRN-BRU, etc.) and candies are also constitute a sugar-high of twee frippery that ought to be edited down. One element like this is charming; nine is nauseating.

None of these things would jump out so jarringly if the rest of the restaurant weren't so clean and well-conceived. But they're the difference between durable décor, and the sort of décor that will look hokey as hell in five years' time, when the entire street is lined with "concepts."

The Sunken Chip's fish, sourced daily from a Breton fisherman and fine restaurant supplier called Thomas Sarraco, is impeccable. Of the three types I tried, the most impressive were the ugliest and least-invitingly named: "fish nuggets," which is The Sunken Chip's counter-intuitive way of selling monkfish cheek, the sôt-l'y laisse of the sea, savoured by every chef I know for its pliant delicacy. Who cares if it looks like something found in the fry-oil at the end of a shift?

The fries are serviceably crispy. Accompaniments of pickled eggs and pickled onions are both satisfying and pub-standard, only perceptibly cleaner, a quality which neither adds nor detracts from these staples.

Special mention must be made of the mushy peas, which are a striking kryptonite green and which taste even better than they look - nuanced, succulent, and persistent, with a long natural douceur. Superman, upon eating them, would die happy.

Prices are fair, with the notable exception that one must pay 1,50€ for tartar sauce. I don't expect this practice will last long. Another recently-launched Paris fast food concept, Frédéric Penetheau's Grillé, has already abandoned its initial demand of ,30€ for ketchup. Everyone understands a restaurant must pay the bills. But it's never worth the PR hassle of demanding chump-change for condiments.

The Sunken Chip serves just two beers, one superb and one quite bad. Anthony Martin's Pale Ale is a high-toned wholesome Belgian-brewed marvel of its type, a generous malty brushstroke with an eyebrow-raising floral finish.

The other is Gallia, one of two Paris-branded beers launched in the last few years, and by far the worse. It barely registers on the palate as beer. That such a flavourless and imbalanced product has achieved any market presence whatsoever is a testament to the branding power of the city of Paris.

I am, admittedly, friends with the the owner of the other recently launched Paris-branded beer company. I also find his beers much better, and, for what it's worth, much better-branded.**

* No other people in the world have such patience over their coffee, or over the ice cubes in the bottom of a glass. It's almost like your average Parisian has no appetite, no tolerance for alcohol, no money, no place to be, nothing to do, and yet desires above all to occupy busy spaces and be seen. City life !

** But as long as we're serving French beers: how about some Muscadet? With fried fish this good I'd kill for some cuvées of Guy Bossard, or even something as simple and ebulliant as Joel Bouvet's "Vino-Sense" Muscadet.

The Sunken Chip !
39, rue des Vinaigriers
75010 PARIS
Tel: 01 53 26 74 46
Métro: Jacques Bonsergeant

View Larger Map

Related Links:

An interview with Sunken Chip co-founder James Whelan at AnotherMag.
A hearty endorsement of The Sunken Chip, replete with impressively digressive autobiographical intro, from Alexander Lobrano at HungryForParis.
A short blurb on The Sunken Chip at GoGoParis.
Why on earth are HypeBeast covering The Sunken Chip? This sort of thing confers negative cred. It's like being endorsed in Teen Vogue or something.

If a successful restaurant concept aims to serve cuisine that inspires respect for its chefs, then, conversely, the hallmark of a successful fast food concept is cuisine that any idiot could throw together.

For the subtext of the business plans of any of Paris' recent crop of fast food concepts - Freddie's Deli, The Sunken Chip, and the subject of this post, Bourse-side haute kebab shop Grillé - is potential expansion. As satisfying as it is to provide tastemakers with baroque tasting menus in twenty-five seat rooms, any restaurateur knows the real money is made with well-branded empires of One Perfect Product : one recipe replicated and varied unto infinity with multiple locations, catering service, O Magazine features, book deals and frozen supermarket versions.

Grillé is a home-run by these standards. You can tell the place is eminently replicable because only way to ensure getting a kebab (or a "grillé," as they preciously have retitled their creation) without a thirty minute wait is to arrive precisely at noon when they open. You can tell because the product itself - a magazine writer's dream kebab, composed solely of luxury name-brand ingredients - is delicious. And you can tell because on the corner of rue Saint Anne and rue Saint Augustin, in its inaugural location, the product is being served and assembled in the most disorganised manner possible by inexperienced jokers.

This bodes well for the future of the concept. A single experienced cook could utterly transform Grillé's service. I took my friend G, a former sous-chef at Marlow & Sons, to witness the chaos, and he couldn't stop laughing.

Neither of us could believe that they weren't using tickets. Clients place orders, are handed a receipt, which they are then asked to hand back to the two chefs, who don't appear to speak the same language or ever talk, and are otherwise on total autopilot making batches of kebabs.*

They'd be much better off instituting a numbered receipt system, and double-printing them so the chefs could have a line and know what to assemble in advance. As it is, it's like watching the Keystone Cops.

Anyway, the only reason I'm posting this is I've had a lot of time in line at Grillé to think about it. The product is excellent: meats by Hugo Desnoyer, herbs by Annie Bertin, the wrap baked sur place from organic flour.

Some early reviews have complained about the small-ish size of the wraps, for the 8,50€ price tag, and their lack of meat relative to traditional kebabs. To me this reaction evidences the shortsightedness of many food writers, all of whom ought to be aware that the value of meat is unsustainably low in the minds of consumers precisely because consumers are used to shite industrial meat, i.e. what they receive in just about any other kebab in Paris.

Desnoyer's product, and by extension Grillé's product, does no more than restore to veal or pork or lamb (depending on the day) its true, unadulterated value. This is a laudable thing.

I would only complain about the fries, which are limp and greasy, nowhere near up to the standard of every other component in the take-away bag.

Grillé is the creation of Frédéric Peneau, an associé at Le Chateaubriand and Le Dauphin. This portfolio connection is reinforced in the restaurant's elegant blue & white décor, which was done by Clément Blanchet, the same Koolhaas alum credited for Le Dauphin's cacaphonous marble-and-mirror construction. Grillé's design is a vast improvement over the latter restaurant.

But it's all window-dressing in the end. A concept this indestructible could be hawked from a car trunk.

* I refuse to keep saying "grillé." It's like asking for a "venti" coffee.

Grillé
15, rue Saint Augustin
75002 PARIS
Tél: 01 42 96 10 64
Métro: Bourse or Quatre-Septembre

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Related Links:

A complaint about lack of meat in Grillé's kebabs at LeFooding.
A mostly unjustified bad review of Grillé at Mr.Lung. (To be fair, when he went, they were charging ,30€ for ketchup, which is stupid and would leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.)
A rave about Grillé by François Simon at LeFigaro.
A rave about Grillé by Stéphane Leblanc at 20Minutes.

More recently opened Paris fast food: The Sunken Chip, 75010

My friends and I wound up at Domaine Colinot kind of by default, as we passed through Irancy on the bike trip we took this past June. J knew the wines already and he had negligible interest in re-tasting, because the domaine's website loudly offers rock-bottom pricing on the wines for delivery throughout France, making the wines difficult for J to sell at higher export mark-ups.

But the nearby domaine we'd intended to visit turned out to be a complete bust, just glass-shattering sour swill, and it was too early to lunch. (Additionally, the town's only restaurant, Le Soufflot, was closed for vacation.) So we joined a trio of middle-aged Frenchmen, fellow wine tourists, poking around outside Domaine Colinot, hoping for an unscheduled visit.

In the end it proved a pretty educational tasting. At the very least, we were able to put names to the steep vineyards I had accidentally steered us through earlier that morning, having mistaken treacherously rocky trails for normal paved roads. (They presently look the same on GoogleMaps' very, very Beta bike route feature.)

Otherwise it offered a nice opportunity to meditate on the differences among the various crus of Irancy, something almost no one ever otherwise does.

The village-level appellation - one of just three in the Yonne, along with Saint-Bris and Chablis - dates to just 1998, and in my limited experience the wines of Irancy tend to share a marked briary, black, wiry character, like anemic Cotes de Nuits. (There are exceptions, of course, like the luminescent, pure-fruited Irancy Vincent Dauvissat has made from rented vines since 2003.)

A recent impromptu tasting of 2007 Irancy at my landlady's place. Both the Dauvissat and the Richoux were showing a little shut. I still preferred the former, as I find Richoux's style a little varnishy.

Irancy's distinguishing peculiarity is that it is the only Burgundian appellation that permits use - up to 10% of a blend - of the César grape, a dark, late-ripening variety that adds colour and tannins, if arguably not a great deal in the way of complexity. Its role is mostly cosmetic - to make pale northerly Pinot appear more grand.

Domaine Colinot make a broad range of cru Irancy wines, with the proportion of César not always dependent on the particular vineyard. (For example, they make two bottlings of the Mazelots cru, one of which contains 3% César, the other of which contains 10% and is aged in barrel.) Anita and Jean-Pierre Colinot, along with their daughter Stéphanie, run the 10th-generation estate, which now spans close to 12ha. (Their cru holdings are marked with white Post-It scraps on the Irancy map pictured above.) Stéphanie is a graduate of oenology school in Beaune and has handled vinification at the estate since 2001.

Of what we tasted that day, I found myself liking the south-east-exposed, young vine Cailles cru from 2011. It contains no César and instead read as a nice rapier-like style of Pinot, agile and red-fruited.

Certain other cuvées tasted a bit worked over, to my palate, and in general the house-style is rather strict. Across the board, many of the 2010's were showing a distracting, unaccountable dusty note on the finish.

It also bears mentioning that while I laud the domaine for its commitment to defining the nuances of Irancy terroir, as expressed in a bevy of minutly diffentiated crus, it does seem like the range could use some winnowing. They could stick with the three crus true enthusiasts know - Palotte, Les Mazelots, and Cailles -and take the best fruit of the rest to make what would hopefully be a superb standard village wine. As it is, the Colinot range consists of an overlarge array of similar mid-range reds that all compete with each other.

At a certain point the trio of genial but perceptibly non-professional Frenchmen began considering aloud which cuvées to purchase, and I wondered how on earth they'd reach a conclusion. It became clear when they started crowing over the quality of the domaine's marc de bourgogne: they'd choose almost at random, because they were very uncritical people. It was a little embarrassing, so we thanked the cellar hand and went to lunch.

Domaine Colinot
89290 IRANCY

Tél: 03 86 42 33 25

Related Links:

Jura Bike Trip
Beaujolais Bike Trip

A terrific, comprehensive summary of Irancy at Bergman'sBourgogne.
Another recent visit to Domaine Colinot at WineCellerage.

If one disembarks the train from Paris at Vincelles and travels in the direction of Irancy, one crosses the Yonne into another blip-sized town beginning with V, Vincelottes. One is immediately struck by the serene riverside terrace of l'Auberge Les Tilleuls. How nice to dine there in between visits to wine domaines ! one thinks.

But one is subsequently struck by the rather high menu prices at Auberge Les Tilleuls, and upon inquiring about the more reasonable-sounding "bistrot déjeuner," one is directed away from l'Auberge's serene riverside terrace, into a low-ceilinged attic-like space above the restaurant's kitchen called L'Atelier à Jean, where one overlooks a sideroad, and not the river Yonne, or even the riverside terrace, which circumstances prevent one from jealously hurling hunks of bread at the wealthier diners by the river.

The upshot is a pleasant hokey country meal and a few glasses of well-aged Chablis.

The terrace where we did not dine.

Chef-owner Alain Renaudin deserves credit for offering the Auberge's fine wine list to the plebs scarfing at L'Atelier.

My friends and I hadn't yet biked very far, or even tasted very much wine, however, so we refrained from splashing out that early in the bike trip. I contented myself with some glasses of Daniel Etienne Defaix's 2002 Chablis 1ér Cru Les Lys.

I hadn't actually heard of that Defaix at the time, which I later learned is probably indicative of how rarely I drank French wine back in the states. Daniel Etienne Defaix is a huge and well-known estate. The domaine exports some 60% of the production of its 28ha, much of it via Rosenthal. J and I stopped by the domaine's tasting room in Chablis later in the trip, and were pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow wine blogger, Laurent Barraou, who is presently doing a spell working for Defaix.

Barraou explained that the estate is in the practice of keeping large stocks of wine in reserve, and so can offer a range of aged cru chablis at any given moment.

Defaix's 2002 Chablis 1ér Cru Les Lys was positively glowy at lunch that day, showing polished minerality, and a pliant apricot - vidalia accord that went very nicely with Atélier à Jean's tiny cheese plate. Despite the miniature scale of the pairing, I was overjoyed - because aged Chablis was what I'd come to the region to taste.

Outside of the region itself, one seems to see aged Chablis exclusively on the lists of very serious, stratospherically expensive Michelin-starred restaurants. Which is to say one doesn't see it often enough. The Chablis most consumers encounter in the rest of the world of restauration is the coltish young version, with its acid kick and stony bite. The wine is arguably just as nice that way. But it's an incomplete picture of Chablis, and it would be a shame if the evanescent, ghostly flavours of well-aged Chablis were to be altogether forgotten in favour of immediate satisfaction.

The meal itself at Atelier à Jean was a perfectly lovely fusty lunch. I began with the jambonneau en gelée, because I'm in the long slow process of trying to teach myself how to enjoy aspic. It's a preparation that, in the minds of Americans such as myself, will always vaguely recall Jell-O salads.

My pork was correct, as they say here, although I hate seeing ramekins standing in sauces like offshore oil rigs.

My friend J fared less well, having gone for the breaded fish, unawares that it was to arrive accompanied by unsauced pasta, which is like the "yadda yadda yadda" of the idiom of French country cooking - a recourse for chefs who don't feel like finishing the story of a dull dish.

The man who rang us up after the meal was in fact Renaudin the chef-owner. He took the opportunity to press into my palm a thick promotional pamphlet listing all the "Maitres Cuisiniers de France" and their country restaurants. He explained, as he stamped my promotional book, that if I were to visit ten such restaurants and get ten such stamps, the organisation behind the promotional pamphlet would mail me a magnum of middle-market Champagne.

This struck me as a splendid idea, if one were retired and abandoned by ingrate children and had nothing left to live for. I thanked Renaudin, before depositing the book in a rubbish bin and speeding off with my friends to our appointment in Chablis.

L'Atelier à Jean
Auberge Les Tilleuls
12, quai de l'Yonne
89290 Vincelottes ‎

Tél: 03 86 42 22 13

Agrandir le plan

Related Links:

Yonne Bike Trip: Domaine Colinot, Irancy

Jura Bike Trip
Beaujolais Bike Trip

A brief 2012 mention of Auberge Les Tilleuls at LesEchos.

When a restaurant or bar really blows me away, I think I instinctively look for ways to compare it to Bruce Springsteen. It's just a habit I've developed. But I think the analogy is for once justified in the case of new 9ème bar-of-all-trades Artisan.

It's an appealingly under-designed space with a big broad bar, competent cocktails, decent beer, not enough wine, and an astonishingly successful menu comprising miniaturized version of French classics: roast lamb shoulder, steak tartare, etc.

In much the same way that Springsteen's songwriting, while rarely credited with the originality of peak-era Dylan, pleases both in spite and because of its predictability, so too does Artisan's careful craftsmanship draw cheers without being the least bit innovative. In fact, that's what I like best about the place.

Artisan is the project of Frédéric Le Bordays, who previously created cocktails for 9ème house of mediocrity La Maison Mere, and for private clients through his consultancy company, Mixed Drinks. (Le Bordays, intelligent and unassuming in person, seems to have a talent for coming up with ultra-generic names. A Google search for "Artisan," for instance, brings up a lot of locksmiths and perfume companies. Anyone seeking to launder money through a nonexistent shell business might do well to seek Le Bordays' naming services.)

Artisan is less a bold new path than a studious and masterfully-executed synthesis of recent Paris cocktail bar trends. There's a restaurant and a menu, for one thing. The era (2006-11, roughly) when cocktail bars could draw crowds on the strength of drinks alone is effectively bygone. Artisan's wide, inviting horseshoe bar, par for the course in New York or London, might as well be called post-Mary Celeste in Paris.

But I'd argue that what the cocktail industry as a whole, and particularly Paris' adolescent scene, needs is less innovation, not more. Artisan presents sophisticated drinks and a lively atmosphere without Asian inflections, without caricatured Cali vibes, with no silly hidden doorways, no Mexican themes, and no vile perfumes sprayed on the cocktails - and as such, it represents the inevitable but already-overdue maturation of cocktails and bar culture in Paris. The theme is there is no theme, nor is one needed.

Instead, Artisan's appeals are classic and unimpeachable: sterling service, a sociable atmosphere, and food that is significantly better than it has to be, served from a kitchen open until 00h30. The secret weapon is chef Vanessa Krycève, a formidable polymath who at age 26 has already put in time with Ladurée, Pierre Hermès, and Guy Savoy. Her cuisine - formally trained, and delightfully unadulterated by small-plates fads - fairly slays the competition. It's the best bar food in Paris, bar none.

I arrived late the other evening to join the Native Companion and her friends, and despite all having dinner plans later in the evening, we tasted our way through much of Artisan's menu and left nothing on the plates.

The aforementioned lamb shoulder was roasted to savoury perfection, and arrived with the classic but perennially overlooked accompaniment of room-temp aubergine mash.

A steak tartare was the equal of any other I've had in Paris, fresher than a slap in the face. I'd also argue that this is a dish that can benefit from miniaturisation. I've often felt like a bite or two of tartare, while still preferring not to wolf raw beef for the duration of an entire course.

An appetiser of mussels arrived in a vermillion chorizo broth, the sort of clichéd, forehead-smackingly simple, ultimately satisfying recipe that more chefs ought to revisit.

Having trained in some of Paris' premier pastry kitchens, Krycève excels in the dessert realm. Explosively delicious chèvre-stuffed figs came with enough arugula to get lost in. Meanwhile a raisin and honey-infused Russian-Jewish cake called vatroushka was homey and seductive, and all the more memorable for being Artisan's menu's sole trend-setting moment.

This being a wine blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Artisan seriously underwhelms in this department. There are two uninteresting whites and two dishwater reds by the glass, plus some dull Billecart-Salmon. I understand that wines are the sideshow to cocktails at Artisan. But bad product has no place on the menu of a good establishment. It was out of blog-obligation that I ordered a glass of lumpen, flabby Chablis by Domaine d'Elise, a conventionally-farmed 13ha estate founded in 1970 with no story worth relating.

Better was a "Sherry Cheri," on the trim and unshowy listed of cocktails. It was mild and comme il faut, the sort of simple, unobtrusive aperitif that passes far too quickly.

The cocktail list isn't without flaws. It's user-friendly to a fault, and the drink names are a little obvious, at least to Anglophone eyes. But given Artisan's sundry graces, I can't help feeling it would be my loss to focus too much on this.

When Le Bordays later informed me that the menu at Artisan, along with the cocktails, will change roughly every two weeks, I was almost heartbroken. I wanted to shake him by the lapels and say, "When it's this good, why?"

Artisan
14, rue Bochart de Saron
75009 PARIS
Tel: 01 48 74 65 38
Métro: Anvers

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Related Links:

A pre-opening profile of Artisan at TimeOutParis.
A piece on Artisan at LittleBlackBook.

By the time my friend Camille Fourmont opened her Buvette in the 11ème this past spring, rumours had already spread that American celebrity chef Jody Williams was planning to replicate her successful West Village wine bar of the same name in Paris. Fourmont had heard the news too, but she'd already made her own neon sign. There are tens of Café du Métros, a bevy of variations on Au Passage, even more than one Galopin in Paris - what's the problem with a few unrelated Buvettes?*

I can see why opening in Paris struck Williams as a savvy move. She made a late-career switch from Italian cuisine (as practiced at Tappo, Morandi, and Gottino in NYC) to French, and stands to benefit from the authenticity boost that an actual Paris outpost confers. Her Buvette also arrives at a recent high-water mark for Parisian acceptance of new-world-style small-plates wine bars. (The floodgates will soon give completely.)

What's more, replicating the NYC Buvette in Paris doesn't seem to have required Williams to tweak the original concept at all. The Paris Buvette feels eerily - at times hilariously - like a New York restaurant aiming to sell quasi-French small plates to Americans.

Did someone on Williams' team suppose, for instance, that residents of the Pigalle area need to be schooled on the historical import of the Pigalle area?

Was it one of a seeming multitude of graphic and interior designers who thought it would be cute to draw a big map of France on the wall, illustrating the wine list without specifying producers or vintages ? As though French drinkers were wont to wonder where, precisely, the Rhône might be ?

And was the wine director playing an exceedingly clever joke, by offering almost exclusively wines that could seem exotic to Parisians only because the bulk of said wines are sold in the US market? Domaine A. & P. de Villaine, Arnaud Ente, Château Thivin... Should Buvette prove to be a thronging success in Paris, Kermit Lynch might wonder where his quantities went.

One also wonders whether it was necessary, on an entirely French wine list in Paris, to mention, in French, that the whites and reds by the glass are French.

To be fair, I quite like the three domaines mentioned above. Château Thivin's Côte de Brouilly "Clos Bertrand" is a benchmark for the appellation, and the bottle my friends and I consumed was swift and practiced wingflap of keen blackberry and ash, with an appealing pineapply acidity. (Thivin's white is less good; given the long history of the estate, one suspects the wine might even be the root cause of Beaujolais Blanc's insipid reputation.)

But this is Paris. More interesting, less regimented Beaujolais - by the likes of Descombes, Metras, Guignier, Jambon, Breton, Foillard, Lapalu, Vionnet, etc. - practically spurts from shop shelves at a drinker, for cheaper. It also deserves mentioning that while Buvette behaves admirably like a wine bar, with no plates larger than a roughly six-inch diameter, wine prices are firmly in the restaurant realm. Sometimes they're outright gouges, as in the case of Pierre Gimonnet, whose 1èr cru Champagne - 22€ per bottle retail at Caves Augé last time I checked - is 16€ a glass at Buvette.

To justify such margins, the food would have to be angelic. But Buvette aims for terrestrial charms, serving Williams' idea of French comfort food.

I won't dwell on the predominance (at dinnertime) of bruschette, Italian refugees presumably permitted on the menu because their ingredient cost is rien.

Some better menu items are laudably unembellished, like a perfect straight take on roast bone marrow.

A tarte tatin, too, attained the perfection of its source inspiration: it was velvety, tender, and pristine.

Other classics had lost something in translation, as in coq au vin and hachis parmentier, whose incarnations as Buvette were significantly less flavourful than the those one finds at most business lunch bistrots.

A salad of brussel sprouts lacked all acid. And the alien-looking thing in a salad of octopus was not the octopus, but rather the pointless unsharable lettuce surrounded it, hiding all the other ingredients. It too was under-sauced.

These are not mistakes one regularly encounters from the hands of famous chefs. But such mistakes do come from the kitchens of famous chefs, particularly when famous chefs aren't spending much time in their kitchens.

This brings us to the key difference between the Paris and New York restaurant scenes. For a combination of reasons - Paris not being a global financial hub, and France having straitjackety labour law - it is far easier to become a famous Paris chef than it is to become a rich one. Expansion is accordingly slower. I don't know a thing about Jody Williams' finances. But it does seem to me she might have spent more time adapting her concept to its new location. Buvette in Paris feels like the work of a franchisee who signed contracts forbidding changes to the original concept.

So many aspects, in both design and cuisine, remind me the times I'd argue for minor graphic design changes to the menu of the restaurant I managed back in LA. "No chance," I was always told. The sous-chef and I resorted to absurd 7-point font use, trying to wedge an evolving restaurant concept into a fossilized menu layout. The celebrity chef who might have given the go-ahead for changes to design was at all times presumed to be too busy to reconsider issues that had already been decided once.

Similarly, who cares if Buvette's freakishly overdesigned wine list looks like it tore itself from the back of a McSweeney's issue through sheer force of Twee Will ? It works in Manhattan.

And who cares if Parisians don't appreciate French geography lessons on the wall ? Parisians will rationalise patronising Jody Williams' Buvette for three simple reasons.

1. There are free walnuts and apples lying around, testifying to Williams' idea of a buvette as a sort of elfin tea-room, rather than the usual drinking-hole connoted by the French usage. This will poll well among the stroller-pushers of rue des Martyrs.

2. Accessibility. The kitchen is open from 10am to midnight, with different menus served at different times of day. Plus it's open on Sundays.

3. There are sufficient servers staffed to handle the room.**

It's not a lot. But it takes almost nothing to be original in Paris - just basic American commercial instincts. Which is why it was smart for Williams to open a Buvette here.

Instead of "fermé le lundi," Buvette's window announces "dodo le lundi," which translates as "sleepytime on Mondays," and which is pretty much the feyest thing ever, the equivalent, in diction, of sprouting purple butterfly wings.

* Remember Spring Buvette ? An unfortunate casualty to Daniel Rose's successful courting of the most exacting, conservative, least spontaneous clientele on the Right Bank. A rock and roll wine bar it was not, and it was shortly repurposed as another dining room for the restaurant.

** Almost. On the night I visited, we waited ages for wines, while one of the bartenders was snacking behind the counter. The bartenders on the whole seemed to do very little. Our extremely charming and elegant waitress redeemed the experience. I was blown away when through some sort of good-witch magic she dismissed a marauding rose-seller with no more than a glance, and he complied.

Buvette
28, rue Henri Monnier
75009 PARIS
Métro: Saint Georges or Pigalle
Tel: +33 1 44 63 41 71

View Larger Map

Related Links:

La Buvette, 75011 : Camille Fourmont's vastly more charming and authentic wine bar.

A typically uncritical note on Buvette at LeFooding.
A atypically booster-ish note on Buvette at ParisByMouth, a website where my nominal contributing editorship role includes no input whatsoever in restaurant listings.
GoGoParis inexplicably calls the décor "lo-fi chic." Quick, someone find more huge decanters full of fresh fruit !

A review of Jody Williams' Buvette in the West Village in the NYTimes.
An interview with Jody Williams at Kinfolk.

It's poor form to be late to an appointment with any vigneron. But anyone familiar with unimpeachable greatness of Vincent Dauvissat's Chablis will understand why my friends and I were particularly concerned about arriving on time to meet the winemaker.

We had biked from Irancy that afternoon, taking an ill-considered route that led through steep, shadeless Saint-Bris onto a stretch of hellish highway (the D965) that we were unable to escape until exiting at Beine, a town west of Chablis distinguished by an artificial lake, the Etang de Beine. In Beine you see a blitz of proud signage for this artificial lake, but before you encounter it, you pass a really swampy mini-lake, which my friends and I incredulously took for the étang before arriving at the real thang. We had a good laugh about this and entertained the idea of joining some bathers at the étang until we realized we were in danger of arriving late to Chablis.

As it happened, we arrived chez Dauvissat a few minutes early. The family member who answered the door gestured to Vincent, who, evidently having just returned from work in the vines, appeared briefly in the doorway eating an apple, wearing denim short-shorts and a bandana. He made an apologetic gesture and disappeared, reappearing five minutes later dressed less like Axl Rose.

As we'd just arrived from Irancy, we chatted about Dauvissat's, a cuvée he's made since 2003 from vines rented from a practicing organic vigneron called Roger de la Loge, who retired in 2002.* Dauvissat predictably couldn't give us a good answer for why his Irancy is reliably more satiny and poised than most. He said for him it still felt like an experiment, an anomalous red in his oeuvre. The 2011 that day showed refined, crunchy cranberry fruit. In 2011 he destemmed, but sometime he doesn't, depending on the vintage.

I had tasted bottles of his 1èr cru Chablis before this visit, but only in a scattered fashion, here and there. As ever, tasting his full range of 2011 Chablis sequentially caused the differences to leap into high relief.

The 1èr cru "Les Sechets," a SE exposed plot of 50yr old vines, showed reserved, tenor aromas and a waxen, Rhône-like finish; whereas the 1èr cru "Les Vaillons," from deeper clay soil, possessed finer acid and was precociously open on the nose. "Le Forest"'s nose was more minty, its mineral profile more austere.

Of the grand crus, I fairly fell over myself for the 2011 "Les Preuses," from an ampitheatrical plot of clay with marl subsoil. There's something powerfully, seductively feminine and corporeal about the nose, a concept which I fear I probably expressed rather poorly in my broken, halting French. The aromas are quasi-pheromonal - they provoke the sort of wakeful, mouthwatering, heart-tugging feeling one gets from the proximity of certain lovers at certain times. Amid the bodies, I detected a bit of light incense.

Dauvissat treated us also to the latter half of a bottle of 1993 "Les Vaillons," an unusual wine, he explained, in that rain on the second day of harvest had caused the wine's tartaric acid levels to rise, the only time he'd ever encountered such a phenomenon in four decades of winemaking.

A biodynamic calendar. Though in reference to the decision of when to harvest, Dauvissat says, "La matière est vivant, c'est pas sur le papier."

Sure enough, at twenty years in, the wine was still wiry, shell-like, with pronounced notes of oyster liquor. I asked Dauvissat at what age, roughly speaking, he thought his wines showed best, and with regard to the '93 "Vaillons" he said "About now, that's to say, twenty years."

Dauvissat had squeezed our appointment in before one with Stephen Tanzer, so we tried not to tarry. We thanked the former and greeted the latter and savored the rest of the bottle from plastic cups by the river before dinner.

* During the rest of our time in the region we searched unsuccessfully for older bottles of Roger de la Loge's wines. Has anyone tasted ?

Vincent Dauvissat
8 Rue Emile Zola

89800 CHABLIS
Tel: 03 86 42 11 58

Related Links:

Yonne Bike Trip: Domaine Colinot, Irancy
Yonne Bike Trip: Atélier à Jean, Vincelottes

2011 - Beaujolais Bike Trip
2011 - Jura Bike Trip

the angevin clan, pt. 3: bertin-delatte / l'echalier, rablay-sur-layon

paris wine company launch

the home front : touller outillage, 75011

killing it : restaurant bones, 75011

lettie teague nearly encounters natural wine, remains skeptical

hey one-percenter : le griffonnier, 75008

sandwiches du terroir : u spuntinu, 75009

more to come : restaurant encore, 75009

n.d.p. in champagne: emmanuel lassaigne of champagne jacques lassaigne, montgueux

n.d.p. in champagne: aux crieurs de vin (bistrot), troyes

n.d.p. in champagne: aux crieurs de vin au marché des halles, troyes

n.d.p. in champagne: restaurant l'étoile, troyes

cuttlefish water ? : la régalade conservatoire, 75009

london calling : the sunken chip, 75010

idiot simple : grillé, 75002

yonne bike trip: domaine colinot, irancy

yonne bike trip: l'atélier à jean, vincelottes

glory days : artisan, 75009

authenticity unnecessary : buvette, 75009

yonne bike trip: vincent dauvissat, chablis