not drinking poison in paris

If coverage of some of my favorite Paris addresses is long overdue, it's usually because I inadvertently befriended the staff and / or ownership before I had a chance to write anything. It's hard to write about one's friends. One either gushes aimlessly, or, if one is me, one tosses, underhand, a few critical softballs, and soon loses friends. Often it doesn't seem worth the risk. What, one asks oneself, do I get out of this ?

I'm still trying to figure that out. This blog is approaching its 500th post, which, when you think about it, is a lot of booze. A lot of sacrificed lunchbreaks, a lot of aimless travel, and above all, a lot of unsolicited opinions. As with most commitments in life, I'll probably never stop thinking of ending it all.

But I'll take advantage of the valedictory humour I'm in lately to say something about my friends at Le Siffleur de Ballons, Thierry Bruneau's pitch-perfect neighborhood wine bar on rue de Cîteaux, where I can be found at least once a week. For newsiness, I might add that since autumn the bar has offered splendid aged fux-filets to share, triaged over from Bruneau's other restaurant L'Ebauchoir across the street.

Le Siffleur de Ballons' interior navigates the middle road between ringard and too-cool, a clean, contemporary space that, for once, doesn't look conspicuously attuned to its own beauty. There is an earnestness to the décor that I find soothing. It celebrates the simple appeal of well-selected products on shelves, from Christine Ferber's cult Alsatian jams to jars of confiture de lait to - of course - the broad wine selection. The latter, like many of Paris' best wine programs, relatively undogmatic. It consists of about 70% natural wine, which is to say that the other 30% is what most differentiates it from other Paris natural wine bars.

Le Siffleur also has the advantage of having not one wine buyer, but three. Bruneau is aided in the selection by his managers Tristan Renoux and Fred Malpart, both of whom possess a knowledge and enthusiasm that is almost unheard of in a bar of Le Siffleur's dimunitive scale.

Renoux even makes his own wines these days, from grapes purchased from his uncle's domaine in the Languedoc, Château Landra. Pictured here is a Syrah he made in 2012. But soon he'll be releasing this year's wine, a Grenache.

He and Malpart are always ready with recommendations for the wines that happen to be tasting good at a given time; between them, and between L'Ebauchoir and Le Siffleur de Ballons, one gets the pleasant impression that wine discussion never really stops. I see this level of staff engagement as the hallmark of a sommelier-run enterprise. (Thierry Bruneau was formerly sommelier for Michel Richard Citronelle in DC.)

My only criticism of the wine program at Le Siffleur is that in its glass pours it displays somewhat too much consideration for neighborhood cheapos, often leaving me no eminently interesting options outside of bottle selections. Of these there is happily no shortage. Last summer Renoux introduced me to the wines of Christophe Curtat, who at around 40 years old counts as one of the young guns of the Saint Joseph appellation. Formerly he worked in sales of jewelry and lingerie (!) before ubiquitous Rhône vigneron Yves Cuilleron encouraged him to start a domaine. Curtat studied with Cuilleron and other domaines in Australia and South Africa before beginning his own domaine with just 1ha in 2005. Since then the domaine has expanded to 3,5ha, of which 2/3 is planted with Syrah.

But it's his Saint Joseph blanc I found most captivating: 100% Roussanne, it bears the very apt name "Sous l'Amandier," for indeed the wine's keen white floral aromas yield to a decidedly almondy palate, with nuanced notes of honeydew and beeswax.

Le Siffleur's cheese and charcuterie plates are reliably tasty, and make up in generosity what they sometimes lack in star components and plating finesse. (The stray apricots adorning the cheese plate have puzzled me for years.)

The rest of the menu consists of bar snacks, ranging from the serviceable - some tinned mackerel, a daily soup in winter - to the occasionally life-saving, like a sobering ramekin of roast potatoes and roblochon.

The faux filet for two stands out from the rest of the menu's dependable basics. Sourced from La Boucherie du Rouillon and aged 5 weeks, it rivals, in succuluence and density of flavour, the more famous meat slabs up the road at Bistrot Paul Bert.

We'd devoured half before I remembered to take a picture.

There's not much worth saying about a steak in Paris; they're as common as cobblestones. But it's interesting to see Le Siffleur - and, at a different price point, nearby restaurant Bones - successfully recontextualise the bistrot steak for the wine bar format. In Paris, where quite a few kitchen-less wine bars rely on those of their adjacent restaurants, and where alternative fast food is largely limited to dogfood-grade kebabs, the wine bar steak serves a real and useful function, being at once filling, indulgent, and relatively simple to fire. At Le Siffleur de Ballons, it means one can safely sit down for an apéro, and never leave.

Le Siffleur de Ballons
34 Rue de Cîteaux

75012 PARIS
Tel: 01 58 51 14 04
Métro: Faidherbe-Chaligny

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Another reason I hadn't yet posted about Le Siffleur de Ballons is that, right when I was about to, back in 2012, David Lebovitz beat me to the punch. And who can compete with him?

L'Ebauchoir, 75012

It's hard not to have strong reactions to the dense, craggy wines of northern Sardinian estate Tenute Dettori. My own feelings are tinged with nostalgia, because Dettori's wines used to fascinate me back when I worked as a sommelier at Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles. It being California in the mid-2000's, we had a proportion of clients whose palates were accustomed to strong, hot-climate wines, to whom even a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo or a Nero d'Avola would scan as middleweight and mild. (The list was all-Italian.) To such fellows - for they were invariably men - I would suggest Dettori's reds.

The estate's "Tenores,""Tuderi," and "Dettori" cuvées routinely climb into the upper-teens of alcohol content, and they all show a brooding, mouth-conquering complexity that defies any accusations of lightness. Even if my guests proved unprepared for the wines' savoury notes or the various flaw-like zig-zags associated with low-sulfur winemaking, they nonetheless never failed to perceive that something somehow important was occurring on their palates. I rarely had bottles returned, even though the guests had asked for pleasure and I'd served them, instead, a puzzle.

Puzzled is what I remain about the wines, even in the wake of the delightful press trip to the estate in Sennori that my friend the wine agent Emma Bentley organised for myself and several more notable wine writers this past October. Winemaker Alessandro Dettori is accomplishing so much: preserving the island's ancient viticultural tradition, maintaining his family's meticulous respect for their local terroir, reviving marginal native grape varieties, not to mention, of course, making serious wines that demonstrably improve with age. But with these accomplishments comes a final challenge that remains, for the moment, unanswered: how to make these strange, strong, majestic Romangia reds fit the context of a meal, or, for that matter, contemporary drinking among non-Supermen.

What I mean is, if you have five jolly wine professionals on a free trip someplace, and night after night they prove themselves continually reticent or unable to finish bottles, something is amiss. Even aided by the marvelous cuisine of the Tuscan chef of Dettori's agriturismo, Luca Galli, we all seemed constantly to be reaching for refills not of the reds, but of the "Dettori Bianco," a lightly-macerated (1 week) Vermentino that usually shows a more modest 14% alcohol. The younger bottles we drank were bristly, full-fruited, occasionally lumpen - not my favorite style of Vermentino, but honest and satisfying.* From the estate's 3ha of Vermentino, Dettori produces this white, and another, the pleasant but structureless "Renosu Bianco," which contains some Moscatellu.

The estate's lower-priced "Renosu" range is completed by the "Renosu Rosso," which, in a blind tasting of Cannonau with Allessandro Dettori and the other writers (on which more later), I made the rather hilarious faux-pas of loudly denouncing. (I called it "jittery and weird, like a bad Bonarda-Pinot Nero blend from Emilia.")

I might as well justify myself here. To me it seems clear that the grandiosity and power of Dettori's principal wines is directly reflected in the muddled, unambitious nature of the Renosu range, which is composed of the grapes deemed unworthy for the former. (Alessandro and his father Paulo personally hand-sort all the grapes.) The "Renosu" range wasn't exported to the USA at the time I was buying Italian wine, but I do encounter it in Paris now and then. It would be a shame for it to be one's introduction to Dettori. Interestingly, some friends of mine once independently visited the estate's agriturismo, and reported that all they were ever served was "Renosu."

The agriturismo.

Given the exacting care that goes into production of Dettori's titanic principal wines, I can't help feeling some level of Fitzcarraldo-syndrome is going on. Klaus Kinksi's character in Werner Herzog's film attempts to drag his ship over a mountain, and is duly punished by fate for having defied nature.

Far be it from me to imply that Dettori, who practices biodynamy of the Australian school and who uses no sulfur during vinification and avoids it "ninety-nine percent" at bottling, is not making natural wine. But even the most natural wines are subject to the great human intervention that is marketing strategy. In Dettori's case, he builds these maniacally huge, expensive reds, hoping to sail them over the mountain of the international wine market, and sells the "Renosu" locally. Whereas it might be better to offer, internationally, more of a gradation in price and quality, not to mention lightness. To build smaller, more transportable ships, as it were.

That said, I can't presume to know all the factors that influence Dettori's decisions. I am left with assessing the winery as it is, and the wines as they are. The former remains very inspiring, and some of the latter are indeed excellent.

Alessandro Dettori with old vines whose fruit makes up the "Dettori."

The estate has been around since at least the time of Alessandro Dettori's great-grandfather, who planted the 3ha of ungrafted Cannonau vines whose fruit now makes up the "Dettori" cuvée. Tenuta Dettori as a whole extends 33ha. The estate is certified biodynamic since 2003, although Dettori chooses not to push that idea too hard on his wine labels; as with most Burgundy winemakers, he prefers the quality of the wines to speak for itself. (The labels, I might add, belong to a previous generation of Italian wine. They look like sleek Super-Tuscans.)

I'd long understood the estate to practice biodynamic viticulture, but it was only at a tasting in Paris a few year ago that I learned they avoided sulfur use, and that, along with Elisabetta Foradori, Emidio Pepe and others, Dettori were among the first major Italian domaines to have self-identified as part of an international natural winemaking community (at least in their interactions with the French wine market.)

Dettori plows with tractors, feeling the best approximate the traditional method of using cows to plow. Horses aren't strong enough to plow as deep down as he likes (80cm).

Isn't it amusing, how hedgy I get, when discussing natural wine marketing? All I know is that in Los Angeles in the mid-2000's, no one sold these wines as natural wines. That is how fast the conversation is changing.

For Tenute Dettori, at least, only the conversation changed, not its winemaking practices. The estate has always hand-harvested, has never used select yeast. Dettori forswore sulfur use during vinification from 2003. All aging occurs in picturesque sky-blue cement tanks of sizes that vary depending upon which generation purchased them. Some are enameled, others are not, depending on the age and porosity of the tank. Reds are held two years in tank before release, partly, says Alessandro, as a manner of quality control.

When we arrived at the cellar, Paulo Dettori was just putting some Cannonau through the de-stemmer. The free-run juice is rich, basso, smokey - one almost has the impression it already contains a trace of alcohol. Alessandro affirms that he always destems his reds, otherwise the wines show too much tannicity.

Dettori's habit of employing nomi di fantasia for all their cuvées, regardless of whether the cuvée in question is parcel-specific, can be confusing. It derives, in part, from a spirit of protest against the backwardness of a DOC system that offers the entire island the Cannonau di Sardegna DOC, but which places the more terroir-specific region of Romangia at mere IGT status. Alessandro explained that Romangia is home to the largest vineyard area in Sardinia, but that 600ha of it belong to large-scale producer Sella & Mosca, who presumably find it easier to brand their wines as simply Sardinian.

So Dettori's five dry reds, all from Romangia, bear fantasy names. Most distinctive are two cuvées composed of marginal varieties, the "Chimbanta," from the Monica grape, and the "Ottomarzo," from the Pascale grape. I have a strong preference for the latter. The Monica grape shows a tendency towards volatile acidity, and the "Chimbanta" is no exception. I'm able to overlook a whiff of VA in kittenish Loire reds, but the "Chimbanta" clocks in around 16% alcohol, depending on the vintage, so drinking it is like being played with by a young lion. The 2011 had a foxy, tannat-like nose. I found myself wondering how the grape would show if vinified as a sparkling red.

The "Ottomarzo," on the other hand, is lovely just the way it is. Named after Allessandro's grandfather's birthday, it scans, in its youth, like a righteously ripe Pineau d'Aunis, bright with blueberry, black pepper, and saline notes. The 2011 tasted like Jean-Pierre Robinot's "Concerto," if that cuvée's fruit were as loud and Italianate as his shirts.

Meanwhile, a 2003 "Ottomarzo" Alessandro opened was among the highlights of the visit, a nose of strawberry confiture and dried flowers, with a persistent, though relatively unchanging, fruit-leather palate. It reminded me vaguely of certain older bottles of Freisa.

Dettori's three Cannonau cuvées are, in ascending order of price and scarcity, "Tuderi,""Tenores," and "Dettori." I'll admit to having trouble discerning much substantive difference between the first two, although I gather that "Tenores," a blend of the two differently-composed vineyards on either side of the estate's driveway, is considered to be the more age-worthy of the two. Both arrive at between 16% and 19% alcohol, depending on the vintage. Current vintage "Tenores" didn't overly betray its booziness on the nose, but its palate was distinctly porty, with a light rosiness amid the long, full tannins, and perhaps a buried note of VA.

Alessandro rightly declares the cuvée bearing his family name to be an exercise in "culture anthropology," a self-conscious attempt to make an antiquated style of wine. In introducing the wine, which often contains traces of residual sugar, he reminded us that it was "like Barolo in 1899, a sweet wine." Fruit for the wine derives from the estate's oldest vineyards, ungrafted vines originally planted in 1883. The 2011, like other vintages we tasted, was lighter in colour, indeed more Nebbiolo-like, at least visually. It showed a scaldingly hot nose, and tasting it was like being pegged in the mouth with a clove the size of a softball. There was, nonetheless, a widescreen aspect to the wine, a sense of grandeur, some cedary complexity.

I can admit to being drawn to the courage it takes for a winemaker to produce a wine as an exercise in cultural anthropology. The greatest wines are always vehicles for cultural information, transmitting not just the skill of the winemaker or the characteristics of the vintage, but the whole pre-industrial tradition of wine and cuisine in the life of the surrounding region. (I'm reminded of Mâcon winemaker Julien Guillot's terrific "Cuvée 910," which reprises the ancient Cluny monk winemaking practice of blending Chardonnay into their Gamay and Pinot Noir.)

Happily, the 2000 vintage of "Dettori" easily lived up to its ambitious narrative. Its cigar-like nose, its notes of dark chocolate, sweet tea, and beef bouillon, its relative balance on the palate went a long way towards illuminating an ideal role for Dettori's strange creations. It was assuredly a vino di meditazione, something for the end of a meal, or the end of an evening - but one which could provide enough to talk about until morning. (Provided one could still form sentences after a few glasses.)

* A magnum of 2004 "Dettori Bianco" we consumed out on the town one night was significantly better. A cooler vintage, it showed a more Ligurian acid profile, with a superfine dried coconut nose and light vegetal tones.

Tenute Dettori
Badde Nigolosu, S.P. 29 Km 10

07036 SENNORI SS

ITALY
Tel: +39 079 512772

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If my own reporting on Tenuta Dettori seems heavy on interpretation and light on facts, blame my friend Bert Celce of the peerless Wine Terroirs blog, who got to most of the latter first in his excellent post.

Chef Christophe Philippe's new Bastille-adjacent restaurant Amarante, like the cacklingly under-designed eponymous restaurant he maintained for a decade in the shadow of the Panthéon, is open Sundays and Mondays, the better to cater to his principal clientele, his fellow restaurant folk. On any other restaurant's off-night, he entertains tastemaker regulars like food writer Bruno Verjus, Le Baratin's Raquel Carena and Philippe Pinoteau, and Autour d'Un Verre's Kevin Blackwell. When my friend and editor Meg Zimbeck and I visited last Sunday, we ran smack into our friend Thomas Legrand, formerly of La Muse Vin, now manning the decks at La Crêmerie. Philippe, lumbersome of gait and shy as a shoe, is the unlikely mascot of a certain very discerning milieu.

Why should this milieu particularly admire his cuisine, among all the others on offer in Paris' present-day cornucopia? Well, who but his fellow chefs and restaurateurs, those who endure the pressure to present an impression of novelty with each new restaurant and each day's menu, are as likely to have realised, like Philippe, that the search for novelty in cuisine is futile?

Philippe is among the few chefs courageous enough to live the implications of that realisation. At Amarante he offers the exact same pointedly-unfussy, rigorously-sourced bistrot menu and the same well-priced natural wine list as at his former establishment. Amarante is duly aglow with the same monkish sense of serenity and confidence, albeit with slighter better lighting, and a less hideous font on the windowpane.

Part of the suspense of my first few meals at the old Restaurant Christophe was wondering whether the chef himself was in on the joke - whether he saw the humour in how he presented such simple country cuisine with such stern aesthetic rigor. We are used to encountering simple country cuisine with a side of dowdiness, in the form of curled parsley garnishes or hopelessly outdated pseudo-Asian flourishes. Whereas at Restaurant Christophe, a titanic, pliant sweetbread arrived alone on a white plate, like an invitation to consider its sublime beige form. It was followed sometime later by its accompaniment, some mashed potatoes hypersaturated with butter.

The only change at Amarante is that Philippe, in a concession, perhaps, to his dishwasher, puts everything on the same plate. So, yes, I'd say he gets the joke. Given the opportunity to change, to introduce himself to a new quartier with a cuisine livened up to suit the times, he has decided to stay his damn self.

I applaud the decision. If he could get us to cross town for his cuisine before, he must have been doing something right.

It's how little Philippe actually does that constitutes his appeal. At a time when unprecedented ease of information transfer has resulted in constant deafening congratulation of anything even momentarily perceived to be new, its rare to find a classically-trained chef who works with such awesome restraint.

Before opening his former restaurant at the age of 24, he'd worked for Anne-Sophie Pic, as well as for Alain Ducasse at Paris'Hotel Plaza Athenée, and at Le Cinq. His work ever since has felt like a pointed rejection of the meals he prepared in that era. A homely appetiser of endives and ham feels spare, even by Phillippe's standards, until one tastes the immensity of flavour he has managed to pack into the endives.

Philippe's wine list, meanwhile, retains its reputation for bargains. Across the board, bottles by natural wine standbys like Emmanuel Lassaigne, Jean Foillard, Sebastien Riffault, and Nicolas Carmarans are offered at prices just north of what one would pay at your average cave-à-manger.

At the time we visited, the restaurant had only been open a month, however, and Philippe hadn't foreseen that every industry regular would alight upon the same unusual bottle of Julie Balagny's Fleurie. Philippe's experienced new dining room manager Mouloud Haddaden informed us they were fresh out. (Therein lies the double-edged aspect of being a restaurant industry hangout. It requires a really extremely interesting wine list, which he hasn't yet had time to assemble at Amarante. For an example of what I'm talking about, visit the new Pigalle location of Entrées des Artistes, where co-owner Edouard Vermynck's list is a serious geek-out cornucopia of nil-production curiosities.)

We settled for a ripe but middleweight 2012 Hautes-Côtes de Beaune "Orchis Mascula" by Claire Naudin. It wasn't yet in a closed stage, thankfully, but nor did its slightly coarse dark cherry and currant fruit have much length or impact that night.

Later with Philippe we shared an extremely agreeable bottle of Alain Allier's "Pitchounet," a blend of 80% Cinsault and 20% Grenache that in 2013 shows the slightest fillip of residual sugar amid its energetic, red bonbon fruit.

At that point, a dollop of Philippe's famously intense chocolate mousse seemed like an unmissable ritual.

I suspect it's one I'll be repeating very often, now that Christophe Philippe has crossed the Seine.

For there's nothing I'd love more than for the unwavering focus that he brings to traditional recipes to be rewarded with the mass realisation, among the present generation of Paris diners, that the old has become rarer than the new, and is proportionately more gratifying to discover.

Amarante
4, rue Biscornet
75012 PARIS
Métro: Bastille
Tel: 09 50 80 93 80

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A positive, but slightly puzzling review of Amarante by Alexander Lobrano, who for paragraphs on end proudly holds up Christophe Philippe's cuisine as a counter-argument to a litany of bad Paris restaurant trends, before pronouncing that he is "a cook, not a chef." I see what Lobrano was getting at, and he's not wildly off the mark, but the line can't help but read like a dagger of faint praise.

Wendy Lyn's brief and effective summary of Amarante's charms at The Paris Kitchen.

François Régis-Gaudry endorsed Amarante in L'Express last month.

Gilles Pudlowski lays it on a bit thick when he applauds Amarante's dining room for it's "spirit and gaiety."

A kind note on Amarante by Bruno Verjus, who isn't kidding when he cites the former Restaurant Christophe as one of his favorite restaurants. I first met Verjus there.

Christophe Philippe's former restaurant, Restaurant Christophe

A friend who edits a fashion magazine once said to me, apropos of my blog, "I love it. But I never have any idea what you're talking about or whether you like a place. Could you just put a rating at the top or something?"

I've never been tempted to do this, because it would imply a hierarchical order to restaurant experiences that simply isn't there. I have however long been tempted to publish a running list of the Paris restaurants to which I find myself returning most often.*

In pride of place on this list, lately, is YARD, Jane Drotter's ever-evolving jewel of a bistrot by Père Lachaise. The cuisine used to be homey and neighborly under chef Fabrice Mellado. Then Australian chef Shaun Kelley arrived in spring of last year and emblazoned the address in the Paris dining firmament by dint of his ultra-contemporary kitchen smarts. Kelly passed like a comet, however, moving on too soon to make much impact, and since last November, YARD's kitchen has been run by young British chef Nye Smith. Belying his youth, and a résumé includes stints at London hotspots Moro and Koya, Smith's cuisine at YARD is neither precocious nor internationalist. Less austere than that of his predecessor, perceptibly more pleasure-oriented, it strikes a balance between sophistication and accessibility that couldn't be better suited to YARD. I think it's this rare synergy, combined with Drotter's expanding natural wine list and peerless hospitality, that makes each visit a uniquely enjoyable experience.

* List duly included after the jump.

Two very different appetizers offer a gloss of Smith's stylistic versatility. On the one hand you have tender smoked trout with horseradish and sliced beet, a spare and modest dish whose only gestures at innovation (for Paris) are the Slavic wink of the horseradish, and the fact that it is not salmon.

On the other hand Smith is wont to propose gloriously uncomposed dishes like a generous salad of veal ribbons, fennel, and green apple. Its flavours were as harmonious as its presentation was cacophonic, and it captured the charm of kitchen-thrift, of repurposed components, that one finds in the best staff-meals.

Meanwhile, a lamb shoulder with carrots and harissa I had back in January remains the loveliest dish I've consumed all year. In its perfect crisp, in its addictively succulent fat, in its sweetly-spiced accompaniments, it was an absolute tour-de-force for Smith's talents.

I've since learned that pretty much all meat leaving his kitchen does so at perfect temp, with nary an inedible knuckley-bit. It's worth remarking too that lamb with harissa is by no means an innovative or showy dish; it succeeds purely on the strength and sensitivity of the execution. An affable eccentric with a penchant for sporting dandyish suits in his off-time, Smith seems refreshingly free of the impulse to impress fellow chefs with exotic ingredients or daring plating.

Drotter's wine list, meanwhile, keeps growing. Where it was once barely half a page long, it's now begun to show a some breadth.

Drotter has embraced the youthful vanguard of France's natural wine scene, working with many winemakers represented in Paris by agents Fleur Godart and Clovis Ochin. This has its drawbacks, in that the pair's wines have become somewhat ubiquitous in young restaurants in east Paris. But Drotter's support pays off in healthy allocations of the stars of each portfolio, namely François Saint-Lô and Patrick Bouju, respectively. I admit to having somewhat overindulged in my share of the latter's stunning Auvergnat Chardonnay, a cuvée entitled "The Blanc," whose oxidative heft is no barrier to its nervy acid, its vivid tropical fruit or its saline tang. It's a perennial favorite, easily surpassing the whites of Bouju's Auvergnat peers, and I wish there were more of it.

Enough, say, for it to feature in all of my increasingly frequent visits to YARD.

Someone explain to me how the pies at YARD have stayed so supremely excellent through the chef change?

Yard
6 Rue de Mont-Louis
75011 PARIS
Tel: 01 40 09 70 30

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A 2012 visit to Emmanuel Lassaigne

A summer 2014 visit to Emmanuel Lassaigne

Harvesting with Ludwig Bindernagel in the Jura in 2012

Paris has streets that hide in plain sight - overlooked byways that, due to poor sun exposition or traffic redundancy, get circumvented by pedestrians. The forever-shaded length of rue de Chateau d'Eau north of République is one. Another is the Aligre-adjacent rue de Prague, the quiet side street where French culinary journalist Bruno Verjus opened his ambitious restaurant Table in 2013. Despite receiving praise from Verjus' fellow journalists, Table still has its namesakes available most nights, partly due to its discreet location.

Similarly, the Paris natural wine scene has certain esteemed personalities that seem to bend the limelight whenever it nears them, and disappear. Natural wine as we know it in Paris - and increasingly, worldwide - was shaped in its adolescence by the palates of low-key dégustateurs with zero flair for self-promotion: people like La Cave de l'Insolite's Michel Moulherat, now at Issy-les-Mouleaux's La Poudrière, or Olivier Camus, whose struggling Belleville restaurant Le Chapeau Melon is an abandoned goldmine of old bottles.

Another such quietly influential personage is Franck Carré, formerly of La Cave des Papilles and Café Trama. Four months ago Carré opened, in partnership with Bruno Verjus, Table à Côté, a cave-à-manger so discreet and uncommercial as to make one suspect wine sales are secondary to some private creative endeavor requiring office space. (Perhaps he is writing a novel?) Table à Côté seats six on rue de Prague's forgotten sidewalk, and a dozen more inside on a leaden communal table. The menu consists of generous portions of highly-pedigreed meats and cheeses. The only real draw is Carré himself, whose long experience is evident in a slender wine selection containing bottles to marvel the most jaded palate. The other night, for instance, he introduced me to the apotheosis of pineau d'aunis.

It was the most sublime little wine I've tasted all year: Philippe Chidaine's 2013 "Bois Freslon," a Vin de France made from half a hectare of biodynamically-farmed pineau d'aunis near Ternay in the Loir-et-Cher.

Tasting it was a curious experience, because a few weeks ago I'd heard just this sort of wine described in a conversation with my part-time négoçiant friend Chris Santini of Santini Frères. Santini had had a disappointing experience with some pineau d'aunis that had changed drastically after a magnificent initial tasting. His description of the initial tasting articulated a certain pineau d'aunis ideal - perfumey, reddish-orange in colour, low-alcohol, exotic as all get-out - that I didn't fully understand at the time. I'd told him that most of the quality pineau d'aunis I'd tasted had been more extracted than that. (Renaud Guettier's, for example.)

Loire winemaker Jean-Pierre Robinot, in a separate conversation, compared the grape to Pinot Noir, a description I still don't find convincing, although wine writer Richard Kelley echoes it in his impressively thorough writing on the grape. (The grapes both yield aromatic wines, light in colour, but the similarities seem to stop there, and one would never confuse one for the other. Pineau d'aunis's aromas are more savoury, its textural grain more evident, than the comparatively polished and cherried pinot noir.) In another separate conversation, California winemaker Doug Shafer found the wine's black-peppery nose notably syrah-like. Indeed, the more extractive iterations of the grape can scan as a sort of black-hearted, spicy Northern syrah.

I relayed all this to Carré, who gave credit to Guettier's pineau d'aunis, but considered Philippe Chidaine's wine to be, in stylistic terms, a truer expression of the grape's potential. Tasting the latter, I couldn't agree more. "Bois Freslon" is a beguiling, mysterious creation, its soft palate of dried roses and strawberry belied by a finely-etched aromas of gun flint, incense, and baseball mitt. Misty, brick-red, with 11° alcohol, the wine was like a cross between fresh Beaujolais tout court and 1950's Barbaresco.

Philippe Chidaine - no relation to François - is a Paris-based management consultant who apparently tends his vines only part-time. "Bois Freslon," his only wine, retails for 13€. With wines so brilliant and inexpensive, it's easy to overlook Table à Côté's somewhat extravagant 10€ corkage fee.

Menu items aren't inexpensive either, but with an exacting gourmand like Verjus involved, their fine provenance is assured, and the hefty portion sizes seem to indicate Carré is doing his best to give bang for buck. A football-sized portion of rillettes de porc preceeded a rabbit terrine that seemed to have included the entire cast of Watership Down.

We sat sawing at that terrine for the duration of a few bottles the other evening, greatly enjoying, with each new selection, Carré's sagacious commentary. It's what's lacking in the present-day profusion of natural wine in Paris. In the 10ème, 11ème, and 12ème arrondissements, there must be a hundred establishments where I can consume a good bottle of natural wine. But there are no more than a dozen where I can learn anything about it.

Table à Coté
3, rue de Prague
750012 PARIS
Métro: Ledru-Rollin
Tel: 01 43 43 12 26

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Table, 75012

Franck Carré's former workplaces:

La Cave des Papilles, 75014
Café Trama, 75006

A terrific discussion of Pineau d'Aunis from Richard Kelley, who almost visited Philippe Chidaine.

I credit former La Cave de l'Insolite proprietor Michel Moulherat for introducing me to natural wine. His wasn't the closest wine shop to my old apartment on a loud, leery intersection on rue Saint Maur. But it was the closest wine shop staffed by someone who was both well-informed and willing to share his knowledge. I'd often stop by on the way home from work - but never if I were in a hurry, because Moulherat's voluble, Irish-accented conversation and the bevy of bottles he invariably opened could quickly take up much of an evening.

Then a few years ago Moulherat sold La Cave de l'Insolite to some earnest young restaurateurs. He did a spell consulting on wine for fine restaurant wholesalers Terroirs d'Avenir. I don't know what else he did. He kinda fell off the map.

So I was delighted to learn recently that Moulherat is back in front-of-house these days, running the wine program at La Poudrière, a homey new natural wine bistrot and cave-à-manger tucked in a railway arch in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Where the hell is Issy-les-Moulineaux? the overwhelming majority of readers might reasonably ask. It's the southern terminus of the Métro line 12. There's a Museum of Playing Cards there, which I guess makes two reasons to visit, counting La Poudrière.

Among Paris wine collectors the town is known for its private cellar facilities, quarried into the local chalk. It was famously the site of a terrorist car bomb attack during the era of the Algerian war. Nowadays Issy also functions as an office park, for the like of France 24, Canal +, and Coca Cola France. Walking from Mairie d'Issy to La Poudrière, one perceives Paris and its historical construction petering out block by block, being replaced first by squat rows of semi-detached houses and shut cafés, then by monolithic new housing units resembling lunar colonies. The effect is like racing into a very tacky future.

La Poudrière owners Fabrice Mury and Pierre Chartron signed the lease for the restaurant as far back as 2012. But their business plan was contingent upon completion of residential housing nearby, which ran far behind schedule. So Mury, who'd previously been working at L'Ecir Café in the 14ème, ran Le Poule au Pot in the 7ème for two years as a stopgap project. He and Chartron finally opened La Poudrière in February 2015.

It's a conscientious, unpretentious, well-groomed cave-à-manger. There's a terrific terrace, if one doesn't mind a panoramic view of nothing. Moulherat has helped them round up a good selection of youthful, low-sulfur natural winemakers, with a particular emphasis on Auvergne.

There aren't any heavy-hitter bottles, nothing worth crossing town for, but that seems appropriate for the neighborhood and the clientele. (Even in the center of Paris, enlightened restaurants must go to great lengths to reassure the mouse-like public that good taste is not inherently snobbish or expensive. Presumably this is why La Poudrière contains a foozball table.)

The restaurant's kitchen is run by Jaume Morera, who previously worked at Akrame and Jour de Fete. I can only speak of lunch service, but the cuisine is well-sourced, satisfying, and extremely inexpensive by Parisian standards.

A highlight was a refreshing white beet and sobacha soup, which went down like a kind thought.

We shared a bottle of Vincent & Marie Tricot's 2013 "Petit Rouge de la Côte Ouest," an Auvergnat gamay that showed too much volatile acidity for my tastes. I have a notion that the rising cult status of the wines of Patrick Bouju and Pierre Beauger has had a "rising tide lifts all boats" effect for Auvergnat natural wine, which would help explain the recent popularity of the Tricots' wines.

In truth there is no reason to incite a stampede of fine-diners to Issy-les-Moulineaux. (Nor would such a thing be possible.) The reason to visit La Poudrière, or to at least consider visiting La Poudrière, is cultural anthropological.

Americans in Paris like myself tend to assume, without really meaning to, that most quality establishments here open with us - our money and our international press apparatus - at least partly in mind. We assume, without really meaning to, that Parisians, like ourselves, must seek out contact with other cultures. We think: if a tree falls in Paris, and the New York Times doesn't hear a sound, did it really happen?

We are, of course, totally mistaken. It is our defining feature.

I asked Mury why he opened in Issy-les-Moulineaux, thinking he'd explain it was an up-and-coming neighborhood. Instead he replied in earnest that it was because he lived right nearby. Moulherat also lives close by. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a short commute.

La Poudrière, a tasteful Paris-adjacent natural wine spot where tourists never tread, is a small reminder that French natural wine became a globally influential phenomenon to some extent despite itself. For every Racines NY, there is a La Poudrière, where natural wine remains an intra-French phenomenon, one which, like many other intra-French phenomena, evinces very little awareness of being regarded. In the worst instances, this innocence comes at the expense of service standards and general professionalism. In the best - and La Poudrière is indeed one of the best - it is a lesson in charm and sincerity, something to mull over on the long Métro journey home.

La Poudrière
58, promenade du Verger
92130 ISSY-LES-MOULINEAUX
Métro: Mairie d'Issy

Tel: 01 46 45 87 29

Related Links:

The old La Cave de l'Insolite... (I'll admit to not really liking what it has become. Under the new proprietors, it's a dopey downmarket restaurant with helplessly uninformed staff who try their best to serve natural wine.)

François Régis-Gaudry's enthusiastic review of La Poudrière in L'Express, the comment section of which rather hilariously illustrates the challenges of opening a quality-oriented restaurant in those parts of greater Paris that have been left to cheapo greater-Parisians.

Tucked among the fulsome green hills of Sagy-le-Haut is the cellar of Julien Guillot, the charming third-generation winemaker of biodynamic Mâconnais domaine Clos des Vignes du Maynes. Before returning to run the domaine in his late twenties, Guillot, who is of telegenic height and fresh-faced in his forties, had a career as an actor in France. He is conspicuously good at marketing his wines. Their prices in Paris and the US testify to this. His Bourgogne rouge "Cuvée Auguste" costs more than your average Marsannay.

What Clos des Vignes du Maynes' appellations lack in grandeur is made up for in the domaine's unimpeachable history and winemaking acumen. Julien's grandfather, Pierre Guillot, practiced a nascent version of organic viticulture ever since purchasing the domaine in 1954. Later, Julien's father Alain was instrumental in helping get the agriculture biologique (organic) logo approved by the French government in 1984. Julien, for his part, initiated the domaine's conversion to biodynamic viticulture in 1998. Upon hearing Guillot recount this in the anteroom of his cellar, my friend C posed a great question: "What did people in the region call 'organic' before 'organic' existed?"

Guillot grinned, and with the confidence that comes from having been right, replied, "Les conneries de Guillot," or 'Guillot's bullshit.'

I've been a fan of les conneries de Guillot since first encountering Julien Guillot and his wines at a tasting at Quedubon, in Paris' 19ème arrondissement, in 2011. His Mâcon Cruzilles "Cuvée 910," in particular - an attempt to recreate the wine style of the Cluny monks who first cultivated the area, by blending pinot noir and gamay with chardonnay - struck me as prescient at a time when consumer tastes are finally beginning to awaken to lighter, more ethereal wines. It's a wine that, beyond tasting scrumptious, manages to embody the central argument of the natural wine movement: that, far from being newfangled, it constitutes a return to preindustrial aesthetics of winemaking.

The Guillot estate is well-suited to advance such claims. Its oldest plots, like the chardonnay vineyards which yield the cuvée "Aragonite," have been cultivated as vineyards almost continuously since the 9th century, until they were abandoned during the era of phylloxera. The vineyards have never been treated pesticides or herbicides, and have always been replanted using massal selection.

Interestingly, the first room one visits, chez Guillot, is the room where the winemaker ages his Marc de Bourgogne.* By chance my friend C happened to be very interested in marc production at that moment. Guillot's eyes lit up when C began asking rather technical questions about marc production. Guillot's marc operation contains numerous sizes of barrel, of diverse providence. Of a barrel of a certain size, he opines that the barrel drinks, on average, ten litres of the marc as it ages. He makes so little of the stuff he sells it only at the domaine. He explained that he was soon to move his marc production to a larger, more humid facility, because when the air is too dry, the barrels absorb more of the marc.

Guillot was pressed for time when we visited, so we hustled into his tasting room, a little cellar annex area back-lit with warped, antique glass bottles in various colours: garnet, amber, lizard-green. He was pressed for time because he was to receive a bachelorette party at 2pm. The mind reels. Who are these young maidens who celebrate by traipsing around the pays Mâconnais tasting biodynamic chardonnay? We had planned to attend a tasting in Leynes later that day, otherwise I would have volunteered to stay.

I taste Guillot's wines so often in Paris that I assumed the tasting would be more for C's benefit. But in fact Guillot has more than a few random little cuvées that never see the light of the City of Light. Additionally, I found it helpful to see the range presented in entirety. Only then did I realise that Guillot's reputation is founded as much on his négoçiant work as on the wine from his 7ha domaine.

The two wines of his I encounter most often, his Saint-Véran and his Pouilly-Fuissé, are both made from purchased grapes. On good days the latter wine, made from biodynamic vines and aged in a mix of demi muid and pièce, can show a beaming, ray-of-God purity, with notes of honeydew and white flower. On other days it just tastes like solid, hearty Pouilly-Fuissé. Guillot usually uses no sulfur during vinification, and adds just 1 gram of sulfur at bottling. In my experience, his wines' purity is assured; they nonetheless can be rather changeable within vintages, presumably due either to his restraint with sulfur or time between bottlings.

Lately Guillot's been getting deeper into gamay. I've raved elsewhere about his 2013 Beaujolais-Leynes, which I learned that day is made from a wayward, hail-prone parcel of vines he purchased from the Bret Brothers, who'd had enough of it after three straight years of hail at harvest. (Guillot gambled well: it was spared hail in 2013.)

Now, from tank, we tasted a Beaujolais Guillot produced in 2014 from vines leased from Beaujolais wizard Bruno Debize. It was an absolute marvel - the sort of wine one wants to step outside with. So we did, the better to appreciate its wild, sex shop-magenta colour, and its pure, crispy, crushed-berry fruit.

Guillot told us that, due to a missed deadline in filing paperwork, this wine will likely have to be bottled as Vin de France. I don't think it'll affect sales. It was among the most moving wines of the visit, alongside the 2013 Beaujolais-Leynes and the structured and mineral 2013 Mâcon-Cruzilles "Aragonite."**

It's easy to connect Guillot's passion for négoçiant micro-cuvées to that which he maintains for his Marc de Bourgone and Fine de Bourgogne. Here, evidently, is an enthusiastic, energetic winemaker with a penchant for experimentation. He is very fortunately situated in Sagy-le-Haut. Not only are there zero distractions (it is quite in the middle of nowhere, even by wine country standards), but the town happens to be situated on the local spring-water source, an underground lake beneath his property. In practice, this means that the water the local distiller uses to distill Guillot's marc and fine derives from the same terroir as the base material.

Guillot credits the quality of his distillates to this dynamic. Whatever it is, the 2001 Marc de Bourgogne we tasted on empty stomachs before hitting the road was among the most fascinating liquors I've tasted in ages.

A tantalizing, spicy savoury note enlivens the nose and mid-palate. C and I searched for it, but Guillot, who knows his product well, gave it away: "Wasabi."

It's way better than it sounds, woven into a complex accord including peanut brittle and smoke. I've since found places to taste it in Paris - Entrée des Artistes Pigalle and Table à Côté - but if one seeks any quantity of the stuff, of which not much remains at all, one ought to visit to Sagy-le-Haut. For what it's worth, Guillot's summer project is to start a chambre d'hôte and a table d'hôte, so there will be some amenities.

(One rarely hears of people visiting Mâcon. I think people don't often say to their spouses, "Honey, why don't we visit the region below Burgundy that makes cheaper wines?" Such a phrase is incompatible with the profligate spirit of vacation. But it's precisely what people ought to say, since the chances of having a memorable, sincere experience visiting a winemaker are inversely related to the fame of the surrounding region. You can pay for train rides through caves in Champagne or bumble around the shut doors of Burgundy. Or you can visit Mâcon or the Jura or the Loire and actually have fun.)

* Marc de Bourgogne is Burgundian grappa. We can only speculate why the Italian term predominates in English for this type of alcohol. I suspect it's because the word 'grappa' is more fun to say. 'Marc de Bourgogne' sounds like I'm talking about a friend called Mark, from Burgundy. Then, we can't underestimate cultural factors. Italians are arguably more prone to distributing free after dinner drinks, not to mention their greater affection for over-designed, trophy-like bottles.

** I have had some oxidation issues with the 2012 "Aragonite." Lately it tastes a bit lumpen and appley, and can't help but disappoint, given that it retails for around 30€ in Paris.

Clos des Vignes du Maynes
Rue des Moines
Sagy-le-Haut
71260 CRUZILLE
Tel: 03 85 33 20 15

Related Links:

Drinking a few of Julien Guillot's 2013 reds at Cave du Daron, 75011
Meeting Julien Guillot at Quedubon, 75019

A nice account of a 2010 visit to Julien Guillot at Vinography.

Everything about Entrée des Artistes Pigalle proprietors Fabien Lombardi and Edouard Vermynck's previous bar-à-manger on rue de Crussol evinced a stubborn, cloistered dedication to cool, which often superseded practical concerns. Each cocktail took up its own page on the finicky list. The wine selection was fearlessly obscure. Hospitality could feel a bit teenage. The music program consisted exclusively of canonical rap.

When I heard they were uprooting that original successful address in favour of a larger space in Pigalle, I worried it might be a case of two artistes fixing what wasn't broke. As the album work - as opposed to the early mixtapes - of an MC like Action Bronson attests, sometimes it's folly to polish an idea whose virtues lay in messy spontaneity.*

But it took no more than a footstep beyond the unassuming threshold of Entrée des Artistes Pigalle to realise I'd underestimated Lombardi and Vermynck's ambitions. The dazzling space is gilt-edged, multi-tiered, Escher-like, with two floors, each with its own bar, served by a kitchen perched on what is, in essence, a stair landing. Gone is the air of bedroom hero-worship that characterised the old address. Lombardi and Vermynck have done what a succession of better-financed Paris bars (Silencio, Le Perchoir) have so far failed to do: create a mature, transportive ambience of Parisian cool, un-derivative of other cities.

I can't think of another city on earth where such a polished, borderline nightclubby space would house a radical wine program like Vermynck's. His selection remains unapologetically fringe-natural, but now the raw, untutored wines of Philippe Jambon's acolytes share layout space with maîtres like Pierre Overnoy. In any other city in the world, some investor would have insisted on a dumbed-down list with higher mark-ups.

This speaks to the extent to which, in Paris, the ideology of natural wine has become intertwined with luxury. I have no idea whether the preening young professionals creeping north up rue des Martyrs truly enjoy, say, the pale, laceratingly volatile high-Beaujolais of Daniel Millet. But internationally-validated destination restaurants like Le Chateaubriand, Septime, and Saturne - not to mention their counterparts in Copenhagen - have shown them they ought to keep an open mind about such wines.

For my part, I'm happy to count Vermynck's list as among the few in Paris that reliably contains novelty and surprises. He is an inveterate early adopter.

Daniel Millet. He's on his second vintage. Leynes, where his vines are, can produce wines that are the peer of any cru Beaujolais. So I'm hopeful for the future, even if for now the wines are rather volatile.

Fabien Lombardi's cocktail list at the new address, conversely, appears more user friendly than at the old location. While waiting for my friends to show up on my second visit, I chased a poor decision - the "Bronsolino," a Gibson variation that strayed too far floral for my tastes - with a safe one, an actual Gibson. The latter was mixed to perfection. I was relieved to note that the cocktail list retained its titular hip-hop homages, and that cocktails were no longer listed one-per-page, an arrangement that had needlessly slowed the ordering process at the former location.

I visited Entrée des Artistes Pigalle twice before writing anything because I worried my first visit might have been an off night for the kitchen. There had been tough, under-seasoned squid, some simplistic baked clams with pesto, and a miserly portion of forgettable asparagus...

On my second visit, I hazarded to inquire as to whether there had been a chef change. There hasn't. The kitchen at Entrée des Artistes Pigalle is still helmed by Fred Vilgicquel. The menu, as in the latter years of the old address, is still organised somewhat like the early days of Au Passage, with an emphasis on small plates, supplemented by one or two dishes that, for models or jailed dissidents, could pass for main courses.

I can't shake the feeling that the cuisine is just not yet as sharp as it was at the last location, however. This could be because the kitchen is serving two dining rooms instead of one. It could also just be the adjustment of a chef to an unfamiliar kitchen. My second visit was an improvement over the first, but most items still lacked acidity. Some, like some tuna-stuffed peppers, felt too skimpy for table service. It's interesting how a dish that works fine in the homey atmosphere of, say, Septime Cave, scans a bit mean in the chic-er context of Entrée des Artistes Pigalle.

More substantial dishes seemed more appropriate to the new digs, and were more successful overall. A filet of yellow place with slivers of crunchy cauliflower matched its textural play with nuanced, wintry flavour. A veal hangar steak we ordered, in a fit of indulgence, for dessert, disappeared faster than anything that came before it.

It's important to eat voluminously on a visit to Entrée des Artistes Pigalle, because the temptation is great, at the end of a meal, to stay and soak in the splendid vibe over a cocktail or five. The atmosphere ranks alongside that of the soon-to-be-missed Bones, or the early days of Le Mary Celeste. Tucked near the downstair's bar of Entrée des Artistes is a DJ booth with its own bar-stools, a pleasant design feature that, while discreet, makes clear that the establishment is something other than a restaurant.

I can happily overlook the occasional lapse in its functions as a restaurant because it functions so well as a bar. It is, for example, the only bar I know of where I can enjoy a few glasses of Julien Guillot's magnificent 2001 Marc de Bourgogne after a meal in the company of fellow hip-hop afficionados. Paris has a bright future if its citizens continue to support such evolved, iconoclastic definitions of luxury.

* In Bronson's case, his florid misogyny and homophobia sounded, in the context of his rougher mixtape work, like a self-conscious stylistic tic. It was identifiably the sound of some broke idiot dreaming he was Ghostface. Lately, coming from a successful rapper with higher production budgets, the same idiocy is less forgivable. Context is everything.

Edouard Vermynck, right.

My friend Jeff Jank's affectionate thank-you note to the Entrée des Artistes gang.

Entrée des Artistes Pigalle
30 Rue Victor Masse

75009 PARIS
Tel: 01 45 23 11 93 (online reservations only, however)

Related Links:

The previous Entrée des Artistes on rue Crussol.

Le Fooding's blurb on Entrée des Artistes Pigalle is, as usual, a breathless avalanche of nouns.

A plainspoken and informative run-down of the cocktail program at Entrée des Artistes Pigalle at 52 Martinis.

Grazia's piece on Entrée des Artistes Pigalle is an example of how fashion journalists do disservice to their favourite restaurants by writing about them. If I didn't know better, my takeaway from this piece would be: idiots like the place, so I'd better stay away.

When I first wrote about Jane Drotter's splendid contemporary bistrot YARD in April 2014, I couldn't help expressing astonishment that some of the passing Père Lachaise locals found prices too high. "Stinting flintnosed cheapskates," I called them. YARD the restaurant was then and still remains one of the city's best deals, its prices calibrated more to the expectations of its far-flung quartier than to the skills of chef Nye Smith or the superior quality of his product.

Drotter, presumably as part of a grand strategy for domination of nightlife in the eastern 11ème, has now opened, beside her bustling bistrot, YARD Wine Bar, a cosy roomful of high tables and a wide terrace where she continues to indulge her clientele. The small-plate menu prices are lower than those of most soft beverage programs in the Marais.

It's worth noting, though, that Drotter's clientele has changed. Where once it consisted of whoever happened to live or work nearby, it now resembles a cross-section of the Paris fine restaurant crowd, which is to say, chiefly people who unhesitatingly order the whole menu twice and consume oceans of natural wine. This dynamic, one hopes, will sustain YARD Wine Bar's paradisiacal micro-scene for many summers to come.

Nye Smith is at the head of the wine bar kitchen as well, working from a new kitchen space that conjoins the restaurant and wine bar.

Confusingly, upon entering the bar, one runs smack into a waist height expo counter, covered with the detritus of service (stacks of menus, empty glasses, meal tickets, pens...).

It's the first week of service, and I'm confident the team will find some hospitable way of accommodating this strange décor feature. It would, for instance, make an excellent bar for gnomes.

The rest of the space is furnished with excellent sensitivity. A warm checkered wooden floor underpins high tables and wall-bars at human height. The rear houses a spacious, even palatial toilet. (Well-appointed toilet facilities are an enjoyable hallmark of female-run restaurants. For the diametric opposite, try using the loo at Ménilmontant beer bar La Fine Mousse. Or any beer bar.)

YARD Wine Bar's greatest draw, at least for the next few months, will be its terrace. The rue du Mont-Louis sidewalk is large enough for YARD to be very accommodating with metastasizing tables and guests-who-bring-guests.

The menu, for now, is slenderer than wild asparagus, and perceptibly a work in progress.

For now it's composed of the sorts of thing one improvises for apéro hour on one's own balcony: radishes, tomatoes, mozzarella on toast, cured ham. I prefer this style of cuisine to just about any other, but it may be of little interest to culinary adventure-seekers.

Only two plates have the feel of having been worked on or constructed in any way: fried rabbit, and a curiously-plated salad of favas and Ossau Iraty, resembling a taco lading on the moon.

The rabbit, while fried to perfection, was a tad salty for most of my table. (Americans will not be bothered. I wasn't.) A toasted fennel-flecked plate of cubed pork belly met with unanimous, if slightly predictable, acclaim.

The wine bar for now shares the same wine list as the restaurant, which is to say mainly the mid-range natural portfolio of wine agent Fleur Godart. One hopes it will diversity a bit, since with menu prices so low, check averages will be wine driven. I spent slightly too much on a pleasant, but uncomplex bottle of very old-vine Gamay pétillant naturel, entitled "H," by Patrick Bouju. (The wine's minimalist label declares that the vines were planted between 1982 and 1906. Making a pét' nat' from the fruit seems to have been deliberately iconoclastic.)

I adore Bouju's winemaking, but seeing the prices of his sparklers (see also the "Festejar") climb into the twenties at Paris wine shops makes me suspect there is, as it were, a bubble in the market. I would have been just as happy spending more on something better. (The "H"'s mark-up was not YARD's. It is the winemaker's, or his agent's.)

Vis à vis pét' nat's in general, PUNCH magazine (for whom I write occasionally) recently ran a good, skeptical piece that, worrisomely, implied the wine genre is attaining or has attained cult status stateside. I like a good pét' nat' as much as the next guy. But fetishizing them strikes me as faintly preposterous, like cherishing a certain brand of mineral water.

Once in a while one does encounter a moonshot pét' nat, like Dobrà Vinice's "Créma di Pinot Noir," a positively luminescent sparkler I tasted with the gang from Jenny & François Imports in Prague. And there are indeed outright disasters, like certain brownish cuvées from Caves Beclair that I still reflect upon with a mixture of horror and hilarity. But overall quality in pétillants naturels remains, like Bruce Springsteen in "Better Days,""halfway to Heaven, just a mile outta hell."

There is just not a big quality amplitude. The best, for the most part, taste like very expressive sparkling fruit juice. Sometimes that is all one seeks in a wine, it's true. But if that is all one seeks in a wine most of the time, one is not a wine connoisseur; one is an alcoholic toddler. (I say this with the awareness that it probably applies to certain winemakers I know.)

It seems salutary to insist, when assessing natural wines, that freshness of fruit not be prized at the expense of complexity. At YARD Wine Bar, we followed the Bouju sparkler with a 2014 Thierry Puzelat"Frileuse," a chardonnay - sauvignon - sauvignon gris blend that, like pretty much all that winemaker's oeuvre, sang with the tense tonal range of a talking drum. I could have drunk it as easily in seven years as immediately.

Actually, I didn't finish it immediately. I took half the bottle home. This photo is from my balcony.

Here is where I usually complain about how French taxation on wine stock and surfeit of demand together prevent restaurant in Paris from maintaining deep cellars. But that seems hypocritical in this instance, given how often I'll be among those hoovering up lakes of young natural wines at Yard Wine Bar this summer. When I first wrote about Drotter's work at YARD, I wondered aloud whether the neighborhood would change her restaurant, or vice versa. With the opening of her wine bar, I think the question has been answered.

YARD Wine Bar
6, rue du Mont-Louis
75011 PARIS
Métro: Philippe Auguste
Tel: 01 40 09 70 30

Related Links:

YARD Restaurant under present chef Nye Smith
YARD Restaurant under former chef Shaun Kelly

Some tasting appointments in Beaujolais are difficult to obtain because a given winemaker's work is so sought-after that he or she has no interest in cultivating new clientele. Securing a tasting with young fringe-natural winemaker Benoit Camus was difficult for something like the opposite reason. He has almost no commercial operation to speak of, instead selling his finished wines wholesale to a few négoçiants willing to sell it for him. He has practically no direct clientele at all, and next to nothing for visitors to taste.

Camus lives in the southern Beaujolais town of Cogny, a short drive from Villefranche-sur-Saône, the riverside town north of Lyon where I commenced a bicycle trip this past spring with two novelist friends. In our initial communications, I sensed it embarrassed him to receive visitors when he had almost no wine to show. He rather gallantly kept proposing we go see a winemaker friend of his further north instead, until at last accepting to have lunch together at his house in Cogny, rather than at his cellar in nearby Ville-sur-Jarnioux.

Ordinarily I would have taken his suggestion to visit elsewhere, but Camus was located right on our itinerary, and I'd been keen to meet him since tasting his wines in Paris. As it was, over the course of a very short tasting that turned into a jam session, we got a small peek into the life of a promising, eccentric winemaker at the semi-anonymous outset of his career.

Camus among some notably unplowed Chardonnay vines.

Camus is from Lyon originally. A lifelong saisonnier agricole (migratory farmhand, seems to be the best translation), he's been working vines since he was sixteen years old, in regions ranging from the Drôme, to the Rhône valley, to the Jura. He began making his own wines in Beaujolais in 2006. Asked how he became interested in natural vinification, he said it was a financial issue. "Even a packet of levure costs 10€."

More seriously, he cited a small association of young organic Beaujolais winemakers called Cep et Charrue who had helped put him on a path towards organic production.

Although not certified organic (again, he cites costs), Camus practices organic methods in his vineyards, all of which are in the Terre Dorées, south of the crus of Beaujolais. The area is known for possessing more limestone and clay soil, and less granite than further north, but Camus describes it as a very varied terroir. From this he produces about 4-6 cuvées per year, though he has produced 12 (!) different cuvées overall, including three reds, a white, a rosé, and several sparklers. (I suppose you might call this the Philippe Jambon school of incomprehensible marketing.)

The first wine of his I'd tasted had been a brawny Beaujolais Nouveau bottled as Vin de France, at L'Entrée des Artistes' Beaujolais Nouveau party two years ago.

Later I saw that he'd sold wine to Philippe Jambon, who bottled the resulting rugged, soulful Vin de France cuvée as "Dense Avec Une Tranche." Then my eccentric neighborhood semi-Italian wine shop SQUATT (sic) surprised me by carrying numerous cuvées from Camus, at slightly high prices.

The pricing was news to Camus, who, it turns out, had bottled those wines specially for SQUATT and one other Belgian wine merchant. I think the Belgian did the schoolboyish labels.

Camus' front room belies his status as family man and father of two; it is bare save a computer and a panoply of musical instruments. We munched on slabs of thick bread covered in a surprise dip, resembling a rich Thousand Island dressing, that Camus later revealed was made from mayonnaise, wild bear's garlic, and tinned shellfish.

Ail des ours

All he was certain to have available for us to taste that day was a 2011 pét' nat' gamay vinified en blanc, with zero sulfur. Brownish, unruly, and cidery. I can't say it was one of his successes. He scoffed that he'd been unable to sell it at 4,50€ / bottle wholesale, but when he asked 8€ / bottle, he sold out. We all shook our heads.

Thankfully, among his kitchen cabinets, he turned up two more bottles. A 2011 "Dense Avec Une Tranche," with which I was already familiar from Paris, was unfortunately damaged by a defective cork. In a turn of the baleful irony that seemed to characterise Camus' operation, the wine that redeemed the tasting was a brut de cuve sample from 2013 he had lying around.

It possessed all the characteristics I'd found so striking in Camus' wines in Paris: a bristling, rooty richness, long on the palate, with notes of violets and iron. Here, I thought, is a Terres Dorées wine with its own indubitable personality, one that doesn't merely emulate, in a lumpen fashion, the grace of the crus up north. Rather unusually for the region, Camus doesn't employ carbonic maceration, instead fermenting his reds whole-cluster in open-topped vats for about three weeks, with pigeage. The results are muscular Beaujolais that embrace the coarse, burly tendencies of the Terre Dorrées, to fine effect.

From what I understand, Camus sells the majority of his unsulfured vinified juice to Philippe Jambon and Cyril Alonso. The latter winemaker's wines all bear the label "vinifié par PUR," which seems a shame, given that not all Alonso's purchases are as rigorously natural as what he gets from Camus. I've also heard rumours I cannot substantiate to the effect that Camus has sold wine to a star winemaker from the Jura.

It's Jambon's imprimateur, says Camus, that has helped him the most. Whatever I might feel about Jambon's marketing practices, I certainly credit him with helping organise and promote the work of some of the most quixotically natural young winemakers of the region. Asked why he doesn't simply bottle and sell his own wines, which amount to about 190HL on an average year, Camus says he doesn't have the time to develop the commercial network, label everything, and so forth, before adding, significantly, that he strongly prefers that his work remain pas cher.

I have the feeling that among back-to-the-landers in America, socialism died out in the 1980's. Here in France one finds the two impulses still intertwined, and occasionally, as here, mutually self-defeating. Camus could probably sell all his wine himself (all the reds, at least) if he were slightly more willing to let it become a luxury.

After the tasting and some curry, Camus, upon learning that my friend S played piano, plucked his violin off the wall and treated us to real luxury - a short concert, before we hopped back on our bikes.

Benoit Camus
Trève Fontoin

69640 Cogny

Related Links:

My last Beaujolais Bike Trip, in 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

Where to try Benoit Camus' wine in Paris:

YARD, 75011
Squatt Wine Shop, 75011
Entrée des Artistes Pigalle, 75009
Crus et Découverts, 75011

A brief mention of Benoit Camus' wine from my friend Bert at Wine Terroirs

As diners and critics, we're willing to discern greater depths in a chef's plates if he or she has led a swashbuckling lifestyle, or at least can be presented to us as having witnessed the mysteries of foreign cultures. In contemporary Paris, the résumé spice du jour is "travel in Asia," a transcendant, cuisine-altering experience for chefs ranging from David Toutain to Saturne's Sven Chartier to Le Servan's Tatiana Levha. If, of that list, only Levha's cuisine shows any direct engagement with eastern cuisines, don't blame the chefs. Blame their publicists, and culinary media outlets.

Les Déserteurs, the upscale market-menu restaurant opened last year by chef Daniel Baratier and sommelier Alex Céret in the former Rino space on rue Trousseau, is, like its chef, deficient in narrative flair. The name is a witticism referring to the owners' former workplace, the untrendy Ile Saint Louis Michelin one-star Le Sergent Recruteur, a restaurant that I now read is in liquidation. When the joke passes, we're left with the following premise: Two Friendly French Guys Open Slightly Pricey Restaurant.

Diners will be forgiven for not leaping to book six-tops. I myself only went because they had a last minute table on a Saturday night, and I often work in the neighborhood. I was therefore caught entirely by surprise by the restaurant's outright excellence. From its pacing to its apportionment to its marvelous contents, a meal at Les Déserteurs is a tour de force of sensitivity, where the refined, vegetable-driven country cuisine is as nuanced and mature as the wine list.

The storied restaurant space must be as much a curse as a blessing. Giovanni Passerini's Rino proved beyond all doubt that the space and the neighborhood could support a high-value meal. But inhabiting the same space did no favors for establishing Baratier's cuisine for what it assuredly is: a new identity with an original voice.

Les Déserteurs' menu is, it must be said, monstrously overwritten. Baratier and Céret might have done better to provide information like, say, the name of their asparagus farmer, upon demand, rather than trumpeting it on the menu itself. It shortsells Baratier's wizardry to present him as a pedantic épiceur. That said, the duck sausage we shared while perusing the wine list was extraordinarily well-chosen, rich and indulgent.

The salad of zucchini and rhubarb that followed was a work of ingenious contrapuntal texture, immensely flattered by its tangy hazelnut vinaigrette.

The menu that night had cited "tormented asparagus," which summons a mental image as cruelly amusing as the dish itself was tender. Here as in the salad, Baratier showed impressive attention to textural nuance.

A hunk of delicately flavorful rump steak, larger in real life than it seems pictured here, capped a rare hat-trick of flawlessly-executed dishes. I didn't care a whit that the dessert that folllowed was a little forgettable and unergonomic. The meal had already succeeded wildly.

Sommelier and co-owner Alexandre Céret formerly worked with an immense Champagne list at straightforwardly conservative Michelin two-star restaurant The Greenhouse in Mayfair. At Les Déserteurs he's set his sights lower, but one sense his London experience in the far-flung reach and general openmindedness of his selections. The glass pour is among the loveliest I've encountered in Paris, featuring things like Zidarich's glimmery skin-macerated Vitovska, and Sylvain Pataille's Marsannay masterpiece "Les Longeroies."

Being too voluminous a drinker to have much truck with glass-pours, I instead alighted upon a well-priced bottle of 2004 Robert Michel Cornas "Cuvée des Coteaux."

Céret deserves praise for taking care to mention that Robert Michel's Cornas, stylistically, is a far cry from the honking, brawny fruit of most of the appellation. Indeed, the 2004 "Cuvée des Coteaux" showed the levitational side of syrah, scanning something like an older Saint Joseph, its sinuous black fruit laced with notes of tea and clove cigarettes. Robert Michel, who retired in 2006, was, needless to say, not a natural winemaker. But he worked traditionally and well and belonged to the category of acclaimed artisanal domaines whose fame predates the contemporary fixation on sulfur use. I would desperately like to see more of the wines of such domaines integrated into the diehard natural wine lists of Paris' most ambitious contemporary restaurants, most of whom, in a baby-with-bathwater gesture, have jettisoned the greatest traditionalist wines of famous appellations along with the white tablecloths, chandeliers, and obsequiousness of Michelin-style service.

Les Déserteurs takes its own chisel and mallet to the crumbling Michelin edifice, but leaves the pillars of service and wine more intact. At time when restaurants like Le Chateaubriand and Saturne have rendered progressive Parisian fine dining Giacometti-lean, a meal at Les Déserteurs arrives with the classical sumptuousness of a Rodin.

Les Déserteurs
46, rue Trousseau
75011 PARIS
Métro: Lédru-Rollin
Tel: 01 48 06 95 85

Related Links:

Alexander Lobrano's spot-on 2014 piece about Les Déserteurs.

The Paris Kitchen's write-up of Les Déserteurs sees Wendy Lyn trying out a critical voice, which is entertaining in the same way it is entertaining to watch friends try on funny hats.

Le Fooding's note on Les Déserteurs is, by the standards of the publication, relatively informative, perceptive, and cool-headed.

Pop-up sommelier Laura Vidal popped into Les Déserteurs, and liked it. A key difference between the critical perspective of foodies and that of actual restaurant professionals is the latter, as Vidal does here, tend to get more excited about ambience and acoustics than food.

François Simon enjoy everything in his visit to Les Déserteurs.

Jean-Claude Lapalu occupies an interesting position in the pantheon of contemporary Beaujolais. The son and grandson of winegrowers, he began bottling his own wines relatively late, at age 35. It was 1996. "I'm an intermediary," he acknowledges, "between the generation of Max Breton, who started before me, and the young generation today."

Our visit had been arranged Lapalu's good friend Rémi Dufaitre, a talented young winemaker twenty years his junior, who was hosting us that night in the neighboring town. Despite their age difference, Lapalu and Dufaitre share an easy rapport. Dropping us off chez Lapalu, Dufaitre asked his friend to "throw us back" to Dufaitre's place when we were through tasting. We asked if that was normal rural slang. Lapalu just laughed. "It's just Rémi being Rémi."

Lucky for us, Lapalu was in an expansive mood on the day we visited. Our tasting went long. A born raconteur, he's among the rare great vignerons whose verbal expressivity is a match for that of his wines.

Astonishingly, Lapalu's first taste of what we now call natural wine wasn't one of the low-sulfur masterpieces being minted a few miles north in Villié-Morgon. Rather it was the wines of Provençal winemaker Henri Milan, specifically a 1996 "Clos Milan" Lapalu tasted in 1998 or 1999. According to Lapalu, it was only after his own wines began to be known "beyond the frontiers of the commune," that his neighbors from Villié-Morgon sought him out. "For modesty, or out of fear, I never would have pushed their doors," he says, grinning.

He became fast friends with the Villié-Morgon / Fleurie circle of natural winemakers - Jean-Paul Thévenet, Max Breton, the late Marcel Lapierre, and Yvon Métras. The latter winemaker, famously tight-lipped to the press, phoned Lapalu to chat several times throughout the tasting. Among the most striking aspects of Beaujolais culture, on which I'm sure I'll have the occasion to comment again, its contradictory nature. In practically no other region are great winemakers on such friendly, geographically proximate terms to drop in on one another throughout the day. Yet the region's Balkanisation is such that Lapalu discovered natural wine via Provence.

Lapalu's cellar is smaller than I anticipated. I think I had outsize expectations of his production due his wines' popularity in Paris, where about a quarter of his production is sold. All vinification and elevage is done in his cellar on a hill where Beaujolais-Villages meets Brouilly. (Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne is known as the gateway to the crus.) Labeling and shipping are done in an annex to his house down the hill.

Lapalu's range is composed, in most years, of about ten wines. I can't be the first to point out that the winemaker's restless creativity has made a muddle of the marketing. The newer cuvées, like "Eau Forte" (a cold carbonic blend of Brouilly and Beaujolais-Villages) and the majestic, amphora-aged "Alma Mater," are discrete creations unto themselves, without any visual link to the rest of the Lapalu oeuvre.

Amphorae for the "Alma Mater."

The cuvées labeled "Vieilles Vignes" - a Beaujolais-Villages and a Brouilly - are assembled from a mixed of purchased and domaines grapes. The Beaujolais-Villages cuvée "Tentation," whose label differs very little from the B.V. Vieilles Vignes, is a spiritual pre-cursor to "L'Eau Forte," and like the latter is sulfur-free and composed exclusively of domaine grapes.

Then there are the parcel-specific Brouilly cuvées, the "Cuvée des Fous" and "Rang du Merle," both bottled in Bordeaux bottles. This strange practice dates back to the early 2000's, at the outset of Lapalu's vigneron career, when a wine merchant in Grenoble complained that he couldn't sell wine labeled Beaujolais. As an experiment, Lapalu bottled a Vin de France cuvée in Bordeaux bottles, and the habit stuck.

I'd always assumed Lapalu's Bordeaux bottles were a deliberate reference to the muscular character one tended to find in his Beaujolais. But in fact the two cuvées where winemaker actually seeks greater extraction are bottled in traditional Burgundy bottles. These are the Brouilly "Les Croix des Rameaux" and the Côte de Brouilly, both of which see slightly longer old-oak aging (10 months, as opposed to 6 or 8 for the other cuvées) and some pigeage and pumping-over. These practices set these cuvées apart from those of much of the rest of Lapalu's peers, situating them stylistically somewhere between the Villié-Morgon gang and the more conservative Beaujolais domaines for whom quality means emulating Burgundy.

Interestingly, Lapalu's own tastes are perceptibly evolving. Nowadays he makes clear that only "Les Croix des Rameaux" and the Côte de Brouilly are "a little worked over" in vinification, whereas he speaks with evident relish about his aims with "Tentation" and "Eau Forte," his two lithest, most "fluid" cuvées. "Even if one makes the wines for oneself, an evolution is always occurring," he says. "We taste again and say I now have more interest in fluidity than extraction, more interest in fruit than tannin…Fifteen years ago, I would never have thought that a fluid wine could be long. I would have never thought that a non-extractive wine could be kept."

In my own experience, tasting Lapalu's wine frequently in Paris, I can indeed attest that his production seems to have reoriented itself over the last five years. Where five years ago I sometimes found his wines stolid, recent vintages have proven as sinuous and pleasurable as those of any of his peers.

After tasting for about an hour seated in the extremely chilly cellar, we repaired downhill for a few bottles on Lapalu's comparatively warm terrace, where we were soon rejoined by Rémi Dufaitre, who had gotten bored waiting for us to finish tasting.

He arrived at a good time. Lapalu soon opened a rare beauty, a 2003 Brouilly "Les Croix des Rameaux." As elsewhere in Europe, 2003 in Beaujolais was a scorching vintage. Lapalu harvested extremely early, on the 15th August. Within eight days he'd brought in all his fruit, from vines which had yielded a measly 15HL / ha. But he'd gambled well: other winemakers who'd waited for greater phenolic maturity had a catastrophic vintage, losing all acidity.

Twelve years' later, Lapalu's "Les Croix des Rameaux" was in resplendent form. An open, forthright nose of rhubarbe and violet, with an almost nebbiolo-like texture on the palate, enlivened with a small, succulent raisinated note.It added a whole new dimension to my understanding of 2003 in Beaujolais, and demonstrated how even disastrous vintages, like the less successful David Bowie eras, have their masterpieces.

Lapalu freely admits that his ideals have shifted since 2003, that he now seeks less extraction in the wines he makes. He says its not worth seeking out the wines he made in the late 90's. "Despite that, the wines that we made 15 years ago, I still take pleasure. And I think they gave pleasure," he adds hopefully. "Because of course that’s the goal of the game."

Jean-Claude Lapalu

Le Petit Vernay

69460 Saint-Étienne-la-Varenne

Tel: 04 74 03 50 57

Related Links:

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2015:

Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

Some way better pictures of a visit to Jean-Claude Lapalu by my friend Bert at Wine Terroirs.

A common wine writing trope is to conclude that a wine resembles its maker in some way or another. Nowhere is this less applicable than in the wines of rising-star Beaujolais winemaker Rémi Dufaitre, whose production of Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly (among other wines) is distinguished by its elegance and finesse.

Rémi Dufaitre himself is more direct, an endearing trait, from certain angles. When I arrived at his domaine in Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières, roughly where the Brouilly appellation meets Beaujolais-Villages, he lost no time asking me upfront about my blog traffic. When I introduced my bike trip companion N, a novelist, Rémi, without missing a beat, asked, "How many books did you sell?"

The no-bullshit approach, in this case, reflects the confidence of a young winemaker who enjoys broad support among his forebears in the region. Originally from Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne, Dufaitre has known since birth his friend and Brouilly neighbor Jean-Claude Lapalu. Influential Fleurie winemaker Jean-Louis Dutraive is Dufaitre's cousin. And while Dufaitre and his wife Laurence only began bottling their own wines in 2010, their work soon attracted the attention of Villié-Morgon legend Jean Foillard, who has said he considers Dufaitre among the best of the younger generation of Beaujolais winemakers. Who cares if he possesses the combative, ball-breaking temperament of a mob enforcer, when the wines are this good?

The Dufaitres cultivate 12ha total, mostly gamay, although two are sandy-soiled chardonnay parcels from which they produce a pristine, silvery Beaujolais Blanc.

My friends and I visited in April, a period where most winemakers we visited were plowing their vines. Dufatire was no exception. He began conversion to organic viticulture in 2010, the same year he began bottling his own wines.

It was late afternoon when my friends and I arrived at Domaine de Botheland. Dufaitre had kindly arranged for us to go visit Jean-Claude Lapalu first, so we saved the tour of his own facilities for the following morning. Instead we shared a few sips of Dufaitre's Brouilly 2014 as we made introductions. 2014 in Beaujolais was more generous than the preceding years; the reds for now evince a voluptuousness of fruit that belies their relatively low alcohol.

Carbonic fermentation chez Dufaitre occurs in lidded cement vats. From what I understand, the only efforts Rémi makes at temperature control are to bring the grapes in early, and if necessary, to let them sit for a time in a refrigerated room before loading them via forklift into the fermentation vats. Like his neighbor Lapalu, he seeks a long, relatively cool fermentation, to conserve finesse.

The Dufaitres' Brouilly is produced from vines on sandy soil in Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne. The 2014, freshly bottled when we tasted it, was showing a rosy, lightly lactic nose, with a free-flowing generosity on the palate. In terms of personality, it's the opposite of the Dufaitres' Côte de Brouilly, which is aged in used barrels from Burgundy winemaker Fred Cossard, and which evinces a more angular, athletic profile in its youth. In April the 2014 was chalky and shut, but I had no doubt that with more time in bottle more fruit and texture would reveal itself.

The 2013 Côte de Brouilly, tasted later with a magnificent Charolais steak Laurence prepared, was in splendid form: wiry, bright-fruited, long on the palate, with a nice chewable-vitamin crunch. I'd greatly enjoyed this same wine the first time I met Rémi, at a tiny tasting at Ma Cave Fleury in spring 2014. Its acid was notably more energetic than much of the other 2013 cru Beaujolais I'd tasted until then. Amusingly, at the time, Rémi was downbeat about the vintage. Where other winemakers had voiced the usual mildly optimistic hedging, with perhaps just a minor note of complaint about low yields, Dufaitre had flatly said, "2013, it won't be a great vintage," implying the opposite.

Everyone in the region, Dufaitre included, seems since then to have changed their minds about 2013 cru Beaujolais. The wines have noticeably perked up since release, attaining good length and very refined structure. I expect that if I were to visit the Dufaitres again in 10 years, that 2013 Côte de Brouilly would be the star wine of the evening.

The drinking room.

Dufaitre also produces a Beaujolais-Villages cuvée entitled "L'Aire de Rien" which sees slightly longer barrel elevage, and no addition of sulfur. In this it could be loosely comparred to Jean-Claude Lapalu's "Eau Forte" and "Tentation" cuvées. Like these, the "L'Aire de Rien" is a hit at Paris' natural wine bars, and the Dufaitres produced slightly more than usual in 2014. It seems significant, though, that both Dufatire and Lapalu categorize separately their strictly-no-sulfur cuvées. In this the winemakers are arguably more transparent than many of the original Villié-Morgon gang, whose sulfur use is very low, infrequent, but above all, mostly undeclared.

Rémi also ages sausages.

Therein lies the source of the fragmentation of natural wine currently underway in the Beaujolais region. Natural wine's pioneers - from Chauvet, Néauport, and Lapierre to Foillard, Breton, Thévent, and Métras - were notably undogmatic about its practical applications. Marcel Lapierre, for his part, has even said he had no problem with chaptalising "once every fifteen years." The goal of this group was to make great wine first, natural wine a very close second. This group has been followed by other winemakers for whom sulfur avoidance is the first priority, who see natural winemaking as an end in itself. This latter group's work is, sometimes understandably, abhorrent to the first group, and this schism seems to account for some of the region's contemporary Balkanisation.

Dufaitre also makes a gamay pét-nat, in collaboration with his friend France Gonzalvez. It's the same wine, sold under two different labels. Dufaitre's sports a label drawn by Laurence.

Apropos of this, Dufaitre over dinner announced that he and his ideological forebears in Villié-Morgon intend next April to organise a smaller satellite tasting to the Beaujoloise. "Like Les Pénitantes?" I asked, referring to the hyper-insular, self-congratulatory satellite tasting to La Renaissance des Appellations in Angers.

"Like Les Pénitantes," he confirmed. "We'll all get together among our own, those who have the same ideas about wine. It wears me out, these salons, having to share the region with people who [don't have the same ideas about wine]."

I began to argue that this was a terrible idea, on the grounds that if Foillard, Dufaitre et al are disappointed by the work of their neighbors, they ought to engage more with them, not less. But you don't win an argument with Rémi Dufaitre, you just get called a wanker and he refills your glass.

In his defense, I can see why passions run high about what might, to oursiders, seem to be obscure shadings of aesthetic differences among winemakers whose work is considered natural. At stake is the eventual redemption of the region's reputation, and, of course, the word natural itself.

We sent our regards, via double-selfie, to our mutual friends in NYC, his importers.

Laurence and Rémi Dufaitre
Domaine de Botheland

69460 Saint-Étienne-des-Oullières

Tel: 04 74 03 55 69

Related Links:

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2015:

Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

A far better reported visit to the Dufaitres by Bert at Wine Terroirs.

Jordan Mackay. Someone get this man a glass of Métras.

I write now and then for an NYC-based website called PUNCH, whose stated purpose is to explore the culture surrounding wine, spirits, and other alcoholic beverages. It's a publication of Ten Speed Press, itself a subsidiary of Random House. I hope the site and its parent companies will forgive me in advance for publicly taking issue with a deeply misinformative piece recently published in PUNCH by San Francisco Magazine wine writer Jordan Mackay.

Entitled "Beyond Carbonic: A New Era in Beaujolais," the piece alerts readers to an ostensibly new trend in Beaujolais winemaking, Burgundian fermentation with de-stemming and pigeage, i.e. not the region's traditional carbonic maceration. This is not, not even by the furthest stretch of the imagination, "a new era." Mackay inadvertently acknowledges as much in the piece itself, citing Chateau du Moulin-à-Vent (established: 1732) as among the practitioners. Jean-Paul Brun, the other key example Mackay cites in the piece, founded his domaine in 1979, and has long been imported to the US. The producers Mackay cites, it bears mentioning, are neither the region's leading lights, nor its youngest vanguard.

So, not news. Where Mackay goes harmfully off the rails is in ascribing all the faults of industrial Beaujolais Nouveau production circa-1980 to carbonic maceration. In one astonishingly wrongheaded paragraph, he manages to conflate the influence of Jules Chauvet with that of Georges Duboeuf.

Mackay writes:

Many believe that modern carbonic evolved out of the investigations into semi-carbonic by Jules Chauvet, Beaujolais winemaker, chemist and the “father of natural wine.” Eventually, this method of light extraction that produces a gentle wine with distinctively high-toned fruit character was more widely adopted in the region, probably thanks to the success of Beaujolais Nouveau...

There you have it, folks: history inverted. This is either terribly sloppy research, or deliberate misinformation on the scale of Republican presidential candidates discussing climate change.

Mackay implies that natural winemakers choose to employ Chauvet-style carbonic maceration in order to emulate the success of Beaujolais Nouveau. Whereas the real story is that Marcel Lapierre, who later would do great work transmitting the gospel of low-sulfur winemaking, unofficially apprenticed himself to Chauvet around 1980, directly as a result of his [Lapierre's] dissatisfaction with wines produced during what was then the height of the Beaujolais Nouveau craze. The fad for Beaujolais Nouveau was largely the marketing work of mega-negoçiant Georges Duboeuf, who is, strangely, not mentioned in Mackay's article. Carbonic maceration in Beaujolais predates both the term natural wine and the Beaujolais Nouveau era.

Mackay proceeds to lay blame for the loss of terroir expression associated with the excesses of industrial Beaujolais Nouveau production (the latter including chemical farming, lab yeasts, too-brief macerations, heavy sulfur use) on the practice of carbonic maceration, which, it must be stressed, does not require or imply them. (Contrary to what is indicated in this article, carbonic does not even require the "technological innovation" of modern tanks, for CO2 is heavier than air. Most producers use lidded cement tanks, but others merely string netting or tarps over the open vats during maceration.) Mackay, throughout the piece, equates carbonic maceration with short carbonic maceration, which is not at all the practice pursued by the region's greatest producers. Carbonic maceration can be very long - chez Yvon Métras, for example, a particular tank of old-vine fruit in 2013 macerated for 44 days.

To arrive at the bizarre conclusions Mackay does in his article, one would have to hold a grudge either against Kermit Lynch, who imports many of Beaujolais' greatest (and, yes, carbonic) winemakers, or against natural wine, an ideal closely associated with those same winemakers. In support of the latter possibility are the author's disparaging mentions of natural winemakers Philippe Pacalet and Hervé Souhaut early in the piece, and the fact that not once is the word "sulfur" used in the article. But there is a third possibility, which is that Mackay is just clueless about Beaujolais. Mackay basically says as much, when he cites the only non-carbo Beaujolais "with some age" he's tried: a 2010 Moulin-à-Vent from Chateau de Moulin-à-Vent.

For all Mackay's unfamiliarity with Beaujolais and natural wine, it would still seem he's read my friend Alice Feiring's book, Naked Wine, in which, towards the end, probably for plot's sake, she takes what I'd suggest is a rather too-skeptical view of cold carbonic maceration, often seeming* to conflate it with all carbonic maceration. Mackay, in his piece, commits the same peccadillo, but on a nuclear scale, implicitly indicting all the region's greatest winemakers. (Who, lucky for them, go mostly unmentioned by Mackay.)

Wine writers often tend to demand from winemakers broad heuristics, easy rules of thumb that lay readers can apply to a supermarket wine shelf. But winemaking is more complicated than that, and as wine lovers we would do well to resist the temptation to ascribe overall quality to any one vinification practice. At best, it oversimplifies a subject. At worst, as here, it actively creates confusion in the market for an economically downtrodden region whose greatest, most visionary winemakers are still a struggling minority.

* Sorry Alice ! I know you didn't intend that. But it reads that way at times.

Related Links:

It's also worth reading Alice Feiring's savvy commentary rebuttal to Mackay.

The last time I took public offense to a fellow wine writer was 2013, when Lettie Teague"investigated" natural wine.

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2015:

Rémi et Laurence Dufaitre, Saint-Etienne-des-Oullières
Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

Young Fleurie-based winemaker Jules Métras released his first wine under his own name this year, a Beaujolais-Villages sourced from two parcels, one in Lancié, the other in La Chappelle de Guinchay. The latter parcel was formerly owned by Jules Chauvet. Jules Métras vinifies the wine in his father's cellar, an anonymous-looking, un-insulated concrete structure perched amid the Fleurie climat of Grille-Midi.

He makes the wine in much the same way his father does. The fruit, harvested relatively late, is cooled down before gentle, long, cool carbonic fermentation with natural yeasts in lidded cement vat. "It took eight or nine days to start fermentation, which is pretty long. At the end of five days I was going crazy," he says. "But my dad says, 'Noooo, don't worry.' He's never worried."

We taste the wine in April, not long before bottling. The nose is deep, redolent of crushed berry, and faintly roasty, although only older barrels are used in elevage. Its black-current fruit possesses the suavity and dark florals that made his father's wine legendary. Jules Métras titled the cuvée "Bijou," a bit of local youth slang whose popularity Métras credits to his friend and fellow Beaujolais scion Kéké Descombes. "Everytime he plowed a parcel, he'd send some photos and say 'Wow, it's bijou!' Meaning it's clean, magnificent. Now when we drink great wine, it's bijou. When a pretty girl passes, she's bijou."

A sneak preview of the label design.

I first met Jules Métras on the night of Beaujolais Nouveau at La Quincave in Paris' 14ème arrondissement. His friends had been teaching me the definition of another Beaujolais slang word, "troll," which, in its narrow definition, means something like 'carpetbagger,' a latecomer to the region, insufficiently dedicated to its culture. I was telling them I was thinking about writing a book on Beaujolais. Am I a troll, I wondered?

I suppose the jury's still out on that one. But Jules was very kind, some months later, to receive my friends and I on a windy evening the weekend before the La Beaujoloise tasting. Along with his own new cuvée, we tasted his father's 2014 wines, and it was a uniquely edifying experience hearing them curated by Jules, who helps in their production, and who seems slightly more at ease than his father with the role of de facto regional ambassador. The Métras wines are a beacon in the region, after all. In their depth, ageworthiness, and grace, they embody the region's soaring, still-largely untapped potential.

The keen Beaujolais tout court is, unusually, sourced from the highest-altitude parcel of the village of Fleurie. (Much basic northern Beaujolais is grown on clayier soil, guyot-trained vines closer to the Saone river.) It's a parcel that was declassified from cru Fleurie to Beaujolais on account of its height. Jules reports that the vines have never undergone chemical farming, and the resultant fruit is host to a beautiful plethora of yeasts. Accordingly, it always naturally ferments the fastest, typically between 10 and 20 days.

The Fleurie "Cuvée Le Printemps," meanwhile, is sourced from a young-vine parcel just above the cellar. This is the one Métras cuvée in which I occasionally encounter strong reduction. He observes that the vines are in a sort of adolescence, that when the vines were even younger, there was less reduction in the wine.

The Fleurie "Vieilles Vignes," tasted from cuve, was in a transitional state, showing intense persistence, with just a hint of acetates on the nose. I have no doubt they'll disappear in the finished wine. An interesting aspect of the Métras operation is that the vineyards are very "fragmentés," with small parcels spread throughout the Fleurie appellation. One surmises that part of the genius of Métras pére lies in his skill at blending them.

An old vine parcel downslope from the cellar.

Another part of his genius is probably maniacal attention to detail. It's custom at the Métras cellar to continuously monitor fermentation temperatures on the fermentation vats themselves, with the result that they resemble the cell wall of a madman in jail.

Lastly we tasted the Fleurie "Ultime," a very-old vine, selection-level cuvée which was last produced in 2011. The barrels in which this wine ages are positively drenched in wine, presumably a result of super-rigorous topping-up, or frequent dipping-in, or both.

I admit to usually preferring the Fleurie "Vieilles Vignes" when I taste the wines from bottle; the "Ultime" always seems unapproachably rich. From barrel the latter wine was extremely forthcoming, however, with a vivid, bloody, red-currant nose, and fermenty notes of china bark.

I said we tasted this last, but in fact there was no identifiable last wine; we doubled back to wines already tasted, as friends, family, and neighbors began to arrive. Jules' sister Inès, his neighbor, fellow winemaker, and good friend Yann Bertrand, others. No doubt some of the rarity of these wines derives from how much the family and their friends enjoy them. Who can blame them? Among the most beautiful characteristics of the Beaujolais region is the perceptible resolution, among the great winemakers whose wines risk becoming rare luxuries, to refuse to treat them as such.

Jules Métras / Yvon Métras
69820 FLEURIE

Related Links:

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2015:

Rémi et Laurence Dufaitre, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

A beautiful report of harvest time visit to Yvon Métras at Wine Terroirs.

On a rainy morning in April, over some barrel samples of his and his son's old vine Morgon and Régnié (respectively), I mentioned to Jean-Paul Thévenet that I was planning a book project about the wines of Beaujolais. Like many winemakers I spoke to, he was encouraging, but not without certain qualifications.

"When we started making this type of wine, there were people who quite liked our wines, but who soon began telling us, this is good, and that’s not good, and it’s no good for us, to talk like that. There are people who work conventionally who work very well, and we ought to leave them the choice..."

Having worked for over three decades to encourage better viticultural and winemaking practices in his region, Thévenet is aware that progress is slow, where it occurs at all, and that the eager attention of a critic is likelier to inflame situations than improve them. Thévénet counsels patience.

"Little by little, the products are less noxious... There are a lot of people who begin to work a little more naturally. When we started to do this in 1985 - Marcel Lapierre a little before - we were often refused the appellation because [our wine] was marked atypical, not representative of the region. Meanwhile the old winegrowers told us that our wines were like the Morgon that was made fifty years ago."

I always leap for Thévenet's wines whenever I see them in Paris, which is oddly rarely. He has a longtime agent who lives in Grosley, near Beauvais, who I suspect doesn't actively court any new accounts in the city. Then again there might just not be any wine to go around. Thévenet's domaine has remained about the same size since the mid-80's, diminishing even, when he ceded his Régnié vines to his son Charly in 2007. Thévénet père is left with just under 5ha of Morgon, mostly situated near the hamlet of Le Clachet, bordering the vines of Domaine Marcel Lapierre.

Thévenet also produces a lightly-sweet sparkling Gamay for the British market.

Charly Thévenet's 2014 Régnié that day was a sample drawn from concrete tank. The wine sees a somewhat unusual aging process, in that it spends the first eight or nine months in concrete, after which about a third of it will be put in neutral oak barrels, with everything being assembled for bottling about a full year after the vintage.

For comparison, his father's old-vine Morgon is aged 3/4 in old oak from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, with the last quarter aged in concrete tank. Jean-Paul Thévenet does several bottlings per year, depending on the yields of the vintage, and there's unfortunately no way to tell from which bottling a given bottle derives. (He says it's because he orders the labels before he knows how many bottles he'll produce.)

Both wines undergo cool carbonic maceration (as opposed to the cold carbonic that is my friend Alice Feiring's personal bugaboo). In his circumspect way, Thévenet professed to eschewing too drastic chilling before carbonic maceration:

"Before we had a technique, for fermentation, where we went much lower on temperature. Now, well, me personally, I have less the tendency to make the temperature lower, because we lose a lot of time....We went to zero, 2, 3 4 degrees. I find that a little too much, because for 4 or 5 days, nothing happens. I don’t like that too much, when nothing happens. I prefer that it starts fermenting. So now we descend the temperature a little less; in general we put in the grapes cold, between 10-12-13 degrees, so the fermentations aren't as long."

Thévenet's basic Morgon, which is not brought into the US. To this day I still haven't tasted it. He says he still makes it for the sake of his father's clients.

I had arrived solo, after having told Thévénet we'd be four people. The two novelists I was traveling with preferred reading in bed that morning, and my other friend C had, impossibly, managed to get lost behind me on the fifteen minute bike route between Lancié and Pizay.*

But by lucky chance Thévenet and I were soon joined by former Clermont-Ferrand natural wine caviste, current Domaine Marcel Lapierre cellar-hand David Chastang, a.k.a. Totor, who was just dropping by. I'd met Totor the previous summer when he was working at Le Bist'Roch in Nuits. I recalled aloud that on the day I visited that wine bar, the other clients were a bachelor party whose guest of honor was dressed up as a gigantic penis. (In retrospect, this is probably the sort of story I should not try to relay in a second language.)

We all agreed that Charly Thévenet's Régnié was in fine form that day, bristling and bright-fruited. Totor went so far as to propose he forget the fut aging and just bottle it immediately.

The tasting's real treasures, however, were a pair of older bottles Thévenet kindly opened, old-vine Morgons from 1996 and 2008.

Thévenet and Totor recalled that 1996 had been an unusual harvest. "We had quite a bit of production in quantity," said Thévenet, "but there was difficulty to ripen. From the beginning to the end of harvest, it was cold and sunny in the day, and cold at night."

Harvest had been very late, yet the wines tasted astringent in their youth. In our glasses now, the wine was an aromatic eruption of Morgon, with bold cherry, gunflint, and kirsch notes. This latter note, to my American-raised palate, often scans as a pleasant, low-toned cough-syrup, a rich center to a Morgon's otherwise lithe, agile profile. On the palate this bottle of 1996 was a little brief, marked by a nagging note of volatile acidity.

The 2008, on the other hand, was mesmerizing in the cool, panoramic style of that year's greatest successes. Its white-cherry fruit was luminescent, throwing off lovely rainfall aromas with just a touch of cigar-like spice. If in a classic year, Beaujolais is stark, crunchy, and rhythmic in the manner of Ziggy Stardust, then the greats of 2008 resemble Bowie's shimmery sound-experiments the Low era.

Around this time we were joined by Jean-Paul's wife Annick and his daughter Charlotte, who joined us for a glass. I reintroduced myself, which involved reintroducing the idea of my book project.

"Perhaps why they haven’t yet written [such a book]," Jean-Paul observed then, "is that 15 years ago we were not very numerous. Now it’s interesting because there are lot of good young winemakers. So the book can be a little thicker."

Annick laughed and added, "Before, it would have been 12 pages - a pamphlet!"

* In her defense, her cell-phone had been stolen on the train. I was left with the uncomfortable choice between relying upon her to make her own way back to the gite, or blowing off an appointment with a great winemaker in order to go find her. I chose the former option, and felt somewhat validated when it began to rain steadily.

Jean-Paul Thévenet
82, route de Saint Ennemond

Pizay
69220 ST. JEAN D'ARDIERES

Related Links:

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2015:

Jules Métras, Fleurie
Rémi et Laurence Dufaitre, Saint-Etienne-des-Ouillières
Jean-Claude Lapalu, Saint-Etienne-La-Varenne
Benoit Camus, Ville-sur-Jarnioux

Beaujolais Bike Trip 2011:

Karim Vionnet, Villié-Morgon
Café de la Bascule, Fleurie
Isabelle et Bruno Perraud, Vauxrenard
Le Coq à Juliènas, Juliènas
Le Relais des Caveaux, Villié-Morgon
L'Atelier du Cuisiner, Villié-Morgon

A concise profile of Jean-Paul Thévénet's domaine at the site of his longtime US importer, Kermit Lynch. The text oddly refers to Régnié as a "Grand Cru," although to my knowledge there is no such thing as a "Grand Cru" in Beaujolais, just crus.

Roberson Wine in the UK bring in Thévénet's basic Morgon and his sweet sparkler.

Aurélia Filion produced one of her spell-binding "Bu Sur Le Web" YouTube videos in which she tastes the 2008 Thévénet Morgon Vieilles Vignes in 2010. I predict these videos will one day be used as eduational aids for the training of aphasic sommeliers.

The other evening I had the occasion to follow up on a surprising recommendation I'd received in March from Guardian wine columnist Fiona Beckett, who had turned up what sounded like a splendid wine bar in the least likely place of all: mere paces from luxury department store Le Bon Marché. This is deep, gerontocratic Paris, home to those Parisians whose wealth and social stability have largely spared them from meaningful interaction with the contemporary era, let alone any re-examination of their drinking habits.

I adore this neighborhood, naturally. But, save for the splendid Café Trama up the road, it's until now been very hard to find anything to drink there.

So newcomer natural-wine cave-à-mangerSauvage, when it opened in February on rue de Cherche-Midi, needed merely to exist to qualify as groundbreaking. Bare-bones, boxy, and cheerful, Sauvage resembles a small-town Scandinavian coffee shop. But owner Sebastien Leroy outdoes himself with a surprisingly uncompromising natural wine selection, and an improvisational menu that grasps beyond the usual cheese and charcuterie to include - at least on the night I visited - a bright and vivid lobster salad.

Who knew that all cold lobster needed as adornment were a scrappy herb vinaigrette and a broken-necklace of fresh berries?

Sauvage's menu is verbalized (at great length) without prices, so I'd been waiting for a wallop with the bill after a round of these salads. The wallop never came. Exact prices escape me but nothing was gougingly expensive, as one might expect in Sauvage's neighorhood. (Perhaps Leroy is passing onto his clients what he saves in labor costs by preparing everything himself, with some of the attendant delays.)

Wine prices, too, are fair. For the initial selection I understand that Leroy, a former film set designer, received some help from my friend Michel Moulherat, formerly of La Cave de l'Insolite, now of La Poudrière in Issy-les-Moulineaux. (There seems to have been a falling-out between the two over the project, hence Moulherat's departure. An issue about which I have neither requested nor received details from either party...)

The selection as it stands now is Loire-centric, but a little lean on readily enjoyable white wine. (Points for courage to anyone trying to explain the Courtois family's skin-macerated Sologne creations to anyone looking for a nice white before dinner.)

I was happy to see the wines of upstart natural Beaujolais winemakers Hervé Ravera and Romain des Grottes. These are less-than-obvious selections for a new wine bar.

Sauvage's chief draw for those not overwhelmingly interested in natural wine will be its terrace, which is just slightly broader than your average tongue-depressor. I suspect this was done less out of sadism than for fear of having it removed entirely by the Mairie. As it is, ones ankles are in continuous competition with droves of coiffed old ladies and their dogs.

That didn't stop us passing a really splendid evening. After about 8pm, bedtime for the quartier, foot traffic largely disappears, and one can begin to spread out. My friends and I shared, among other bottles, one that has become a favorite of mine this spring and summer, Domaine de La Paonnerie's 2014 Vin de France Rosé "Voilà du Gros Lot."

It's a fascinating, unclassifiable wine that splits the difference between an orange wine and a rosé. Domaine de la Paonnerie's Jacques and Agnès Carroget make it from grolleau gris, a pink-skinned mutation of the more commonly encountered red grape grolleau noir. The grape see whole-bunch fermentation and short maceration, yielding a strawberry-blonde color, and an enthralling, iris-tinted nose. At around 14€ retail at most places I've seen it, it's easily the best price-quality ratio of the season, for anyone looking for complexity in rosé.

I recently tasted the 2013 vintage at 12ème arrondissement wine bar Le Siffleur de Ballons, who still have quite a bit of stock. It holds up alright, although a lightly skunky incense note starts to obscure the fruit. My friends there shook their heads relaying how impossible it was to sell - a waxen, cloudy rosé from an unknown western Loire variety.

Proposing it to Bon Marché shoppers, many of whom are probably in Provence as I type, is deliciously quixotic. Here's to more of the same.

Sauvage
60, rue de Cherche-Midi
75006 PARIS
Métro: Rennes, Vaneau, or Sèvres-Babylone
Tel: 06 88 88 48 23

Related Links:

Fiona Beckett's March 2015 piece on Sauvage.

Le Fooding's piece on Sauvage boasts by far the worst photo the site has ever published. It looks like it was taken with Google Street View.

Café Trama, 75006

somm-run: le siffleur de ballons, 75012

n.d.p. in sardinia: tenute dettori

the return of christophe: amarante, 75012

time is nye: yard, 75011

revolutionaries: bar à vin a.t & restaurant a.t, 75005

n.d.p. in abruzzo: 50 years of emidio pepe

les vendanges: champagne jacques lassaigne, montgueux

side benefits: table à côté, 75012

off the map: la poudrière, issy-les-moulineaux

n.d.p. in burgundy: julien guillot, sagy-le-haut

rebirth of cool: entrée des artistes pigalle, 75009

back yard: yard wine bar, 75011

n.d.p. in beaujolais: benoit camus, ville-sur-jarnioux

conscientious objectors: les déserteurs, 75011

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jean-claude lapalu, saint-etienne-la-varenne

n.d.p. in beaujolais: laurence and rémi dufaitre, saint-étienne-des-ouillières

jordan mackay's beaujolais misinformation

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jules métras, fleurie

n.d.p. in beaujolais: jean-paul thévenet, pizay

the noble savage: sauvage, 75006