not drinking poison in paris

In writing about Paris restaurant openings, I'm accustomed to grousing about stillborn fads and failed trendhopping. (Meatballs, anyone? Wine by the litre?) But newly opened Place Sainte Marthe wine bar La Cave à Michel floors me, for it's perhaps the first place I've encountered since Bistro Bellet last fall that seems genuinely forward-thinking.

Located in what used to be the physical premises of online wine retailer La Contre-Etiquette, La Cave à Michel is a joint effort from two longtime neighbors - Fabrice Mansouri, formerly of La Contre-Etiquette, and Maxime and Romain Tischenko, the telegenic brothers behind nextdoor tasting menu restaurant Le Galopin.

Mansouri and the Tischenkos have transformed the awkward old Contre-Etiquette space into a spare, elegant, standing-room-only wine bar that offers, Wednesday through Sunday (!), a solid natural wine selection, a rousing atmosphere, and a winning menu of ambitious small plates produced from a comically small kitchen. The eponymous "Michel," as I understand the idiom, refers to a kind of Everyman figure, and this seems appropriate. Every neighborhood should have one of these.

La Cave à Michel's team will hopefully forgive me if I admit that nothing led me to expect such a grand slam from them. Fabrice Mansouri's work at La Contre-Etiquette was solid, but so low key as to be imperceptible to all but immediate neighbors. (I meant to write about La Contre-Etiquette for ages, and could never think of anything to say.)

Meanwhile, it took me two years to make it over to Le Galopin (full post forthcoming sometime), because I'd been put off by the brevity of the wine selection vis à vis the cost of the tasting menu. It fairly reeked of hype... And indeed when I finally dined at Le Galopin, I found it had more in common with Restaurant Pierre Sang Boyer than with, say, Bones; where the latter restaurant aims to impress fellow chefs, the former two restaurants seem to target the beginner-gourmand audience their respective chefs attained with TV exposure. A surefire indicator of this is the kitchen-sink dish, the plate that creaks beneath the weight of its component list, the better to impress novice diners who can't imagine how all those ingredients could be successfully combined.

At La Cave à Michel only once did such a dish arrive: a bit of mozzarella festooned with salmon roe, guindillas, dill, capers, etc. I still give Tischenko credit for using very good bufala and not the ubiquitous bad burrata we're currently wading through at apéro hour in this city.

Otherwise, the physical limitations of La Cave à Michel's kitchen seem to have had a tremendously beneficent influence on Tischenko's cuisine.

Almost every dish at La Cave à Michel is sufficiently spare for a diner to perceive the care taken with product. An oeuf mayo was amusingly do-it-yourself, with just a pot of mayo arriving with a gesture towards the bar's egg rack.

More involved dishes evinced admirable focus: a dashi-toned bar ceviche, a tartare bedecked in salty ricotta salata, or some daringly undercooked red shrimp, jelly-like and lividly fresh.

If La Cave à Michel presently has an Achilles' heel of sorts, it's that everything depends on Romain Tischenko's foxhole of a kitchen, and the bar's thronging demand means that plates can get forgotten or take inordinate lengths of time to arrive.

Happily, there's a lot to drink. Mansouri's long caviste experience is intermittently evident: the occasional back vintage curiosity enlivens a selection otherwise characterised by natural wine standbys like Henri Milan and Domaine Grange Aux Belles. It seems worth mentioning that Mansouri's choices at La Contre-Etiquette was less full-throttle natural than La Cave à Michel's, and all the more interesting for it. A prime example is the biodynamic and rather heavenly - but not exceptionally natural - 2010 Aligoté I enjoyed the other night, "Face au Lévant," by Dominique Lucas.

It's not the current vintage of this wine; it's something Mansouri bought in his Contre-Etiquette days. Sourced from 93 year old vines outside of Pommard, the wine was ruminative, smoky, and pure-toned, with a patient gravity rarely encountered in Aligoté.

The Native Companion and I polished off most of it waiting for a few forgotten dishes to arrive. To the bar's credit, I didn't mind at all. The ambience in La Cave à Michel on a lively Thursday evening is enjoyably reminiscent of an Andalusian bodega, only with fewer shrunken old men in caps, and rather more savvy young drinkers.

The Place Sainte Marthe has long possessed a secretive, out-of-the-way appeal, one undercut entirely by its two rather terrible terraced bistrots. Le Galopin, pricey and unspontaneous, never had a chance, on its own, to change the tenor of the neighborhood drinkers. La Cave à Michel, sophisticated, informal and inviting, almost certainly will.

La Cave à Michel
36 rue Sainte Marthe
75010 PARIS
Métro: Belleville
Tel: 01 42 45 94 47

Related Links:

Le Fooding's nonsensical, Google-translated note on La Cave à Michel, which incorrectly states that all the wines are sulfur-free.

A Time Out article on La Cave à Michel which is notable for the curiously open-handed way the author reveals his lack of wine knowledge. Odd for such a publication, which in my experience trades in the (imaginary) expertise of its local authors.

When I arranged to harvest with Montgueux Champagne winemaker Manu Lassaigne this September, I had convenience in mind. His is the best domaine in the vicinity of the Native Companion's mother's house outside of Troyes. I figured we could stay with her and sort out transport to and from Montgueux without undue hassle, perhaps on bicycles.

"Attention!" said the NC's mother, when I proposed what struck her as a dangerously bad idea. "Ca mont beaucoup vers Montgueux!" (Tr.: "The way to Montgueux is very steep.") She says this about most hills.* When this failed to sufficiently terrify me, she invoked gypsies. Harvest time brings a lot of low-paid migrant labour to the Aube, and she worried these voyageurs would ambush me with long knives as I bicycled home. "We'll deal with such situations as and when they arise! " I laughed.

And in the end the NC's mom needn't have worried. It took just one day's harvesting at Domaine Jacques Lassaigne for the Native Companion and I to realise we had neither the desire nor the capacity to bike eight kilometers to and from the domaine each day. I was reduced to reliving my early teens, gratefully begging rides to and from my summer job... Harvest is always a blend of festivity and grunt work, in proportions that vary according to the individual traditions of the domaine. Harvest chez Lassaigne is mainly the latter, punctuated with charcuterie and various interesting non-commercialised cuvées.

Some domaines use harvest as a press opportunity, inviting foreign sommeliers and sales representatives to share the experience. Domaine Jacques Lassaigne is not one of these domaines. Manu Lassaigne, a carefree devil at tastings, is all business when it comes to harvest. His team consisted of a core group of former firefighters and young cellarhands, who performed porter work, helped with the wine press, and coordinated the pickers. The pickers consisted of the local under-employed, leathery retirees, young Arab kids, tiny Chinese grandmothers, my girlfriend, and me.

These two had the natural advantage of possessing an extremely low center of gravity. They barely had to bend down to reach the bunches.

Following a miscommunication with Manu, we arrived fifteen minutes late on our first day. It wasn't a big deal. But it made our introduction into harvest's most enjoyable tradition all the more surprising: we'd picked for only an hour, barely working up a sweat, when everyone dropped what they were doing and assembled at the end of the field for the 9AM gouter.

The domaine's namesake Jacques Lassaigne (Manu's father) showed up in a van, from which he produced a generous array of charcuterie - andouille, fromage de tête, mousse de foie gras, etc. - along with numerous unmarked bottles of yellowed Champagne.

This bottle's cork got stuck. So Jacques found a solution.

This was to prove the high point of each day, the 9AM gouter. Everyone has worked up just a pang of thirst by then, which everyone slakes immediately with Champagne. But no one is quite verbal yet, due to the early hour. Cigarettes get lit. The pickers sit on thrones of overturned grape bins and gaze downhill at the lowland fog dissipating in the horizontal morning sun.

Then it's back to work.

The 2014 harvest was completed in about six days. With the exception of a brief storm on the fifth evening, the weather was splendid throughout. I think I can count on one hand the times I encountered rot or mold over the course of four days. The domaine's vines are astonishingly pristine.

Their beaming, rude health was especially striking in contrast to the Poulsard vineyards I'd been harvesting just days before in the Jura, which had suffered about 50% losses due to cherry vinegar flies...

Among the last vines we harvested were the younger vines in the Clos Sainte Sophie, the Aube's only Clos, from which Manu Lassaigne has been purchasing grapes since 2010 for a yet-to-be-released cuvée.

Interestingly, this historic vineyard is, at least to my superficial perspective, significantly less well-tended than Lassaigne's own vines further up the hill. There isn't the same grass coverage between rows; the earth is at once dustier and more impacted. The occasional Pinot vine is found among the Chardonnay, but all is harvested and vinified together.

An historic wine press on display in a barn by the Clos Sainte Sophie.

Pickers brought their own lunches each day, which made for a slightly stilted atmosphere at the picnic table most days. This relented only when some of the senior harvest staff organised a terrific bring-your-own-meat barbecue one day.

The Native Companion and I made potato salad for the occasion. It's amazing how much shared food improves the ambience at a table. (My impression is that when you gather random French workers around a lunch table, everyone's first priority is not to be judged, whether on the quality of one's packed lunch or on one's manner of consuming it. Nourishment comes second.)

All meals were more or less rescued by Champagne, however. I later learned that the cuvée served to harvesters at morning gouter and lunch was an experimental barrel that Lassaigne left outside the cellar in the elements for a year. (This explained the slightly darker colour.) It reminded me more than a little of Jean-François Ganevat's sparkling wine: low-toned, short and pure on the palate, with savoury herbaceous notes.

Manu Lassaigne also produces, but doesn't sell, a lovely still Coteaux Champenois red from purchased Pinot Noir. He vinifies it in a notably Beaujolais-like, vin de soif style, and does all pigeage himself. He says he only makes it because his father enjoys reds, but, amusingly, Jacques later confided that he doesn't like the wine's Beaujolais-like, vin de soif style.

I had intended only to work three days of harvest, but it seemed a shame to miss "le chien," which is local slang for the end-of-harvest festivities. So I came back for a fourth day. The NC explained that at certain other Aubois domaines le chien is a riotous party long into the night. Chez Lassaigne it was sort of like a long, seated gouter, after which Manu gave the pickers a tour of the cellar.

I'd already seen the cellar on two other occasions. But for my efforts Lassaigne slipped me a bottle of yet another non-commercialised cuvée he makes from time to time, a still red Gamay. I'd had no idea any Gamay was grown that far north, but apparently so.

The bottle was from 2008. Was 2008 a good year for Coteaux Champanois Gamay? Who knows? I opened it for the occasion of a chef friend's birthday at L'Amitié Rit in Montreuil, only to have the bar owner, Thierry, rightly point out that we probably ought to have carafed it for an hour... It was a dense, high-acid, peppery black Gamay, which only began to show appreciable fruit on its final sips.

* The NC's mother, bless her, is prone to issuing morbid predictions no matter how benign or anodyne the circumstances: if one of us is, for example, about purchase a train ticket at the station, she'll announce that it might rain, there might be no seats left on the train, and that vikings will invade.

Champagne Jacques Lassaigne
7, Chemin des Haies
10300 MONTGUEUX
Tel: 03 25 74 84 83

Related Links:

A 2012 visit to Emmanuel Lassaigne

A summer 2014 visit to Emmanuel Lassaigne

Harvesting with Ludwig Bindernagel in the Jura in 2012

The stakes are high in Paris when an established, beloved restaurant like cave-à-manger pioneer Le Verre Volé opens a seafood sequel, in this case the drily-dubbed Le Verre Volé Sur Mer. Not because Parisians are discerning about seafood. Quite the opposite! Seafood sequels in Paris must be convincing because when they are not, a curtain drops, and we risk recalling, as quivering forkfuls ascend, that Paris is the Chicago of France, a landlocked abattoir with no real claim to oceanic expertise.

Successes ranging from L'Ecailler du Bistrot to Le Mary Celeste to Clamato all show that the trend remains at high tide. With all due respect to most of that list, I suspect this has to do more with socioeconomic factors than with outright quality. Better, cheaper oysters are available in, say, Boston. For raw fish, try Liguria, the Adriatic coast, or Tokyo. But Parisians, like their counterparts in other wealthy capitals, demand something healthy-ish on which to drop their euros. Hence fish.

Le Verre Volé Sur Mer is thus an irresistibly logical next-step for Verre Volé owner Cyril Bordarier, whose original restaurant still does gangbuster business up the block. The seaside version is, alas, a rigid, cack-handed cash-in. From the Little Mermaid wall artwork to the miniscule wine list to the confoundingly amateurish cuisine, it screams of a concept in search of a vision, or, at very least, a competent chef.

The failure is surprising, given the impressive quality of Le Verre Volé, Le Verre Volé Cave, and L'Epicerie du Verre Volé. I'm a regular customer of all these businesses. Le Verre Volé, despite its kitchen turnover and its mistaken reputation as a destination for serious wines, is a worthy institution with a magnificent ambience and a formidable price-quality ratio. Le Verre Volé Cave, despite manager Cyril "The Other Cyril" Brouard's towering, ultimately endearing irascibility, is where I buy most of my great Beaujolais. And L'Epicerie du Verre Volé, despite sourcing much of its product from better-value neighbors in Paris, is a cornucopia of well-informed gourmandise.

Le Verre Volé Sur Mer, on the other hand, has no redeeming features.

Disregarding our potential for critical ferocity, my friends and I were the ideal table. We ordered the entire menu with minimal discussion.

Five minutes later, almost all of it came out at once. In a restaurant this small - 18 covers - it is not the hallmark of a well-oiled kitchen machine. It is the hallmark of dishes conceived for minimal heating and convenient plating, representative of the increasing saladization of fine dining.

That most dishes looked beautiful only left us feeling more betrayed after tasting them. Some royal purple clams in a keen orange broth tasted outright vomitty. (I have never before witnessed my formidably omnivorous friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck spit something out.)

Worse still was some squid en persillade, a dish that reminded me of having once described ox penis as having the texture of "land squid." This was like that, only without flavor.

To go on would be morbid. Across the board, dishes lacked all salt and acid. Reliably, a Japanese element cropped up - daikon here, soy sauce there - as if to reassure diners that some foreign sensibility had informed these blithering dull creations. I understand that the nighttime chef, for now, is a fellow from Montreal called Laurent.

If forced to return at gunpoint, I would order his herring and cabbage, which, alone among the dishes on offer that night, possessed a correct balance of sweetness and acid, along with a spiffingly perfect boiled egg. I also enjoyed the side dish of rice with mussels, in which the latter's pliant delicacy contrasted excellently with the former's rustic grain.

What to say about the wine list, except that you shouldn't go to Le Verre Volé Sur Mer for it? It's a well-edited, but drastically edited version of what you can get at the original up the road.

We shared a bottle of Savoie-via-Bourgogne vigneron Dominique Lucas' supple, elegant Savagnin. If the bottle nonetheless left me conflicted, it's because I'm coming to realise suppleness and elegance are the foremost features of all Lucas' wines, regardless of terroir or grape variety... I had a similar suspicion a few years ago regarding Cascina delle Rose's too-light Barbarescos: that I had in my mouth, rather than wine, the hand of the winemaker. To its credit, Lucas' Savagnin still showed musky fruit and fine brown butter notes.

Towards the end of the meal, our Maldon oysters arrived, weirdly warm, on less a bed than a sheet of watery rock salt.

Oysters after a meal is like being offered a handjob after an orgy. No one even wanted that at that point.

The space now inhabited by Le Verre Volé Sur Mer used to be a terrible downmarket wine shop. I would walk by from time to time and shake my head, wondering what dimwits patronised such a hopeless bargain bin when Le Verre Volé was just up the road. The inhabitant at the address has changed. The business model, preying upon dimwits, has not. The dimwits around the Canal Saint Martin have just gotten richer and become likely marks for bad crudo.

Le Verre Volé Sur Mer also offers, at lunch, enjoyable Japanese comfort-food bentos (not pictured) by my largely self-taught friend Maori Murota, who was most recently seen at Düo, a short-lived gallery-café near Parmentier, now under new ownership. I had recommended her there for the position of chef, in which, I'm afraid, she didn't exactly shine. There were various reasons, but primarily it was her lack of experience working for other chefs in professional kitchens. She cooks like her audience consists of adoring fashion industry home-cooks, which in her private tutoring practice, it does. Professional kitchens are less cuddly and demand more rigorous discipline.

At Le Verre Volé Sur Mer she is once again working solo, proposing more or less what she proposed at Düo, which is to say that nothing has changed, and that her placement at Bordarier's new restaurant is just further evidence - as if any were needed - that the entire effort has been phoned-in with scant attention to quality. Bordarier is capable of good restaurateurism. But for now he's gone fishin'.

Le Verre Volé Sur Mer
53, rue de Lancry
75010 PARIS
Métro: Jacques Bonsergeant
Tel: 01 48 03 21 38

Related Links:

A rave for L'Epicerie du Verre Volé, 75011
A rave for Le Verre Volé, 75010

A typically uncritical, noun-heavy blurb on Le Verre Volé Sur Mer at A Food Tale.

A typically uncritical, noun-heavy blurb on Le Verre Volé Sur Mer at Le Fooding.
A surprisingly critical blurb on Le Verre Volé Sur Mer at A Nous.

Barbecue, arguably, is for Americans what wine is for the French. What the subjects share is a dialectical emphasis on local cultural tradition, to a degree that handily surpasses that of, say, the New World wine industry. So perhaps it should be no surprise that Thomas Abramowicz, the young French barbecue afficionado behind hype-scorched new Parisian BBQ establishment The Beast, displays a masterful command of the finer regional nuances of barbeque: things like the provenance and flavour difference of the oak and pecan wood used in the Central Texas-style he prefers; or the origins of the sweeter, more pork-based Kansas-style. I knew none of this before the round of Wild Turkey we shared at the close of my meal at the Beast.

While billing itself as a bourbon destination, The Beast also maintains a tight, inexpensive natural wine list, one that is surprisingly au courant, given the context. For The Beast is a laser-sighted populist commercial endeavor, replete with graphics package and a catchy koan-esque slogan. ('Meat. Fire. Time.')

Yet the cool wine list and The Beast as whole leave me torn. The restaurant's mass appeal and commercial savvy seem to be in latent contradiction with its small size. Success seems predicated upon rapid table turnover and massive takeout business, neither of which phenomena have much precedent in Paris, a city congested in perpetuity with inveterate table-squatters. So I wonder how the restaurant will thrive without either drastically raising check averages or relocating to a larger premises. In both cases, the experience would change entirely. Hence my ambivalence about The Beast. In its current state, it is among Paris' best new restaurants. But reviewing the place is like being given a cute baby tiger and asked whether you'd like to keep it.

Before I speculate further, I ought to congratulate Abramowicz on his restaurant's almost flawless execution. The Beast gleams. For once one doesn't get the impression that the branding effort took place in lieu of substantive content; rather, the well-appointed space is the natural accoutrement of a well-developed concept. (Ask Abramowicz about the tattered American flag that serves as backdrop to the take-out counter. The story is a masterpiece of narrative salesmanship. Abramowicz, incidentally, formerly worked in marketing for LVMH.)

Before opening The Beast, Abramowicz embarked on a barbecue pilgrimage around the USA, training with Wayne Mueller in Taylor, TX and at Franklin's in Austin, among others.

His beef at The Beast is primarily American Black Angus, which he prefers to French beef for its fat content. He gives it a salt-and-pepper rub, Texas-style, eschewing the more sauce-centric BBQ traditions. Brisket, a nigh-on unfindable cut in France, undergoes a 15-18 hour cook time, emerging perfectly pliant with a haunting, three-dimensional flavour.

Of the main courses my friends and I tasted on our visit, only the dry, under-seasoned chicken disappointed. But certain accompaniments, too, felt undersketched, like a container of steamed greens, whose steam might as well spell out in the air above it, "AFTERTHOUGHT."

The "homemade bourbon barbeque sauce," for its part, feels actively discouraged, arriving as a lonesome brownish dot on the meat tray. Sauce ought to be in bottles, and pickles ought to be in a jar. For someone otherwise possessed of a positively Japanese attention to detail, Abramowicz has a surprisingly clumsy approach to plate presentation.

The question inevitably arises: should one expect fine plate presentation at a barbecue joint ? What about in barbecue joints that actively fetishize the presentation of their meat via wall-mounted photography?

I'm not talking about a dusting of coriander flowers or curlicues of mandolinned root vegetables. I just mean that it is in a restaurant's interest to attend to plate presentation to the extent that food items don't look tiny on the trays they arrive on.

In most other respects, The Beast is visibly the work of someone with a granular knowledge of contemporary American restaurateurism. Where the restaurant stumbles is in its presentation, which occasionally over-adapts to Parisian expectations. There are the garishly idiotic menu names. ("Big Boy,""Who's Your Daddy").

There are the posery, outdated mason jars the splendid local Deck & Donahue beer arrives in.

There's also the "Beef Rib XXL," whose name belies its rather modest size on the tray. A ballerina could eat it for breakfast.

Such are the challenges of opening a barbecue joint in Paris, however. Everyone - not just me, presumably - will be looking for traces of fussiness and sissy-fication, for Parisians tend to do that to concepts they import. (C.f. brunch.)

This reminds me, however, of an illuminating conversation I once had with a wine industry friend from New York, who explained that his favorite aspect of contemporary Paris restaurant meals was their relative moderation. Flavours are delicate and plates aren't enormous. The Beast, for all its authenticity, is a contemporary Paris restaurant meal, and therefore a very new context in which to appreciate excellent barbecue.

How does excellent barbecue match-up with natural wine ? Mylène Bru's Languedoc red "Far Ouest" was out of stock on the night I visited, so I opted for a wine I know very well, Beaujolais rising-star Remi Dufaitre's 2013 Brouilly. It didn't so much pair with the XXL beef ribs as run fleeing from them. I returned to beer, and some sips of the Native Companion's bourbon.

My friends in the US wine industry are continually floating wistful ideas about how they might sell US wines in Paris. As much as I myself prefer drinking French wine in France, I'd be remiss not to point out that The Beast is the one Paris venue I can think of where serious US wines might sell at their relatively stratospheric prices.

And who knows? That might prove necessary to feed The Beast.

The Beast

27, rue Meslay

75003 PARIS

Métro: République

Tel: +33 7 81 02 99 77

Related Links:

Meg Zimbeck at Paris By Mouth took the unusual step of bestowing a ton of positive press the day the restaurant opened.

Wendy Lyn at The Paris Kitchen was, for once, more reserved.

Le Fooding's vaguely offensive English language version of their Beast blurb, which describes the Beast's clientele as "hordes of Americans, enticed by the smell..." If only Le Fooding's English were remotely readable! Then when choosing restaurants us hick Americans wouldn't have to rely solely on our noses like cavemen.

An early interview with Thomas Abramowicz at TMBBQ, unfortunately riddled with curious errors. At one point Abramowicz rightly credits Kristen Frederick of Le Camion Qui Fume with starting the food truck craze in Paris, and the website follows it with a link to her competitor, Cantine California. The author also thinks "des" and "viandes" together comprise one single word.

By way of introducing a series of posts about sherry and various visits to Andalusia, I thought I'd relay a conversation I recently had with a respected wine journalist friend from New York.

"Are you into sherry?" I asked. (We were on a long car ride.)

He wasn't not into sherry, he said. But, having done the same initial research most wine guys do, he found he subsequently almost never encountered anything new of interest from the region. "I'm sick of Brooklyn bartenders incorrectly explaining what Oloroso is," he added.

After three visits to the region over the course of the past year and a half, I could empathise. Sherry is, as Churchill said of Russian statecraft, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Reading Peter Liem and Jésus Barquin's splendid book on the subject gets you only so far - just inside the outer enigma of a wine whose potential often seems as ill-understood by its producers as it is by its consumers. Even in the sherry towns themselves, one rarely lays eyes on the obscure bottlings about which Liem and Barquin write so inspiringly. Most local bars and restaurants offer a what amounts to a modest elaboration of the Jerez airport's Duty-Free.

This is why it's such a relief to return to La Taberna der Guerrita, foward-thinking sherry dealer Armando Guerra's rustic and unassuming Sanlucar tapas bar, which houses, inside a surprisingly space-age rear tasting room, a scintillating selection of rare and unusual bottles. A chat with Guerra - particularly after a long day shuffling along the town's semi-deserted cobblestones encountering nothing but mosto signs - is enough to restore hope for the region's future relevance.

The bar was founded in 1978 by Armando Guerra's father. Its status as the epicenter of geek sherry appreciation isn't totally obvious from the outside; its bar is typically peopled - not crowded - with the same stout elderly locals one encounters everywhere in the region. The rear tasting room isn't even advertised. One has to ask at the bar.

Only here does the breadth of the enterprise begin to sink in. Guerra's passion for wine - not just sherry - is reassuringly evident in the ambitious tasting calendars posted around the room. Bottle keepsakes lined along the walls, leftovers from previous tastings, included cuvées from Jean-François Ganevat and Jean Foillard. In a region not known for its curiosity about the greater wine world, this seems especially significant.

Not many bottle selections are kept chilled, but since most bottles are 375ml, it doesn't take long to ice one down. Meanwhile the bar's glass list is composed of almost nothing but wondrous curiosities, at least for an outsider like myself. Of particular interest is the emphatic concentration on Manzanilla and Finos bottled en rama, or straight from cask with minimal filtration, with the intention of preserving character.

This list is a little outdated - it dates from our first visit in summer 2013.

As anyone who's ever tasting flor-aged wine directly from cask will tell you, a great deal is lost in the intense filtration most sherry producers use to ensure stability and shelf life for their quasi-industrial wines. Bottling en rama is a relatively recent development, inaugurated with Sanlucar bodega Barbadillo's bottling in 1999.

But it's a testament to the challenges faced by sherry afficionados, and to the anti-innovative stances of many sherry producers, that even en rama production - probably the most positive aesthetic development in the genre in the last century - is a subject of confusion in the market. Largely to blame is the helplessly self-defeating habit of most producers to hedge, emphasizing in marketing materials that the wines are very unstable and under no circumstances can age. Essentially they had the opportunity to create a genre like vintage Champagne, but judged it safer to market it as Beaujolais Nouveau.

In my experience, stability concerns about en rama wines are warranted, but by no means universally applicable, nor do they derive from insurmountable problems. It seems fair to recognise the possibility that flor-aging in a solera system administers stresses to Manzanillas and Finos that render them especially unstable when bottled without filtration. But, in light of the olympian fruit health required for a French natural wine producer to successfully bottle without sulfur (an analagous risk), it seems equally possible that industrial farming and mediocre fruit is to blame. Since a given solera contains the wines of numerous harvests, this is a mystery that invites no swift resolution.

Armando Guerra, in the meantime, has come up with another idea. He has persuaded two producers (so far) to bottle their Manzanilla en rama in magnums specially for La Taberna der Guerrita. The rationale, of course, is that if the en rama wines are aging too fast in traditional 375ml bottles, bottling them in 1500ml ought to slow down the rate of oxidation to the extent that it will result in what we perceive as complexification.

I bought a few btls myself.

One night during our last visit to Sanlucar in November the Native Companion and I took the opportunity to taste three sacas of three vintages of Antonio Barbadillo Mateos' totally unfiltered Manzanilla en Rama, which he began bottling quarterly in 2010. Barbadillo Mateos, as his name indicates, is a sixth-generation descendant one of the town's preeminent sherry families, though I gather he is something of a black sheep. His Sacristia AB project, of which only the Manzanilla has been released thus far, is intended to become a personal selection of soleras of all the Marcos de Jerez' famed D.O.'s, bottled without fining or filtration.

The Primera Saca 2014 was predictably the most classic of the three, exhibiting pineapple fruit and a bold, crunchy salinity I've come to associate with the Sacristia wines.

The Segunda Saca 2013 offered a strong argument for letting these wines sit, at least in the short term. It was more resonant than the 2014 by several degrees, constantly evolving in the glass, from candy-corn and marshmallow aromas to cinnamon and nutmeg to a dried flower / roast nut accord.

The Primera Saca 2010 was sort of the counter-argument to the 2013. In that I believe Barbadillo Mateos is making some the most forward thinking wines of the region, I'm delighted to have tasted this soon-to-be historic bottle. On the other hand, it was unavoidably madeirized, with weakened acidity, and a relatively unstructured tamarind-cider palate. (Perhaps it would have fared better in magnum?)

With all this we devoured a healthy sampling of the bar's rationes, including some deliciously piquante fresh mushrooms, posed on the bar and cooked to order.

La Taberna der Guerrita, incidentally, offers what must be the most frightening dish I've ever eaten in Spain: rough-cut octopus, with brains. Nature channels occasionally inform us how intelligent octopuses are. Now I know firsthand !

Two days after our impromptu Sacristia AB vertical, the NC and I returned again on her birthday. (Mainly for lack of other promising options in Sanlucar.) This time we had the good fortune to run into Antonio Barbadillo Mateos himself, who in fact we'd met briefly back on our first visit. This time Guerra happened to have on hand the last of a brand-new, as-yet-unreleased bottling of Sacristia AB's Amontillado Saca 2014, which he kindly shared with us.

It was one of the most affecting sherries I've ever tasted - a sweeping, kinetic chalk minerality presided, with just the sternest hints of apricot and citrus fruit. Barbadillo doesn't identify the sources of his soleras, but he explained this one was from Sanlucar (naturally) and that the wine saw 12 years of aging. Guerra explained that, for him, it was this mineral core that truly identified Amontillado from Sanlucar, in the same way that saline flavours separate Manzanilla from Fino. I had never before tasted the difference in such dramatic relief.

La Taberna der Guerrita
34, calle San Salvador
11540 SANLUCAR DE BARRAMEDA
CADIZ
SPAIN
Tel: +34 856 131 335

Related Links:

A nice summary of en rama sherry production at Sherry Notes.

A 2013 post at Brooklynguy's Wine and Food Blog about the en rama sherries available in the NYC market.

A 2013 post at Jerez-Xeres-Sherry rounding up the major houses'en rama sherries.

I think I know what was going through the Native Companion's mind when she booked us a hotel in Chipiona on our first visit to Andalusia. She likes the beach, and she probably assumed it would be nicer to be 'off the beaten path,' as it were, rather than directly in the sherry town of Sanlucar.

The problem with this reasoning, it turns out, is that Sanlucar, and indeed the whole region, is already rather 'off the beaten path.' If you try to get further out, you wind up conversing with cacti in a ghost town, which is how we spent much of our time in Chipiona. Alone on the beaches, alone on café terraces, alone in the halls of our creepy hotel, surrounded by oil paintings of freshly-killed chickens... The town's geographical proximity to Sanlucar belies its wildly divergent fate vis-à-vis wine production. Chipiona's sandy soils are known for the production of Moscatel, a fortified sweet wine, for which global demand hovers just above nil. Production has dwindled to the extent that Chipiona is now home to just two bodegas, only one of which, Bodegas César Florido, sells any wine for export.

The upswing to all this is that that bodega's current winemaker, César Florido, grandson of the founder, is among the most welcoming personalities in the region. He has a mayoral mien and an infectious enthusiasm for the winemaking tradition he helps to sustain. If he carries on like the fate of the town's wine heritage is on his shoulders, it's because in some sense it is.

The bodega began bottling its own production in 1988 under Florido's direction. Before it had been an almenecista since its founding in 1887. As the rest of Chipiona's bodegas folded, Florido's operation has expanded - the bodega possesses three despachos des vinos in town, and Florido proudly showed us a newly created tasting room, not yet open at that time.

We tasted an array of wines in various stages of completion. Since it was our first visit, I only realised in retrospect that César Florido is among the finest venenciadors I've ever witnessed. The word refers to instrinsically performative art of pouring sherry into a wine glass from a venencia - a spindly rod capped with a tall thimbly cup, used to retrieve wine from beneath a layer of flor with minimal disturbance. A venenciador whips it the venencia over his or her head and pours in a vertical bead into the mouth of the glass.

(I'm reminded of the practice of drinking wine from a porron, something I first discovered as an undergrad in Boston at Ken Orringer's restaurant Toro. I ruined so many shirts that way. What is it with the Spanish and performative pouring?)

Although his reputation is based largely on his unique Moscatels, Florido also produces a Fino and Manzanilla, both from albariza soils. The last stage of the Fino solera tasted from barrel was rich and curry-like, with a nose of dry straw. The same wine tasted from the 5th criadera - i.e. the almost-fresh juice - had a chalky, white peppery personality, along with mid-malo popcorn notes.

Interestingly, although Florido's bodega in Chipiona is, if anything, closer to the ocean than many Sanluquena bodegas, Florido's Fino has little of the beachy saline tang we associate with Manzanilla. Once filtered and bottled, there's little to differentiate it from a Jerez Fino.

The César Florido Manzanilla seems to retain more after bottling: a finished wine we tasted showed greater persistence, and a notably refined nose, with perfumy white florals. Florido also produces a very small amount of Fino Pasada En Rama, aged eight years, which shows promising finesse, with a silvery acid outlining flavours of crême anglaise and tiger nut.

Florido's Moscatels, to put it mildly, are not created equal. I find it's easiest to distinguish them by comparison to the non-Spanish winemaking traditions they most resemble. The Moscatel Dorado is made, Macvin-like, by fortifying briefly fermented juice, after which point the sweet wine is aged in solera. The Moscatel Especial is something of a hybrid form of the above, taking richness from the addition of arope, sort of a vino cotto. Lastly, the Moscatel Pasas is closer to a classic passito wine, made from partially dried grapes, fermented before fortification and aging in solera.

The Moscatels share a sticky, banana-nut-bread character, complicated by what I perceived as a light note of car exhaust... For muscats, they're rather unaromatic. I rather perversely preferred a dry, non-commercialised cuvée of unfiltered Moscatel Florido let us taste. It was fleshy, yet sandy somehow, with a hazy, dirty hue, and a strange tannicity.

Given that the popularity of sweet wines seems unlikely to come out of its half-century nosedive anytime soon, and given the perennial popularity, at least among somms I know, of off-dry wines, I'm surprised more producers of the world's Muscat variants don't make more off-dry cuvées. I would never argue for the extinction of a sweet wine style. But simplistic sweet wines, a category that includes entry-level Moscatels, possess no appeal whatsoever for me. A vin de meditation, after all, should give you something to think about; it should not feel like reading a bumper-sticker.

In between tasting from barrel and from finished bottles, Florido took us on a stroll of the town's nicer beachfront, which we hadn't yet managed to locate ourselves. The streets of Chipiona, or the streets of that part of Chipiona, seemed cleaner and better-lit than their counterparts in Sanlucar, where broad sections of beachfront recall The Walking Dead. I assume Chipiona is a nice place to retire if one's doctor advises against drinking sherry. As it is, though, we soon decided to spend the rest of the trip in Jerez. For Chipiona, alas, has but one César Florido.

Do not stay at the hotel we stayed at.

Bodegas César Florido
Calle Padre Lerchundi, 35

11550 CHIPIONA

CADIZ

SPAIN
Tel: +34 956 37 02 22

Related Links:

N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Taberna der Guerrita, Sanlucar

I take it as a given that I am not part of a target audience for Le Fooding, the French culinary media outlet. If Le Fooding were principally after my clicks, and those of other Anglophones, the name Le Fooding would of course never have been chosen, for in English it sounds unappetizingly like something Jabba the Hutt would demand of his chained servants.*

The publication's name is a mongrel French pun composed of two adopted English words, 'food' and 'feeling,' which I need hardly explain are not as sonically compatible to Anglophone ears. But the French, whose language lacks gerunds, find the "-ing" suffix very exotic, and tend to use it in curious ways. (Cf. 'shampooing,' a noun in French, and my personal favorite monstrosity, 'relooking,' another noun, signifying a makeover.) French is a rather more rigid language than English, and when considered on the level of the individual, I find the free-spirited, fingerpainty way the French employ English grammatical forms to be an inspired form of resistance : a supplementary lexicon not governed by the Academie Française.

In certain cases, however - particularly when mangled English is used in advertisements and other corporate discourse - I can't help feeling it bespeaks a certain myopic pomposity. For such usage necessarily contains one or both of the following assumptions: a) that no one to whom the language will sound strange will ever read it, and b) that it won't matter if they do. Both assumptions betray a rather dim awareness of the nature of the new media environment, not to mention a sloppiness with meaning that is unbecoming of any service that purports to transmit information. All this is on glorious, spell-binding display in Le Fooding's recently launched English version of its website, in the production of which, it seems safe to assume, no native Anglophones were consulted. Word salad? Word soup? Feast away, it's all there.

On YARD (75011), Le Fooding supply some creepy embedded sexual subtext (owner Jane Drotter is half-American):

Grilled veal rump, meat like the "thigh of an emotional nymph,” which is to say very tender...

The New-England bistro (yet so Parisian…) from Jane Drotter, opened in 2008, has been redone with a boost of adrenaline by offerings its American caboose to an English, Nye Smith.

Some tags on Verjus (75001):

THE EXTRAS: See and be seen, Make me hurt

Laura and Braden at Verjus are typically very kind. I have yet to see them hurt a single customer, even the ones who read Le Fooding and come in begging for it.

On Le Comptoir du Relais (75006), a little bondage:

All that remains is to allow yourself to be strapped to your chair by a cream of lemon and basil, meringue and crumble, refreshed in its center by a quenelle of sheep’s milk and blood orange ice cream.

At L'Avant Comptoir (75006), you can apparently eat dwarves:

Hard to decide between the dwarf sandwiches with bacon and Savora mustard, the hot saucisson de Couenne...

On Pas de Loup (75011), a contender for most mixed metaphors in two sentences:

And for good reason: the Merlin sorcerers of this bar with a Scandinavian look and Perriandesques chairs are defectors of Experimental, Candelaria and Jaja… One blemish? You’ve got to keep your enthusiasm in check, because the bill goes quickly to your head.

To summarize: the sorcerers defected to this bar, whose blemish - the bill - goes to your head.

On Le Verre Volé (75010) some turgid impressionistic poetry:

The tide is rising in Paris, eel from Charentes, lacquered with the savoir-faire of a Japanese, electrifying black rice salad.

And my friend David Lebovitz recently observed Le Fooding's use of Google Translate in their review of Pascade (75002):

Most of these examples were plucked at random from about twenty minutes' trawling the site. It was less fun than you might imagine. This is because Le Fooding's greatest obstacle to Anglophone comprehension is not the dotty diction cited above. It's rather a stylistic trait common to a lot of contemporary French food writing, a particularly ejaculatory manner of stringing together phrases maniacally overladen with pungent nouns and adjectives. It's essentially menu recitation, cut with hyperactive attempts at wit. (Which latter, this being France, often contains risible sexual innuendo or ethnic stereotypes.) It is literally untranslatable, because what seems normal in French scans like a caffeinated harangue in English.

In America most food critics are eager to adopt approachable, patient tones to their readership, because, without much academic apparatus speak of, American gastronomy likes to be taken seriously. Readers respond to that. In contemporary France, where gastronomy has been enshrined as an academic subject since the era of Brillat-Savarin, many food critics seem at pains to show, through swaggering brevity and dense, overly felicitous turns of perfumey prose, just how young and hip they really are.

It all makes for fine amusement when it goes through the Google-Translate blender. It's less amusing, and indeed somewhat perturbing, to wonder what went through Le Fooding founder Alexandre Cammas' head when the decision was taken to translate the entire site to (terrible) English. Is it all sort of okay, because Anglophone readers will trust French opinions all the more if they sound extremely French? Or is it sort of hubristic and strange? As a business owner, it seems unwise to take decisions that are quite so revealing about how you prioritize your audience.

In this instance, Le Fooding proves its true kinship with many of Paris' most twittish restaurants, who wish to profit from Anglophone attention, but only to the extent that it doesn't oblige them to provide any extra service.

* (The use of "food" as a gerund implies an infinitive verb form of "to food," which to Anglophone ears would instinctively signify something along the lines of 'to become something's food.')

A depressing reality sinks in when one attempts study of sherry, or, for that matter, of Spanish and Portuguese wine in general: all too often, it seems one passes time studying not the history of winemaking families, but the history of winemaking companies. In France or Italy there is more widespread persistence of microviticulture: of tiny families bottling their own wines for generations, and in doing so communicating something of the personality of the individual winemakers. There is indeed a cultural history to be gleaned in the study of sherry; but it is mostly a story of foreign investment, large-scale acquisitions, and inheritance.

Were its wines not so uniformly stunning, Jerez bodega El Maestro Sierra would still standout for this reason. It's among the few bodegas I know with a truly captivating, individual family backstory - one that continues to this day with owner Pilar Pla Pechovierto, the regal widow of a descendant of Jose Antonio Sierra, the barrel maker who founded the bodega against long odds in 1832. Even back then, the sherry industry was dominated by aristocratic families, whose attitudes towards a barrel-maker joining their ranks is depicted in the bodegas logo: Sierra is shown as a hare escaping ahead of mounted horsemen with dogs.

Today the tiny bodega is principally managed by Ana Cabestrero, who by all appearances maintains the feisty, individualist spirit of the bodega's founder. Originally from a winemaking family in the Ribera del Duero, she took over cellarmaster duties from the bodega's longtime capitaz Juan Clavijo in 2011. Spritely, welcoming, and energetic, Cabestrero cuts an inspiring figure. Touring the historic bodega, which still contains some of the Maestro Sierra's original casks, she relayed to us the enormity of her task: to ensure the painstaking sustenance of some of the region's most illustrious and well-conserved soleras.

Ana Cabestrero, left

A longtime almacenista, El Maestro Sierra only began commercialising its wines under its own label in 1992, before which time I understand that the wines stocked in its soleras had lain dormant for a period of fifty years. This, curiously, would seem to imply that, while its wines have always commanded respect, the bodega attained its current national-treasures status almost by accident, through whatever succession squabbles or proprietary indolence caused the soleras to remain untapped for such a timespan. (This is not to mention what must have been the Kafka-esque role of the capitaz during that period, maintaining casks without selling anything.)

Even today, the El Maestro Sierra's production is miniscule, relative to the rest of the industry. The bodega produces just 8000HL per year. For comparison, Barbadillo in Sanlucar have an annual production of 130000HL. El Maestro Sierra's VORS wines, the key source of the domaine's renown, are produced in runs limited to 400 bottles a year, evidencing an almost perverse devotion to maintenance of reserves.

Cabestero, thankfully, doesn't seem to let the rarity of her wines influence her hospitality. She prepared a truly astounding tasting for us. (This was in rather marked contrast to the rather airliney way we were received at, say, Barbadillo.)

Among the highlights, for me, were the Vinos Viejos 60-year Palo Cortado, an almost outrageously intense wine, brimming with tamarind and curry notes, and the 100-year Oloroso, whose feminine, irish-coffee / chocolate mole accord was by a long margin the most elegant Oloroso I've ever tasted.

The domaine's basic Fino is also worthy of special mention: it exhibits a markedly savoury, old pecorino noes, and its quivering flavours of horchata and sea salt are incredibly persistent, for an entry level wine.

Cabestrero, interestingly, is not a great fan of en rama production, which elsewhere is seen as a great boon to the sherry genre. But she points out that El Maestro Sierra, in contrast to its larger-scale peers, has always practiced minimal filtration. I can comprehend if she'd be reticent to tweak the bodega's traditional masterpiece formula for the sake of what might seem a new-fangled fad. The difference seems one of degrees, and reminds me of when I hear biodynamic wine producers talk down on the rise of "natural" winemakers. The successes of the former category are typically in no hurry to embrace recognition by the ever-so-slightly different standards of the latter category.

Speaking of natural winemaking: Ana Cabestrero was one of the few people we met on that trip with whom I felt comfortable brooching the subject of natural wine. (As a natural wine lover in Jerez I often feel like a Hindu in a steakhouse. What choice is there, but to make exceptions?) She responded by producing a sheet of paper, the official laboratory analysis of the bodega's Fino...

It showed a sulfur dioxide level of 6mg / litre in the finished wine, i.e. impressively low, even by natural winemaking standards. The average level in conventionally-produced wines is about 80mg / litre.

Cabestrero credits the bodega's historical contracts with high-quality growers and its commitment to traditional production methods - but pretty much all sherry winemakers say these things. At El Maestro Sierra, the proof is overwhelmingly evident in the pudding.

The N.C. and I left the tasting fairly beaming, intent on purchasing as much El Maestro Sierra wine as possible in the region. We were subsequently disappointed to find that many of the wines are really, really hard to come by, even in the town of Jerez itself. Therein, again, lies the paradox of sherry appreciation: price and accessibility do not arc gracefully upward, as they do in exploration of the wines of other winemaking regions. El Maestro Sierra's Vinos Viejos bottles, regional benchmarks all of them, are as fugitive as they are unforgettable.

El Maestro Sierra
Plaza Silos, 5
11403 JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA

CADIZ

SPAIN

N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Taberna der Guerrita, Sanlucar

A lot of lovely photos and useful information about El Maestro Sierra can be found at T. Edwards Wine Blog, although one post contains a rather nonsensical screed against en rama production.

What does it mean for savvy young Parisian restaurateurs to advertise their appreciation for post-war cabaret, as chef Marc Cordonnier and server-sommelier Louis Langevin have done with their new 17ème arrondissement Georges Brassens homage, Gare au Gorille?

My dinner companion was blasé about it. She identified it as part of a wider revivalist fad among Parisians her age, rather like the superficial blues revival incited in the early 2000's by the likes of the White Stripes and the Black Keys.*

Gare au Gorille, the restaurant, not the song refrain, is a bit of a Trojan horse in this respect. Perched in Les Batignolles beside the train tracks spanning northwards from Saint Lazare, Gare au Gorille inhabits a quartier I've long considered to be among Paris' Frenchest and most timewarpy, where foreigners are scarce and their influence barely acknowledged. Yet with Gare au Gorille, its nostalgic name notwithstanding, Cordonnier and Langevin have summoned a blast from the present, replete with all the tasteful grace notes of up-to-date Parisian restaurateurism: versatile menu construction, a kindly-priced wine list speckled with foreign selections, and terrific hospitality.

The restaurant's owners previously worked together at Septime, and that restaurant's influence is felt immediately in the calm but efficient register of hospitality performed at Gare au Gorille. The servers even appear to wear the same aprons. (The restaurant's interior, meanwhile, recalls Camille Fourmont's La Buvette in its mid-century refrigerator chic.)

Cordonnier and Langevin eschew the set menu of their former workplace for one composed primarily of small-plates, anchored by two shareable main-course selections.

On the night I visited, Cordonnier, who worked for Alain Passard before moving on to sous for Bertrand Grébaut at Septime, hit both highs and lows. I had the vexing impression that his attention was not evenly divided throughout the restaurant's diverse offerings.

For example, the pigs' feet croquettes with gussied-up sauce gribiche that began our meal were a diversion that seemed to have teleported in from L'Avant Comptoir's menu of silly high-low mash-ups. The bad joke of a dish like this requires some unpacking: it consists of rustic, traditionally low-culture components (pigs' feet, sauce gribiche), transposed into a contemporary low-culture format (the croquette, a relative of the jalapeno popper), served to us in a tiny portion we associate with high-culture. Something like this would work if served like jalapeno poppers are served: in abundance, at a bar. Amid the smartness of Gare au Gorille, nestled in their spartan bowl, they fail even irony, and come across as a sort of tasty hoax. (Ingredient cost: next to nil.)

But this was followed with perhaps the most impressive new dish I've had all year, a variation on tartare enlivened with uni slivers and a double trompe l'oeil: cauliflower chiselings passed for parmesan, while the deep redness of some pickled shallots made them semi-indistinguishable against the crimson of the beef. The flavours were nuanced and seamlessly integrated; it was the rare composed cold plate whose constituent parts became something much more when combined.

The rest of the meal followed the same zig-zag pattern. Bonito with feta didn't benefit from feta (ricotta salata might have been a better choice). And a side dish of pommes darphin was a 5€
latke by another name.

I nonetheless like the overall program of side dishes. It's a clever and organic way to build a meal intended to be shared. Gare au Gorille's dismantling of dining convention is most evident in its main courses, for which sharing is practically mandated on the menu. (Rather kindly, this occurs via text and not, as is often the case, via price point. A squab was 28€, and an entrecôte was 41€, prices that wouldn't raise eyebrows in Paris as individual portions.)

That our squab for two wasn't exactly cornucopic, adorned with nothing more than scraps of sorrel and a few tiny onions, didn't bother me a bit, for it was fulsomely savoury and expertly cooked. I also appreciated the gesture of it having been plated in sections, for easy division, thereby saving us the neurosurgery of splitting squab.

Gare au Gorille's wine program, like those of most restaurants of its generation, is presently a bit limited and unexciting to my palate. It consists of solid, pleasurable natural and biodynamic French wines, unanimously current vintage, presented alongside a selection of biodynamic wines from Greece, Germany, and Italy that would be laughably superficial in New York or San Francisco, but which in Paris scans as broader than the norm. I recognise, however, that in the wilds of the 17ème, I am not a target audience. Over dinner I made do with a simple, steely Riesling from biodynamic winemaker Stefan Sander, and it's squeaky polish neither added much to nor subtracted anything from the proceedings.

So what if I would've drank much more and spent much more money if the restaurant's wine list were more interesting, if the young natural wines we all love were presented in more vintage depth, or were complemented by the wines of traditional conventional domaines who also, as if by coincidence, make no less excellent wine? Is that what I think this restaurant thing is about, money?

To be fair, amassing and maintaining a cellar is hard work, and I can forgive Gare au Gorille's owners for having backburnered this particular task, among the gazillion tasks required to open a brilliantly contemporary Parisian restaurant that succeeds admirably in all other respects.

* Being of morbid character, I can't help being concerned that there would be a full-on Brassens revival amongst intelligent young Parisians right now. It's not like a renewed interest in jazz or folk, genres that saw cross-cultural influence; the hyper-literate, satirical cabaret of the likes of Brassens can be said to have been an exclusively intra-French phenomenon, the influence of which largely stops at the borders of the hexagon. As a foreigner, I find the music curious, but impenetrable; listening to Brassens in particular is like having a pedantic uncle in the room, reciting limericks. (The closest analog I can think of in American popular culture is Phil Ochs, who hanged himself shortly after his genre had been definitively eclipsed.) For young Parisians to identify most closely with this particularly insular chapter of their nation's pop history would seem troubling at a moment when their nation's economy and culture - gastronomy and hospitality included - might do better to look outwards, and begin competing against international standards.

Gare au Gorille
68, rue des Dames
75017 PARIS
Métro: Rome
Tel: +33 1 42 94 24 02

Related Links:

Le Fooding's typical gushy-but-inexpressive blurb on Gare au Gorille.

François Regis-Gaudry in L'Express offers a slightly self-indulgent review from the imaginary perspective of George Brassens, hilarious not because of the risks it takes, but because despite the literary conceit it finally conforms to the prevailing stereotype of tedious French food writing: lists of ingredients.

Meg Zimbeck's blurb for Paris By Mouth was also a bit listy, but gets a pass for not passing itself off as a review.

Bravo to Alec Lobrano, for taking care to mention how Gare au Gorille inherited "the relaxed but gracious serving style created at [Septime] by Théo Pourriat."

I tend to distrust large restaurants - places where, if you scream, no one would hear a sound. Even at the grandest, most expensive large restaurants, one feels like yet another mouth on the feedlot.

Sometimes my distrust is misplaced. In Paris, the Bourse location of Terroir Parisien operates at an impressively high level, for such an enormous, multifaceted complex. And in Andalusia, the most enjoyable meals I've enjoyed in the region have been at La Carbona, a cavernous family restaurant housed in a former bodega in Jerez.

Incidentally, in five years of writing about restaurants, I can't recall ever having used the term "family restaurant." It evokes Olive Gardens. But the term is inescapable when discussing La Carbona. Its size is a direct reflection of the Andalusian tradition of dining out en masse, with several generations at the table at once. La Carbona is also owned by a family, with chef Javier Munoz' mother Ana running the dining room and the wine list with winning warmth and attentiveness. The menu is as broad and deep as the room, but I never look at it for long. For La Carbona's opulent and unstinting sherry pairing menu, at 5 courses for 32€ with serious wines included, is an unforgettably great deal, one which transcends, in both quality and generosity, the entire overwrought, hucksterish pairing menu genre.

Before I lapse into rapturous praise of what the Munoz family achieve at La Carbona, I ought to justify my disdain for pairing menus, which is characteristically manifold...

I have the idea that many diners participate in pairing menus for the wrong reasons. Pairing menus can constitute an expensive way to avoid interacting with a menu and a wine list, and to experience as much service (good or bad) as possible. So pairing menus exert a particular appeal to those who wish to be pampered for their largesse, without necessarily being obliged to demonstrate any familiarity with what it is they are experiencing.

Some would argue that pairing menus allow each dish of a meal to be enjoyed in the ideal context, alongside a wine perfectly suited to its particular balance of acid and sweetness. I associate this microscopic, dish-centric perspective on flavour accords with a certain risible pharmacological attitude towards cuisine, prevalent in overdeveloped nations... The ideal context of a dish is not a wine, it's an entire meal, and meal's natural accompaniment is, at most, several wines, not nine... For a meal at a restaurant is best considered to be a curated expression of a meal, removed from its natural context, which is arguably the home. Severing that connection entirely strikes me as lavish, and unhealthy.

Furthermore, I know from having worked alongside sincere, ambitious chefs and sommeliers that truly revelatory wine and food accords are rarer than unicorns. And once one has been located, it remains a moving target, as both the wine and the ingredients are changing with the passage of time and seasonality.

I remember a friend once showing me iPhone images of the wines he'd been served with the pairing menu at Restaurant David Toutain in Paris, and being surprised to note that, by miraculous coincidence, the wines 'best suited' to Toutain's cuisine were inexpensive glass-pour French natural wines, i.e. the same stuff on offer at 90% of Paris' ambitious young restaurants. But the fact is it's not uncommon for restaurant pairing menus to consist merely of whatever the restaurant offers by the glass at a given time. In other words, it's usually a big hoax.

Sherry, however, has several factors in its favour that help make La Carbona's pairing menu stand above others.

For one thing, all sherry styles save Manzanilla and Fino hold up well when rationed out in glass pours over time. La Carbona can therefore offer some profound gems as part of its tasting menu, like Sanchez Romate's nervy, forceful Palo Cortado, which Munoz serves alongside modest chipolatas 'n' chips.

It's a surprisingly effective match, and counterintuitive in the sense that one usually wouldn't open a Palo Cortado with hangover food. But the keen, savoury hazelnut intensity of the wine demands that level of comfort fat.

A sherry-pairing menu like La Carbona's is also inherently more novel than most pairing menus, since with sherry one is more or less down a rabbit hole of inverted rules. Even artichokes are permissable with sherry, in this case Valdespino's "Tio Diego" Single Vineyard Amontillado.

With a pronounced black licorice character and a mild nose, it wasn't my wine of the evening. But on the whole Ana Munoz deserves immense credit just for the diversity of her selections, in this region where restaurants and bars are heavily sponsored by individual bodegas.

On another occasion the Native Companion and I supplemented the tasting menu with a bottle of Equipo Navazos' unique "Florpower," a bottling of unfortified flor-aged Palomino Fino from the Sanlucar. The wine ferments in steel before aging under flor for eight months in barrel, then continues under flor for two years in steel tank. It's a pathbreaking bottle, for it constitutes an attempt to discover what Palomino Fino and flor can achieve in the region without the homogenizing effects of the solera system and of fortification.

Even the Javier Munoz's more innovative dishes tend to succed. The pasta-like component accompanying the sea bass loin consisted of succulent ribbons of squid.

Let's just say we ought to have shared it among a family of seven or eight. The first glass we had was fascinating - roast corn and peanut tones amid a glimmer of acid - but after that the wine died with alarming speed. I couldn't help wondering whether it would have benefitted from less aging under flor. There didn't seem to have been enough underlying structural acidity in the initial fruit (despite its provenance from the famed Pago Miraflores) to endure the prolonged oxygen exposure. (Think what would happen if you tried to make a Côte du Jura from, say, hot climate Ugni Blanc.)

Disappointments don't last long at La Carbona, in any case. The final savoury course of the tasting menu is an absolute showstopper, a massive slab of a steak, salted to perfection and served with a glass of Sanchez Romate's walnutty, tannic Oloroso.

I'd be remiss not to mention, at the risk of overrepresenting Sanchez Romate wines in this post, the most captivating wine I tasted on my first visit to La Carbona, the bodega's rare "Fino Perdido," a stab at En Rama production that doesn't seem to have been repeated, or not frequently enough... (It hasn't been available on any subsequent visit to La Carbona.)

The wine offered an energetic, horchata-like nose, and a palate bursting with roast sugared nuts and silvery acidity. It too had been offered as part of the tasting menu, an act of quiet generosity that typifies La Carbona as a whole. It's a magnificent place, a benchmark for the gracious service and honest pairing of the region's fascinating, inimitable wines.

La Carbona
Calle San Francisco de Paula, 2

11401 JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA
CADIZ
Spain
Tel: +34 956 34 74 75

A rather strange 2011 column featuring La Carbona by Nicholas Lander at Financial Times. It starts as mostly well-written profile of the restaurant, but transforms mid-text, with very little transition, into an ambiguous account of a heavily-sponsored sherry cook-off. Lander also refers to Equipo Navazos very unclearly as "the La Bota range of wines."

What little information was available indicated Casa Bigote was among the best restaurants in Sanlucar. In our defense, Sanlucar is a coastal town in a relatively impoverished region. One feels there ought to be a splendid seafood place, and it ought to be right on the Bajo de Guia, as Casa Bigote is.

One's expectations begin to decline when, on a balmy night in early June, one traverses the bat-infested ruins dividing that section of the Bajo de Guia from the town proper to discover that the restaurants on the quay are quite deserted. Casa Bigote is almost indistinguishable from its neighbors: a sprawling, two-storied complex housing a bar and a restaurant on opposite sides of an small alley. We dined at the restaurant, which may have been a mistake. Perhaps the bar is best. Why else would such we have heard such praise for a genteel seaside tavern offering acceptable traditional fare in Sanlucar at what seemed like Seville prices?

The most memorable part of the meal - which we tried, without success, to repeat - was an older bottle of Manzanilla "GF" from Bodegas Gaspar Florido, an historic bodega whose wines, from what I understand, have more or less vanished since its sale to Bodegas Pedro Romero in 2007.

Champagne-based wine writer Peter Liem, whose book Sherry, Manzanilla & Montilla, written in collaboration with Jésus Barquin, has proved indispensable in navigating the region, writes of Bodegas Gaspar Florido:

"...[Pedro Romero] clearly intended intended to preserve the labels and the distinct identities of [Gaspar Florido's] wines... However, the reality of the economic depression seems to have imposed its own rule: Pedro Romero is having enough trouble trying to defend its own wines... It seems the case, therefore, that Gaspar Florido must be counted among those bodegas that have now vanished."

In my own travels around Sanlucar, I found myself mildly haunted by the relatively recent disappearance of Gaspar Florido. Partly this was just the old hipster instinct to taste what cannot easily be tasted. But in Sanlucar an awareness of this ghost brand is almost unavoidable; its signs still perch above the occasional bar entrance in the Barrio Alto.

Upon entering Casa Bigote I'd espied a bottle of "GF" Manzanilla among an impressive battalion of other sherry bottles on the service bar. I'm not familiar with Gaspar Florido's lot numbering system, so I have no idea from which year the particular bottling we tasted derived. On the basis of the burnished bronze colour alone, I'd guess it had a few years on it.

The nose was cigar and citrus peels, the palate full, olive-fruited, pungently saline. It was gorgeous, and shared some characteristics with a stupendous five-year-old bottle of Grant Manzanilla I've tasted since. (These bottles, among select few others, are the bedrock upon with my hesitant faith in aging Manzanilla rests.)

The Gaspar Florido was so good we tried to order another bottle. You'd think they'd get a kick out of that - a young couple like us, putting down two bottles of fortified wine in a sitting. Yet whether by accident or design, our server told us there were no more bottles in stock, even as the full bottle I'd initially spotted still sat gathering dust on the service bar.

We didn't press the issue, and took what pleasure we could in the rest of the meal. The house specialty, the town's famed langoustine, scanned quite like good-not-great shrimp, at several times the price.

Fried sea anemones were amusing but tasted mainly of fry.

I appreciated the strict regimentation of condiments accompanying the gazpacho; it was like the fantasy plating of a neurotic or fascist only-child.

Wine smorgasbord aside, the charm of Casa Bigote is in its unselfconscious immobility. The décor emulates a small-town seafaring museum.

A collection of bawdy mugs.

According to its website, the family-run establishment was founded in 1951, only becoming a restaurant with a dining room some twenty years later. I'm more than willing to accept this oblivious pace of change if it means accessing the occasional rare bottle of Manzanilla. I'm still a little skeptical that the restaurant represents the best Sanlucar has to offer. But I might just be an optimist.

(This why I try to avoid using superlatives on this blog. A reader must infer whether the "best" of something is any good on the basis of the surrounding category. Paris, for example, has its own "best burger,""best sushi,""best rodeo clown." Whether any of these delights is worth seeking out remains ambiguous, at best.)

Casa Bigote
Calle Pórtico Bajo de Guía, 10

11540 SANLUCAR DE BARRAMEDA

CADIZ

Spain
Tel: +34 956 36 26 96

Related Links:

N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Carbona, Jerez
N.D.P. in Andalusia: El Maestro Sierra, Jerez
N.D.P. in Andalusia: Bodegas César Florido, Chipiona
N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Taberna der Guerrita, Sanlucar

Some decent pictures of a 2009 meal at Casa Bigote at Spanish blog Viaja y come.

Aggrieved chefs and their supporters routinely cite, among the evils of journalism, the neophilic tendency of critics to descend upon a new establishment and review its infancy, without ever returning to see how it matures.

I more or less agree with this gripe. It's the reason why the public face of an overachiever restaurant like Simone Restaurant & Cave in the 13ème remains frozen in September 2013, when it was no more than a welcoming and simplistic natural wine bistrot with a fine terrace. The Paris press duly reported this, but in most cases could think of nothing more to say besides how sympa the place was. (Whether niceness and decency constitute newsworthiness in contemporary Paris is, for now, beside the point.)

But chef Arnaud Soinsot took over from opening chef Mike Stewart in late August of last year, and Restaurant Simone's cuisine now shows significantly more ambition. For a diner such as myself, disinclined towards innovation in cuisine, it's a development that cuts both ways. What is undoubtable though, is the restaurant deserves re-visitation en masse, and higher, more interpretive praise, for how its owners have taken a desolate streetcorner in a neglected arrondissement and built a little beacon of enthusiasm and good taste.

Gone, at dinner at least, are steaks with potatoes. The restaurant's appetisers now range as far as deer with chestnuts, and abalone in its shell. A lovely dashi-tinted tartare is laced with oysters and cepes.

Main courses, on the night I visited, suffered from overadornment, with a filet of John Dory in particular having seemingly been accompanied by components from every other dish on the menu. A similarly unrestrained noix de veau managed to shine through the laborious surf'n'turf preparation (seaweed and seawater figured).

Such strenuous main dishes would be laugable if encountered in an overdesigned space in the center of Paris. On an isolated stretch of the 13ème, in a charmingly underdesigned neighborhood bistrot, they scan as sincere and enjoyable, the work of a young chef trying to outdo himself.

It helps that the restaurant has an unimpeachably smart natural wine list, longer and better than most you'll encounter in the city center. I leapt for a bottle of Jean-Marie Berrux's "Le Petit Tétu," as I do pretty much wherever I see it, in whichever vintage: it is one of natural wine's remaining undervalued greats, a coiled and saline Chardonnay with more lime-peel vim than a margarita rim.

In the unlikely event nothing on the list takes their fancy, diners may turn to Simone's wine shop, accessible on the perpendicular rue Pascal or via a backdoor leading to a tiny shared courtyard. It too boasts a splendid selection, including rare bottles from savant-ish cult vignerons like Xavier Caillard* and Pierre Beauger.

Neither of those winemakers' wines come cheap. Nor, truth be told, does a meal at dinner at Simone, although with a little abstention one could navigate the appetisers in such a way as to comprise a full-ish meal. The restaurant's commitment to offering quality at the expense of accessibility, in a quartier notably populated by broke students and Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, is striking, and has the effect of lending the place the pleasant, carefree air of a vanity project.

Owners Florent Brannens, Alain Muzzi, and Julien Chiche were all absent when I visited. But nor did their presence seem essential: the wine list is openly larded with great bottles, whether or not the staff know it, and local diners at surrounding tables all seemed relieved merely to be there, at the sort of conscious and engaged restaurant they'd otherwise have to cross town to access.

* I seem to recall someone telling me that one of the principals of Restaurant Simone acts as an agent for Xavier Caillard in Paris.

Restaurant Simone
33 Boulevard Arago

75013 PARIS
Métro: Les Gobelins
Tel:01 43 37 82 70

Simone La Cave
48, rue Pascal
75013 PARIS

Métro: Les Gobelins
Tél :+33 (0)1 43 37 82 70

Related Links:

A very nice September 2013 piece on the friends behind Restaurant Simone in Libération.
Télérama complained of small portions in their positive review of Restaurant Simone in December 2013.
My friend John Talbott didn't like Restaurant Simone at all in September 2013.
A fairly cursory September 2013 piece on Restaurant Simone in L'Express Styles.
Terrific photographs of Restaurant Simone, alongside some hilariously wide-eyed writing, in this 2013 post at Le Gastronome Parisien
More of the same in this May 2014 post at La Vie de Lili.

Another good wine shop in the area: La P'tite Cave, 75013

Don't get me wrong: the Native Companion and I certainly appreciated our visit to Bodegas Gonzalez Byass, which occupies a seemingly Vatican-sized complex in the town's southwest. The canopied courtyards and echoing, dust-blackened bodegas of Gonzalez Byass are as awe-inspiring as any cathedral, and together comprise a truly resplendent monument to the region's historical significance.

Like other monuments, visitors can go on tours of Gonzalez Byass. There are even trains that take 300,000 tourists per year around the complex. This is what we wanted to avoid, of course, and we were very relieved when one of the company's sales directors agreed to meet us for a private visit.

Unfortunately, our visit was unrecoverably derailed by an extended, Kafka-esque scenario that arose with one of the bodega's doormen, who, despite repeatedly assuring us otherwise, proved unable or unwilling to communicate the message that we had arrived for our appointment. It was human error (his), but I mention it because it blighted the bodega's otherwise commendable hospitality in a way vaguely illustrative of the quality limitations inherent in such enormous, depersonalising enterprises.

After we identified ourselves to the doorman, there ensued a wait of about ninety minutes, spent first in the punishing afternoon sunlight by the gate, and later in the silent, air-conditioned chill of the commercial offices, where the lone secretary evinced indifference to our plight and seemed tacitly to have sided with the doorman. I recall we went so far as to show emails on our phone confirming the time of rendezvous.

I don't consider myself an important journalist by any stretch of the imagination, and am usually grateful for whatever face-time the representatives of wine estates permit me. I'm not a buyer, after all, and I don't write regularly for any major publications. But the welcome we received at Gonzalez Byass was inhuman, and all the more vexing for having apparently been accidental. When the company's regional sales director finally arrived, he couldn't believe how long we'd been waiting. Nor could we ! It is an absurd and unjust world !

How on earth, for instance, was I to appreciate the tasting he had really thoughtfully arranged for us in the royal family's former summer residence ? I was choking on umbrage, not to mention the residence's new inhabitants, fruit flies.

It didn't help that Gonzalez Byass, like most bodegas of its size, seems ill-prepared for, or disinclined towards, satisfying the interest of afficionados. We did no barrel tasting, instead sampling the bodega's normal range, something we could just as easily have done at Jerez airport. We were told no more Tio Pepe Fino En Rama was available to taste, as the most recent saca had already been pre-sold at time of bottling. (I first tasted it at Barrafina in London, where it had paled in comparison to Bodegas Hidalgo's En Rama.)

Gonzalez Byass are among the sherry producers who insist that their lightly-filtered Fino En Rama should under no circumstances be consumed after three months' in bottle. Here as elsewhere, the hedgy marketing seems as likely to be a result of regional attachment to industrial standards of consistency, as to industrial viticultural practices and the resultant imperfect fruit.

Significantly, Gonzalez Byass make no "true" Palo Cortado, instead blending Amontillado and Oloroso to produce their "Leonor" and "Apostolles" bottlings. The latter also contains 13% Pedro Ximenez, as though attempting to attain profundity via sweetness. The wines taste a little one-dimensional, with none of the quivering intensity one encounters in Palo Cortados that have resulted from individual barrel evolution.

The high point for me was a reappraisal of the bodega's Oloroso Dulce "Matusalem," a wine I would never have ordered knowingly. Its pungent, leathery nose and copper notes were a fine counterpoint to its sweetness. I found myself thinking it would be nice on the rocks with a slice of orange.

The walking tour of the bodegas that preceded our tasting was more edifying, though I may in part have been delighted merely to be moving my limbs after so long waiting for the visit to begin.

Can you believe these bottles of En Rama are only 4 months old?

The bodega dates back to 1835. It was founded by Manuel Maria Gonzalez, who twenty years later went into partnership with his British representative Robert Blake Byass. The bodega remains under the ownership of the Gonzalez family, now in the 4th and 5th generations. The intervening years saw the firm attain such pre-eminence that its Tio Pepe brand became practically synonymous with Fino sherry. Casks autographed by an amusingly diverse cast of historical personages attest to the bodega's centrality in Andalusian and Spanish culture.

I kept hoping to see a Beyonce cask, but no luck. No Putin cask, no Obama cask, no Springsteen cask. There was a Spielberg cask. I didn't see a Bono cask, but it seems possible.

Present day Jerez has about as many Tio Pepe logos as it does cobblestones, for better or for worse. I have nothing against the wine, which is fine for cooking and indeed preferable for drinking, in my opinion, to any conventional unfortified white wine at the same price point. But I can't help questioning the whether today the role of industry leader can be gainfully occupied by a company that positions its Palo Cortados as sweet wines; a company that (like many of its peers) produces effectively zero high-end product; a company that employs such demonic doormen.

It could have been worse.

Bodegas Gonzalez Byass
Calle de Manuel María González, 12

11403 JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA

CADIZ

Spain

Tel: +34 956 35 70 00

Related Links:

N.D.P. in Andalusia: Casa Bigote, Sanlucar
N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Carbona, Jerez
N.D.P. in Andalusia: El Maestro Sierra, Jerez
N.D.P. in Andalusia: Bodegas César Florido, Chipiona
N.D.P. in Andalusia: La Taberna der Guerrita, Sanlucar

A concise and informative 2013 post on Gonzalez Byass at Sherry Notes, notable for mentioning the company's ill-timed expansion into Madrid in the 2000's. This post seems to be the basis for the company's Wikipedia page, or vice versa...

Some perfunctory notes on a visit to Gonzalez Byass at Alcademics.

I found myself with a late afternoon to kill in Angers on the Friday before this years' tasting salons. With the aim of avoiding drinking at all costs, I nursed a café crème on the terrace of a no-name bar beside a parking lot, where I soon ran into Beaujolais vignerons Karim Vionnet and Jean-Claude Lapalu.

They were toting several magnums between them, headed elsewhere. I said I'd see them tomorrow at the tasting, whereupon Vionnet reminded me that they were presenting at La Dive Bouteille, which didn't start until Sunday in Saumur. For the winemakers, evidently, as much as for me and most other attendees I know, the weekend was mainly a social occasion.

I'm guilty of complaining about this dynamic from time to time. The truth is, though, that the pageantry and partying of the Loire salons are signs of a vibrant community, and ought to be encouraged as such, or at very least, gracefully tolerated. Take, for a counter-example, the Demeter France tasting at Angers' Palais de Congrès, where my friends and I tasted the following morning. Most of the winemakers looked embarrassed to be there, like they hadn't even been introduced to one another. It seemed illustrative of the limitations of merely-biodynamic collective marketing, at a time when even the natural wine off-salons, Vin Anonymes and Les Pénitantes, are metastasizing each year. I missed out on Anonymes this year, in favor of arriving earlier at La Dive Bouteille - a somewhat unnecessary precaution, it turned out, since this years' edition was notably better organised, and seemingly less overrun by local daysippers. After the jump, some scattered takeaways. Slightly more in-depth posts on a few topics to follow in days to come.

The Late Renaissance

The Renaissance des Appellations welcomed two promising newcomers to the Grenier Saint Jean this year: Maison Pierre Overnoy and Domaine Leroy. Only time will tell whether these scrappy biodynamic underdogs will attract any interest from buyers, or attain acceptance from their formidable peers in the ultracompetitive, dog-eat-dog Anjou scene. 'Sure,' I heard more than one attendee sneer, 'Lalou Bize-Leroy can make a pretty solid Richebourg. But where's the pét'-nat'?'

Similarly, the whispers of those passing by the perpetually desserted Overnoy stand expressed an incredulous curiosity as to the identity of the smiley old guy sitting behind Emmanuel Houillon. What was his deal, anyway?

Ahem.

In all seriousness: I didn't get to taste with Mme. Bize-Leroy, because by early afternoon on Saturday all her wines were finished, which seems significant at a tasting attended, to a large degree, by the same cavistes, sommeliers, and importers who in their own businesses work so tirelessly to steer clients towards anything other than great Burgundy.

I did taste briefly with Emmanuel Houillon, whose wines showed the way I always encounter them in Paris : far, far too young. I learned that Maison Pierre Overnoy were also quite afflicted by suzuki drosophile in 2014, losing up to 40% of their Poulsard. Which is a shame, since it means they'll finally have to turn off the firehose, as it were, when it comes to distribution.

I can see the promotional and educational value of including impossibly-allocated domaines at La Renaissance, particularly for foreign buyers, who would otherwise be obliged to spend their few days in France asking where the hell to taste Overnoy. But it does seem like La Renaissance would do an equal, if not better service, by ceding these tables to younger domaines that need the exposure.

Carolin & Nikolaus Bantlin of Domaine Les Enfants Sauvages

For example, my most pleasant surprise of the whole tasting was a lovely Roussillon white by 9ha Roussillon estate Domaine Les Enfants Sauvages, whose labeling had presumably steered me away from their stand during previous years' tastings. German architect-turned-winemaker Nikolaus Bantlin's 2013 "Cool Moon" is a blend of Grenache Gris, Grenache Blanc, Macabeo, and Vermentino, with a fresh cornbread nose, supple acidity, and pure lychee fruit.

Unfortunately it appears to be quite expensive for its type : 18€ on-line. By "its type" I mean "whites from Roussillon," primarily, but I also mean "bottles emblazoned with French translations of Doors lyrics in Times New Roman," which category has also, historically, never really broken though.

High Hopes For Amphorae

Amphorae cropped up in places where one might not expect. Stephanie Roussel, the frank and vivacious winemaker behind Chateau Lassolle in the Côte Marmandais, explained she plans to put her entire production in amphorae the following year.

While this might smack of kookiness and / or desperation, I think in Roussel's case it might help bring a little uniformity to her range, which is presently kind of all over the map.

I liked her black, piratic 2012 Abouriou, partly for its boldness, partly because it gave me better perspective on the one made by her neighbor and complete human opposite, Elian da Ros. But the "Lassolle Triple S," bottled only in magnum and made from three grapes, aged three different ways, from three different vintages, was as muddled as it sounds.

Bernard Vallette

Meanwhile, Bernard Vallette in southern Beaujolais was showing an experimental 2013 cuvée of 100-year-old vine Gamay aged in a single 400L Georgian amphora he'd bought from a Swiss winemaker friend. Tasting the "Jarre" was a bittersweet experience, chiefly because its dark cherry fruit and rugged energy were so much more livelier than in the winemaker's "Cuvée Centenaire," which is the same wine aged - steeped, I might add - in 3rd passage oak. Someone should start a kickstarter to buy Vallette more amphorae.

New Voices In Vouvray

I was happy to make the acquaintance of two young Vouvray winemakers, whose wines I'd recently begun to encounter in Paris.

Michel Autran

Michel Autran was among the few newcomers at Les Pénitantes, which seems like a high honor for a guy with almost no wine. Autran began his domaine in 2011 with just 0,5ha, after having worked several years for François Pinon. As of this year he has 3h80ares, from which he produces three parcellaire cuvées of joltingly acid Vouvray. I lost tooth enamel on these wines, and liked it, particularly "Le Ciel Rouge," from clay-limestone soils.

He also made a terrific and totally unserious Gamay-Chenin pét'-nat' rather mysteriously titled "Arréts-toi à Kerguelen." ("It's a real town," the winemakers explained, no less mysteriously.) The wine was buoyant and bright, with cracking cranberry-currant fruit, and such acid that one forgot the 10g residual sugar.

Later at La Dive Bouteille I tasted with Matthieu Cosme, who, interestingly, farms one of the same vineyards as Autran, "Les Enfers."

Matthieu Cosme, right

The domaine's labels were a little schizophrenic, evidencing a somewhat scattershot, wine-by-wine approach to marketing. Nowhere was this more evident than in the domaine's two sparkling wines, one of which, a méthode traditionnel that spends two years on lees, was drained and dull, the other of which, "La Bulle du Facteur," was a pét'-nat' with vastly more character.

I also enjoyed their still Vouvray "Promenard," which stood above the others in tension and sheer mineral muscle.

Mustering Interest

Les Pénitantes is reliably the most insidery and least appealing tasting of the weekend, being perpetually thronged, humid, and brimming with wines one knows back-to-front already (Puzelat, Breton, Foillard, Lassaigne, etc.) and wines that do not seem necessary to know (the Spanish contingent).

But on some friends' recommendations I tasted through the wines of biodynamic Styrian domaine Weingut Muster, and really enjoyed much of their blitheringly incomprehensible range, which encompasses all combinations of Chardonnay, Sauvignon, and Riesling, along with, for reds, Zweigelt and Blaufrankisch.

As I sense is become more frequent in my interactions with domaines specialising in orange wines, I liked the entry level wines best... The basic Welschriesling (Riesling Italico) and the Chardonnay-Sauvignon-Muscat-Riesling blend "Opok" were both bright, mineral, well-drawn, with an intensity that never overspilled their slender frames. The richer, longer-macerated whites were all well-made, if less to my tastes, and the reds were showing too oaky for anyone's taste.

Silence of the Layons

Philippe Delmée looking sinister as heck. Guillaume Dupré of Paris wine bar Coinstot Vino on left.

If the death of the erstwhile great sweet wine genre Côteaux de Layon needed any hastening, I've begun to suspect that (arguably misplaced) natural wine tenets will soon finish the job. It's a thought that occurred to me a few months ago, when I opened a bottle of unsulfured 2008 Closerie de Belles Poules Côteaux de Layon that had been rendered unrecognisable by oxidation. It occurred to me again at La Dive, where I found myself disappointed with Clement Baraut's brown, one-note Bonnezeaux. (Particularly in comparison to the rest of his oeuvre, which is stunning. He just débuted a really scrumptious, satisfying Grolleau at this year's Dive.)

Of the unsulfured Angevin sweet wines I've tasted, the only one that retained any significant complexity was Philippe Delmée's 2010 "La Grosse Nadine," whose rich, gingerbread nose belied a nice knuckly acidity.

The winemakers I spoke to about this particular pet subject all seemed to imply that, if classic Côteaux de Layon can't be made without sulfur, then as tasters we ought to content ourselves with the sorts of Côteaux de Layon that can be made without sulfur, i.e. brown, tamarindy creations bearing little resemblance to the historical template.

To me this seems like a confusion of genre. Applying a sulfur-free ideal to a form in which sulfur is seemingly a key ingredient is like insisting that sherry be unfortified, or that beer be fermented without temperature control. I appreciate the ideal of sulfur-free winemaking as much as the next guy at these salons. But I get unnerved when I sense the ideal being applied too liberally, to the point of incompatibility, in the same way that it's weird when certain vegetarians inflict their diet on their pet cats.

Yann Durieux & François Saint-Lô. I was hoping Etienne Thibaud would walk by. It would have been like a reggae fest.

Related Links:

My coverage of the 2014 Loire salons
My coverage of the 2012 Loire salons
My coverage of the 2011 Loire salons

With Au Passage currently topping many critics most-visited lists (including mine), it's easy to forget that, before James Henry got involved almost by accident, the extended Pères Populaires family of establishments had evinced no ambitions towards fine restaurateurism whatsoever. Commercially-minded American bystanders like myself might expect that, having succeeded at winning a high-value clientele, the Au Passage team would continue to cater to them.

But as of last December, we have the Au Passage team's perplexing stepchild Martin, an almost confrontationally détendu bar serving small plates in a largely unrefurbished space on windy boulevard du Temple. Named after its genial co-owner Loic Martin, who formerly bartended at Au Passage, Martin the restaurant reminds us that we have fundamentally misunderstood these people.

I think, in the wake of Pères Populaires'Bones, everyone was expecting the Au Passage team, on their own this time, to launch something similarly savvy, festooned with hip signifiers. Instead, Martin is a discreet, welcoming, and forthrightly egalitarian little all-day bistrot, aimed at inadvertent tastemakers like themselves - those who have certain standards, with regards to food and wine, but who don't need to see them exceeded at every meal. In season when quality-conscious Paris restaurant projects seem ubiquitously to open guns blazing with 65€ five-course tasting menus, Martin is gloriously off-trend, and kind of a godsend.

At Martin, Au Passage's chef, Edward Delling-Williams, oversees a menu run by his former sous, Matthew Robinson, a demure American who, rather amusingly, doesn't hide the fact that he'd rather be farming in Auvergne than making small plates in Martin's vibeless downstairs kitchen. Whatever his dedication to the small-plate medium, his work has improved measurably in just the two months since the bar opened.

On the first night I visited, plates were a little unpolished, lacking finish on their punchy flavour combinations. A pile of succulent duck hearts abutted a squirt of mayo. Duck beneath tarama was cut slightly grisly.

It was, however, impossible to complain, given that everything tasted fine, and menu prices were mostly south of 5€ per plate.

A few weeks later, everything showed much better execution, particularly a plate of marvelously tender and crunchy fried squid I shared with a friend one evening.

Martin's wine list remains disappointingly unambitious, given the potential of the space. It's like they just culled a greatest hits list of Au Passage's perennial glass-pours: natural entry-level cuvées by the likes of Pithon-Paillé, Henri Milan, Laurent Lebled, etc. A few less workmanlike selections would go a long way, in this case.

If it's a question of layout space, Martin might consider reducing the lowbrow diversity of overpriced gin and tonics on offer, which, on the first page of the beverage list, momentarily made me feel as though I'd entered a bar in small-town Spain.*

The limited beverage program is less of a problem at lunch, for obvious reasons. Less obvious is the pleasant surprise that the restaurant really shines at lunchtime, when the sun enlivens the otherwise downtrodden dining room and Robinson prepares French comfort food that seems to play more to his strengths. At 15€ for two courses, it's also among the best deals in the city, reminiscent of back when Au Passage served lunch.

The bright, tomato-toned tripe I enjoyed there the other afternoon was the best I've had since a visit to Mazzo in Rome last February, and simpler.

The Italians called the act of impressing without giving the appearance of expending effort sprezzatura. When we encounter the same in France, we usually revert to invoking je ne sais quoi, for in fact we encounter it so rarely here that it has no name.**

On boulevard du Temple, its name is Martin.

* While gin and tonics are elementally satisfying drinks, over-thinking them is inherently funny to anyone with even a passing familiarity with more complex cocktails, in the same way that one tends to avoid theorizing on checkers strategy after one has discovered chess.

** Conversely, we often encounter its opposite - the effortful act of appearing to expend effort. I often suspect this is the origin of the breathy fillip that marks the conversation of many Francophones, wherein they pronounce a word, usually oui, with what sounds like a painful intake of air.

Martin
24, boulevard du Temple
75011 PARIS
Métro: Filles du Calvaire or République
Tel: 06 16 15 70 61

Related Links:

Le Fooding's article on Martin was, for once, mildly critical and pretty much on-point.

John Talbott didn't get Martin at all, when he visited recently. He went so far as to assume there had been "PR" to "lure""Yankee" critics, which is giving the Pères Populaires team rather too much credit...

My friend and editor Meg Zimbeck's article for the Wall Street Journal, incidentally, shows how, in Martin's case, the critics are the PR team. I like the Pères Populaires / Au Passage gang as much as anyone. But by no stretch of the imagination is Martin's wine list "packed with gems," as she rather enthusiastically puts it.

Tasting new releases with my favorite Beaujolais producers is often kind of embarrassing. After saying hello and getting the usual optimistic, yet gnomic replies about the character of the vintage, I run out of material. With people like Georges Descombes, Jean Foillard, Jean-Claude Chanudet, Matthieu Lapierre, etc., just about every wine is so reliably, resoundingly delicious that it's hard to think of anything interesting to say about them. More bloody wonderful life-quenching Gamay, eh? Shocker.

I adore the wines of Beaujolais more than almost any others. But finding reasons to write about them is damnably rare. At La Dive Bouteille this year there were at least three: an old-vine Morgon from Descombes' son Kevin, an extremely-limited production Chénas by Karim Vionnet, and the promising Morgons of Anthony Thevenet.

Kevin Descombes, whose first Beaujolais Nouveau in 2013 was among my favorites of the vintage, debuted an old-vine Morgon from a 1h30 granite soil parcel just outside the family residence. The 2013 showed a coltish grace, with energetic tannins, peppery red fruit, and perhaps a touch more polish than is typical in the wines of Descombes père.

To be entirely truthful, Karim Vionnet's Chénas is more new-to-me than truly new. He tells me he made a vanishingly small quantity in 2013 as well. The vines for this cuvée derive from La Chappelle de Guinchay, closer to the Beaujolais-Villages zone than to the town of Chénas; the parcel shares the latter's sandy soil, but it's thicker there than in Chénas. Vionnet's Chénas, tasted brut de cuve, was brightly floral, with a high-toned voluptuousness that scanned as more feminine than his grapey Moulin-à-Vent, and less wirey than my perennial favourite among his wines, his Beaujolais-Villages "Cuvée Speciale."

The Chénas was a standout in a range of wines that, overall, were much improved over the last few vintages. For me, Vionnet's 2011-2013's felt inconsistent, lacking the focus of previous years. These were mild vintages, to be sure. But I suspect what I was tasting was the winemaker's negotiations with sulfur-free winemaking. Vionnet now affirms that as of 2014, he's been using 1g of sulfur at bottling, where previously only his special ordered bag-in-box cuvées saw sulfur use. Having tasted the before and after, I have to consider this a case of going one step back in order to take two steps forward. The wines are better than ever, and, in the ideological context of La Dive Bouteille, Vionnet deserves credit for his honesty.

Anthony Thévenet, it must first be noted, is no relation to any of the region's famous Thévenets - not Jean-Paul, nor his son Charly, not even Gauthier and Jean Thévenet of Domaine de la Bongran. Anthony Thévenet inherited his vines in Morgon from his grandfather, and trained with Jean Foillard and Georges Descombes before starting to bottle his own wines in 2013.

The 2014 Morgon brut de cuve showed a bit one-note when I encountered it. But the fine-grained fruit on the nose of the delicious 2013 bodes well for both wines, as do the supple matte tannins they share. Also of interest was Thévenet's Morgon Vieilles Vignes, made from vines over a century old, grafted with vitis riparia. Compared to the two other Morgons, it scanned as a little dense and austere, but I look forward to retasting it in a year or two.

Speaking of ancient vines: alongside these nouveautés I tasted an interesting cuvée that was sort of the opposite of a debut: an adieu. Georges Descombes' 2011 Morgon "Vermont" is made from 100 year old vines the winemaker ripped out and replanted in 2012. It's a time-capsule wine, strangely light in colour, with tense acid and a long herbaceous character, the vines' last hurrah.

Related Links:

My other impressions from the 2015 Loire salons

A time-capsule wine bar and restaurant like Le Bougainville, ensconced on the dowdy side of the Galerie Vivienne, perfectly embodies the simultaneous joys and frustrations of living in present-day Paris.

On the one hand, much of the city's grace lies in the fact that, mere paces from its financial center, places like Le Bougainville persist. The restaurant is gloriously unselfconscious, evincing an insensitivity to décor that borders on senility. A piano hunches unplayed by the entryway; garish fluorescents zig-zag overhead beside the bar; an almost characterless adjacent dining room still resembles whatever unrelated shop storage area it once was. Local suits and lost-looking tourists dine on goose rillettes, oeufs mayo, herring salad, roast pork: low-cost village fare, untutored but uncorrupted. Complementing all this is an incongruously good wine list containing just about the entire sought-after range of cult Jura vigneron Jean-François Ganevat, at mysteriously great prices.

But as happens so often in Paris, the scent of mystery leads us to the trough of incomprehensibility.

Daytime service at Le Bougainville is inattentive chaos, and seems to feature actual child labor. I once asked the very young fellow serving us for coffee, and then watched him clear tables for fifteen minutes. I gave up on the coffee and asked for the check. While acknowledging my requests, he continued to do nothing but clear tables. When, after ten more minutes, my companions and I simply marched to the bar to pay, he seemed astonished that we no longer wanted our coffee. When I told him it had taken too long, he protested that he wasn't the one behind the bar making coffees. That is not how restaurant service works, I thought. But how was he to know? He looked fourteen.

Le Bougainville's terrific wine list, meanwhile, reads as though it were formatted by chimpanzees. Aliens encountering the list might mistakenly be led to believe that Jura wine consisted of the following distinct categories: white, Ganevat, ouillés, and red.

To be fair, Ganevat's wines are indeed sort of a category unto themselves in Jura winemaking. Where the rest of the region's greats make unabashedly Jurassien wines, Ganevat's routinely taste as as though vying (often successfully) for Burgundy's laurels. This befits the winemaker's long cellarmaster experience in Meursault. But it also means that - in Paris at least - his white wines are almost invariably encountered too young, in a sort of a pristine, Sleeping Beauty catatonia, often bereft even of the rustic pecorino sardo notes that serve as a sort of diversionary expressivity in other young Jura whites.

It just makes it all the more revelatory when one encounters a bottle that is showing, like the 2010 "Chamois de Paradis" I shared with some friends at apéro hour on a recent evening. Even for a cuvée that reliably shows a finer grain than his other Chardonnays, this was in sing-song form, with buoyant white fruit that blossomed like a showgirl from a birthday cake.

During apéro hour at Le Bougainville, one comes for the Ganevat, and one stays for the lists other charming curiosities, like Renaud Guettier's dark, forceful 2005 "Adonis" Pineau d'Aunis, a black pepper shotgun blast. I had always presumed Guettier's muscular Coteaux du Loir reds would hold up well. Now I know.

Ordering wine at Le Bougainville remains a bit of a lottery experience. Vintages are often wrong, and with one or two exceptions, Le Bougainville's staff know nothing about wine beyond having been at some point instructed to carafe every bottle they serve.

Dining, too, is hit-or-miss. The other day at lunch, the mijoté de veau and the roti de porc came in precisely the same too-sweet sauce.

Simple appetisers are more reliable. The bar's mixed cheese and charcuterie plate deserves special mention for the high-quality of its components.

Here, as in sections of the wine list, one can discern traces of the superlative quality standards that may once have obtained at Le Bougainville, before everyone involved began sleepwalking.

It is almost as though the renowned social stability of Parisian society has had the effect of removing any incentive whatsoever for business owners to self-evaluate, at least for those owners who through savvy or inheritance came into possession of good real estate.

Whether I enjoy Le Bougainville on a given day depends on my mood, for this idea strikes me alternately as a source of entertainment, and a human tragedy.

Le Bougainville
5, rue de la Banque

75002 PARIS
Tel : 01 42 60 05 19

Related Links:

I would still prefer to dine among sleepwalkers at Le Bougainville than with the craven wankers who run nearby restaurant Saturne.

Verjus Bar à Vin is a very nice option in same neighborhood, if one seeks exclusively Anglophone company.

Willie's Wine Bar is too.

Given the tumultuous social jockeying that surrounds dinner invitations during the Loire salons, I hadn't expected to get to hang with my friends Kenji and Mai Hodsgon at all this past January. So I was delighted when they proposed dinner at one of their favorite local bistrots, an unassuming place a few blocks from the Grenier Saint-Jean called L'Ardoise.

And I was more than delighted - astonished! - that the restaurant matched the quality of the company that evening.

L'Ardoise turned out to be that rare, semi-mythical destination for the wine traveler, a marvelous small-town natural bistrot that, like Le Chat in Cosne-sur-Loire or Aux Crieurs de Vin in Troyes, displays more sophistication, humour, and ambition than most of its big-city counterparts.

One typically enters small-town restaurants with expectations at waist height. The appropriate critical stance is to treat such establishments with kid-gloves, because big-city interlopers like myself can't expect to have much insight into the environmental factors and local expectations that influence the service and fare of a small-town restaurant. When traveling through the French countryside, I'm more than content with a half-decent wine list and an edible bavette.

The family that runs L'Ardoise - a pair of brothers and their mother, of whom I met only, David, the wine buyer - proved my instinctive condescension quite unnecessary.

L'Ardoise's rear dining room possesses an effortless thrift-shop chic that would be right at home in the 11ème arrondissement of Paris. Lighting is warm, and, unlike in Paris, tables have space between them.

I failed to snap a picture of the menu that evening, which is a shame, because it was written in a humorously florid style that encapsulated a lot of the restaurant's homespun charm. Ordinarily I prefer plain language in restaurant communication, but the rhetorical flights on this one scanned as a welcome reprieve from the dry, uninformative component lists that dominate most "serious" menus lately.

A pliant and lovely appetiser of squid ink spaghetti with cockles in chorizo broth handily exceeded any pasta I've had in Paris in recent memory.

The duck confit that followed it was crisped to perfection and complemented by an assortment of brightly sweet root vegetables. There really is nothing like duck fat for re-establishing the palate after a long day's wine tasting.

Kenji, for his part, had just finished packing up at La Renaissance des Appellations, where he'd been performing the bittersweet chore of greeting buyers without actually having much new wine to sell. (The couples' 2014 Chenin is apparently fermenting at a pace we normally associate with glacier movement.)

He humoured my impulse to drink local things with our first bottle, a winningly tense 2012 "La Roche" from his neighbor Jean-Christophe Garnier, a fellow Angevin winemaker who has the distinction of being 100% Mai-approved. (Mai is among the most intensely critical tasters I've ever encountered, with an almost psychic sensitivity to sulfur. The best way to bring clarity to natural winemaking standards, which I hereby propose, would be to bestow a little Mai Hodgson logo on acceptable bottles.)

One unavoidable dynamic of dining with friends who inhabit wine regions is that they necessarily are more curious about wines not from the region they inhabit. L'Ardoise's wine selection (which, I'm told, doesn't necessarily stop at the thirty or so wines listed on the blackboard) is divided not, as is traditional, between red and white, but between wines from nearby and wines from further afield.

The wine buyer, David, is a longtime supporter of Kenji and Mai's wines, as well as those of their neighbors like Garnier, Jean-François Chéné, and Clement Baraut. He distinguishes himself among the local wine professionals in his sincere involvement in the local wine community. "It's a time commitment not all the Angers pros are willing to give," says Kenji. "Another thing about him is his humility. He's not the type to tell you how to make your wine - which we actually get from time to time. Not that he won't discuss his opinions, but you get the feeling that he treats wine as a personal experience whether you are the taster or the grower."

We wound up drinking a bruiser of a Vin de France from Gaillac-based sulfur-free winemaker Jean-Louis Pinto, whose eccentric micro-cuvées I tend to find more memorable than enjoyable. This one touched 15% and still contained distinct note of residual sugar, which, to this tired palate, was, for once, not unwelcome.

Later at the bar we tasted something - wine is not quite the right word - significantly sweeter. Aubance based Angevin winemaker Didier Chaffardon, for unclear reasons, bottled a strange substance he called "Confiture," a wine must fermented to just 1% alcohol.

Sugar in such high concentration as here plays the opposite role as the Pinto bottle: where in the latter it refreshed, in the "Confiture" it asserts its own puckering, tannin-like intensity. I have no idea to what use such a substance might be put. But I greatly appreciated the evident joy with which L'Ardoise's wine buyer, David, curates the region's outright curiosities alongside the new-classics of its vanguard natural winemakers.

L'Ardoise

7 Rue de la Tannerie

49100 ANGERS

Tel: 02 41 88 18 32

A few good Beaujolais débuts from the 2015 Dive Bouteille
Some notes on Garnier's wines from the 2014 Loire salons

A 2013 visit to Kenji & Mai Hodgson

On the surface, there appears to be no reason whatsoever for a wine traveler to visit Rota. It is the runt of the sherry towns, almost entirely overtaken, since 1953, by a vast American Naval base, whose 4000 or so American personal tend to favour beer over the regional wines. Guinness and Corona are as easily obtained as sherry in Rota, and all three drinks vastly outsell the town's helplessly unappealing specialty, a sweet wine in the passito / vincotto vein called Tintilla di Rota.

But Rota is where the Native Companion and I wound up spending a few days last summer. We were visiting our friend B, who works on the Naval Base there, and enjoys the perk of a splendid beachfront apartment. We duly beached it up, frozen margaritas, barbecue, and beer. It was almost as an afterthought that we paid a visit to Bodegas El Gato's unassuming despacho des vinos one afternoon, drawn as much by a sense of anthropological duty as by the psychedelic cat mural on the bar's exterior.

We peered into the retail area, which seemed to be shut, or staffed by small dogs. We noticed that the Bodegas El Gato's Fino hasn't the right to the Jerez appellation; the bodega instead bottles it as a vino de mesa (table wine) and refers to it, on their website, as a "Fino Andaluz." In the adjacent terraced bar, populated unanimously by older Andalusians, we nibbled some surprisingly affecting goat cheese, which we both found more memorable than the bodega's Fino Andaluz. But nothing prepared us for dinner that evening, when our friend B led us to Bodegas El Gato's bar, around the corner from the despacho. In a standing-room-only space, behind a long bar, beneath audible neons, its mugging, churlish chefs grilled up explosive chorizo sandwiches and crackling, curlicued shrimp, plates which, while costing next to nothing, collectively amounted to our favorite restaurant experience in the entire region.

I say 'restaurant experience' and not 'culinary experience' because - let's be serious - I can't with a straight face go into raptures about cuisine that, given the right ingredients and a grill, I could probably reproduce myself. It was the context that counted: the smoke from the grill lazily making its way out the barn-door sized bar entrance; the ingenius wastebins perched just below knee-height beneath the high tables; the sun-shriveled local drunks in baseball hats mocking me for being skinny.

Still, as in the case of other simple, near-unimprovable food cultures, Bodegas El Gato's best raciones attain their distinction through perfectly-judged proportions, rather than novel flavour combinations. For instance, in the wake of this meal, I never want to bite into a chorizo sandwich in which the chorizo slice is any less thick than the bread containing it. Searingly hot shrimp perfectly occupied the perimeters of their plastic plate, in a bounteous portion that never seemed to end. With the awareness that describing such a meal as being in any way "designed" is to some extent absurd, I might still assert that some ergonomic genius dictates portions and service at Bodegas El Gato.

Being rich tourists, we eschewed the house Fino Andaluz for the very marginally more expensive, and vastly more delicious Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla also on offer. When that got monotonous (as it can), I switched to a brown ale by recently founded local Rota brewery Cervezas 37.

It was later, on a return trip to Rota, when we stayed in Sanlucar, that I realised how necessary non-alcoholic beers are to a meal like this. The rollercoaster salt content requires beer, and yet the drive home along almost unlit roads in coastal marshland requires some degree of sobriety...

Although it hasn't featured in any of our meals at Bodegas El Gato, I would be remiss not to mention the bodegas'Tintilla de Rota. They are the sole producer of this infinitesimally obscure grape to still possess vineyards within Rota, all local producers, El Gato included, having been displaced in the 1950's by the arrival of the American Naval base. The owner is Juan Martín-Martínez Niño, whose father, a grapegrower, founded the winery in 1957 with compensation from the resettlement. For sake of completion, the NC and I bought a bottle of the joven version at the town's supermarket.

It's still in our fridge, about four sips lighter, eight months later. Sweet wines produced with cooked fermented grape-must occupy what you might call an unenviable market position. With even the world's greatest, most symphonically complex sweet wines having lost their place at the contemporary table, shunted out by diner preference for shorter meals and restaurateur preference for higher turnover, what occasion, nowadays, might ever call for what is by definition a simplistic sweet wine?

Bodegas El Gato recommends foie gras. For my part, I suspect that Tintilla de Rota - and Abruzzo's vincotto, and all other sweet wines produced from cooked fermented grape-must - are relics from a time of long meals in relatively impoverished multigenerational households, never intended to appear in public establishments or attract aesthetic commentary. They're a simple, cost-effective method of continued togetherness, nothing more.

Interior of bar beside the despacho de vinos.

The cheese we tasted at the bodegas'despacho-side bar, however - this warrents greater attention. The Spanish-fluent NC questioned the elderly bartender about it, and he revealed that it was his family who made the cheese, a company called Quesos Artesanos El Bosqueno. It's called queso emborrao de cabra payoya, a cured cheese from milk of the Andalusian payoya goat that features a rind of olive oil and wheat bran. It's low in fat, nuanced and saline, with a tight texture distantly reminiscent of haloumi. We went through several plates that afternoon.

Psychdelic cat mural on side of despacho de vinos.

The despacho de vinos.

Exterior of the amazing taberna.

Bodegas El Gato (the taberna)

Avenida Maria Auxiliadora, 14
11520 ROTA
Cádiz
Spain
Tel: 956 84 04 69

Bodegas El Gato (the despacho de vinos and bar)
Avda. San Fernando, 40
11520 Rota

Cádiz

Spain
Tel: 956 81 02 03

A splendid 2013 post on Bodegas del Gato and their Tintilla at Cadiz Gusta

A good post in Spanish on Tintilla de Rota and Bodegas El Gato at De Copas Con Baco

For better or worse, the fate of tiny 11ème arrondissement caviste and wine bar La Cave du Daron seems intimately linked to its famous neighbors across avenue Parmentier. Inaki Aizpitarte's ubiquitously publicized triumvirate of Le Chateaubriand, Le Dauphin, and Le Cave are like the Great Whites Sharks of Goncourt, leaving the impossibly low-key La Cave du Daron to perform a remora-like function, living off the overflow.

I lived three blocks away for four years, and for all that I appreciated owner Jean-Julien Ricard's varied and intelligent wine selection, I could never think of much to say about the place. It's the size of a sardine tin, comprising just eight or so seats. Small snacks of prepared foodstuffs are available. While Ricard organises semi-frequent events with outside chefs, including Maori Murota (ex-La Conserverie, presently making lunches at Le Verre Volé Sur Mer) and Adeline Grattard (of Yam Tcha), La Cave du Daron's miniscule size pretty much restricts their audience to the hardcore fanbase of the visiting chef in question.

Ricard, too, has a loyal fanbase of young professionals who populate the bar during apéro hours. If I'm quite late in joining the party, it's because his wine prices can be a little high. What changed, then, to make me visit the other evening, and finally discover the charm of La Cave du Daron? Well, in the time since I praised the utility and simplicity of apéros at Aizpitarte's Le Cave, that wine shop has stopped serving bottles on premises, leaving La Cave du Daron as the block's only option for fine wine consumption without the attendant obligation of expensive cuisine. Modest and welcoming, Ricard is well-suited to the role he's found, as the Goncourt local's favorite low-key foil to the brouhaha across the street.

'Daron' is French slang for 'father' - it roughly translates to 'pop,' but with slightly more derisive connotations, from what I understand - but Ricard tells me his father actually drank no wine. It was his grandfather, pictured on the wall of the bar, who first initiated him to wine. His selection nowadays is refreshingly undogmatic: it ranges from natural wines like Guillot's, to more conventional classics from Auguste Clape, to foreign curiosities from Georgia and Hungary, to perennially underrated traditionalist domaines like Chateau de Suronde.

I gripe about the prices, but truth be told, the same pricing obtains at Camille Fourmont's La Buvette. The fact is that small-scale cavistes that double as wine bars have to make up the margin somehow for what they're not making on full-meal service. While I wouldn't order cases from either place, it remains a very fair deal to consume bottles on premises, even when one factors in La Cave du Daron's 7€ corkage.

On our recent visit my friends and I shared a two bottles of 2013 Julien Guillot reds, both of which were in absolutely glimmering form.

Not planning to have two bottles, we went backwards, starting with a Bourgogne Rouge whose 30€ price tag began, as often happens in the realm of natural Burgundy, to stretch the limits of credibility. (I appreciate that there are significant costs and risks involved in biodynamic cultivation and natural wine-making in Burgundy, as elsewhere. But until the genre of natural Burgundy expands enough to offer a drinker's a more complete spectrum of Burgundian terroir, its pricing will continue to invite unfavourable comparisons to that of more conventional domaines.)

To my surprise, the wine was worth every centime. At once limpid and richly dimensional, with notes of ripe cherry and hydrangea.

I was, if anything, more keen to taste the second bottle: a new cuvée of Beaujolais-Leynes, "Hauts de Balmont," from 90-year-old granite-soil vines.

A friend had recently described it to me as showing quite lean at the moment, but in fact this was far from the case: the wine exhibited taut minerality, a tap-dancer's agility, and the bright, chewable-vitamin and cherry fruit of the best young Chiroubles.

Beaujolais-Leynes is a Beaujolais-Village-level appellation, whose distinction of permission to use the name "Leynes" is considered a step towards cru-status. Its high-altitude, granite soils are on the northernmost tip of Beaujolais production, bordering Saint-Véran. I have a special reverence for Beaujolais from Leynes, because it was the source of one of the most memorable bottles I've ever tasted, a haunting, truffle-inflected 1989 Beaujolais-Leynes by the late Jean Corsin of Domaine des Hauts Balmont, whose vines, I'm told, were recovered by none other than sulfur-free maestro Philippe Jambon. (The Corsin was was opened in 2014; I owe the honor of tasting it to my friend Rodolphe Paquin of Repaire de Cartouche.)

At La Cave du Daron that evening, we paired Guillot's promising young Beaujolais-Leynes with no more than a few slim coins of chorizo and Ricard's pleasant conversation. Which was precisely the point. To hell with people who describe high-acid wines as "needing food." Who needs food? Food I can get anywhere. I don't always need food.

I ran into Julien Guillot back in November on the night of Beaujolais Nouveau. This was early in the evening, as I recall.

La Cave du Daron
140 Avenue Parmentier

75011 PARIS
Tel: 01 48 06 21 84
Métro: Goncourt

Related Links:

Inaki Aizpitarte's deafening triumvirate across the road:

Le Chateaubriand, 75011
Le Cave, 75011
Le Dauphin, 75011

The 2011 tasting at Quedubon where I first met Julien Guillot.

A 2012 note on La Cave du Daron at LeBonBon.

brothers in arms: la cave à michel, 75010

les vendanges: champagne jacques lassaigne, montgueux

gone fishin' : le verre volé sur mer, 75010

killer instinct: the beast, 75003

n.d.p. in andalusia: la taberna der guerrita, sanlucar

n.d.p. in andalusia: bodegas césar florido, chipiona

le fooding, and other howlers

n.d.p. in andalusia: el maestro sierra, jerez

blast from the present: gare au gorille, 75017

n.d.p. in andalusia: la carbona, jerez

n.d.p. in andalusia: casa bigote, sanlucar

happy returns: simone restaurant & cave, 75013

n.d.p. in andalusia: bodegas gonzalez byass, jerez

loire salons 2015: la renaissance des appellations, les penitantes, la dive bouteille, demeter france

effortless success: martin, 75011

a few beaujolais debuts

sleepwalkin': le bougainville, 75002

n.d.p. in the loire: l'ardoise, angers

n.d.p. in andalusia: bodegas el gato, rota

symbiosis: la cave du daron, 75011