The French Way of Life

A member of the club very kindly gave me a ticket to a wine festival.

It was a ticket for two so myself and Phil, from the Irish College, went on our way to get pissed, under the vague pretence of sampling French culture. The festival was of independent wine-makers and was at the exhibition halls at Porte de Versailles. It is apparently quite a well known event that attracts huge crowds each year. This year was no exception except that two Paddies had crept in unnoticed beneath the radar of the French Cultural Police.

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Details of the exhibition can be found at www.vigneron-independant.com under Paris 2006. There were roughly 972 stands. Each of the 12 or so French wine regions were represented.
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The hall was enormous, stretching out in every direction along corridors and corridors of stands. At the door we were each given a wine glass for sampling. The layout was absolutely bewildering, with no order to it whatsoever. They weren't ordered by region or price or by reputation, just spread out randomly across this huge hall. In order to get what we wanted as quickly as possible we bought a catalogue and quickly headed out to our first destination - champagne.

As if to celebrate our newly found pig-in-shit status we stared by sampling one or two champagnes. You must imagine that it was quite evident to these wily vintners that these two student-types, although one of them spoke quite good French (not me), that it was perhaps unlikely that they were going to walk away with a few crates a piece. This seriously cut in to the samples we were given at some stands - most notably perhaps the €70 a bottle Armangnac where we given, after a considerable length of time left standing there, a dribble in the bottom of the Brandy glass. Colour, bouquet, taste, acidity all were carefully mulled over at each stand until we felt we had made it seem like we were considering buying but wanted to shop around just a bit more.

We sampled wines from every region of France - Alsace-Lorrain, Beaujolais, Champagne, Loire Valley, the South-West, Rhone Valley, Loire Valley, Bourgogne - or at least the ones we felt deserved our patronage. Eventually, with a much fuller sense of at least the great range of tastes in wine we decided to call it a day. Chuffed with ourselves, we wandered perhaps slightly less steadily into the sunset to get a Kebab to wash away the sense of pretension which risked consuming us in that place.