Une minute chaude en France
I spent a little bit more than a week in France over Bastille Day. My old buddies from San Francisco were in Bordeaux for a ribosome conference and they invited me to stay in their Airbnb’s extra bedroom. Exactly 10 years ago, I visited the region of Bordeaux with Jerry and Jennifer from Guardian Cellars but on that trip we didn’t spend any time in the city itself. Back in 2012, Rodrigo Luna from Sylvain Cooperage coordinated our visits to some amazing wineries on both the right and left bank and we toured Sylvain’s barrel factory and stave mill. https://www.tonnellerie-sylvain.fr/en/tonnellerie-en/know-how/
This trip in July 2022 was quite spur of the moment on my part over a national holiday with a record breaking heat wave and wildfires. So it was less about visiting specific showoffy Chateaux and more about enjoying a taste of the French way of life together with my old friends. C’est pas grave. Merci to Rodrigo who gave me some great tips about fun things to do in the city and in Arcachon.
My consulting client Baer has been working with barrels from the Demptos Cooperage since day one so I reached out to my sales rep Ron Celaya to get his help in arranging a day of visits for me and my friend Julia. Demptos was founded in 1825 in the town of Saint-Caprais-de-Bordeaux. The president of the cooperage, François Witasse, spent the day with us. Originally from Toulouse, he studied Agricultural Engineering and then spent 10 years selling Demptos barrels in Spain before coming back to Bordeaux. He has a very worldy perspective on the use of oak barrels in wine and spirits.
Dr. Picard with a 400megahertz NMR machine in the Demptos Research Center at University of Bordeaux
https://scotchwhisky.com/magazine/features/27008/unravelling-the-mysteries-of-the-cask/
François took us to visit arguably the greatest wine school in the world, the University of Bordeaux where Demptos sponsors a research center. It was amazing to see the state of the art analytical chemistry equipment and to get a tour from Dr. Magali Picard who is studying oak barrel derived molecules including compounds that smell like citrus and mint. These discoveries were news to me… but admittedly I don’t read a lot of the primary literature anymore. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354869852_The_dynamic_of_roasted_aroma_compounds_release_from_oak_wood_investigation_of_the_heating_barrel_process_and_some_spirit_maturation_parameters
After the lab tour, François drove us around vineyards of Pomerol and St. Emilion and their satellite appellations and then we popped into the town of St. Emilion for a quick and super charming walk around the UNESCO heritage site before a very lovely civilized lunch at the restaurant at Chateau Soutard. François’ colleague Sharleen then took us down to the cellar of Soutard for a tasting and then to the wine shop of Valendraud back in St. Emilion. Sharleen comes from a Cognac producing family and it was fascinating to hear about spirits production and the new popularity of Cognac based cocktails.
The weather was really hot and because of COVID I wanted to take all our meals outside - so it was maybe not the best conditions to appreciate the serious red wines of Bordeaux. I mean we drank super well but I was choosing cold and fresh white wines from other regions like Champagne, the Loire, the Basque country and Cotes Catalanes. Many of the admittedly hipster restaurants we went to featured “vins vivant” natural wines and pet-nats from elsewhere. Later in the evenings, as the temperatures cooled somewhat, we enjoyed some classic Bordeaux reds including the La Dame de Bouard from La Montagne de St Emilion and a Pomerol from Le Clos de Beau-Pere.
After Bastille Day, I left my buddies and spent a fun weekend in Paris by myself. Miraculously, I could actually sort of function with a combination of my baby talk French and my vague recollection of the Metro line directions. I stayed in the 11th arrondissement for the first time this trip mainly because of David Lebovitz’ recommendations. (He is literally the OG of food blogging – he was a chef at Chez Panisse and moved to Paris like 15 years ago? He now lives in the 11th. His recipes always work – his restaurant recommendations are spot on – his writing is adorable. Get ready to be charmed if you follow his Instagram or subscribe to his newsletter.) Anyhow the 11th is a somewhat “out of the way” neighborhood of Paris where there are barbershops and bigger grocery stores (as opposed to neighborhoods that seem to be entirely fancy macaron shops). There are a lot of very cool chef-owned restaurants in the 11th but since I was on my own and again I wanted to eat outside, I didn’t make reservations anywhere famous. I did very much enjoy sitting “en seule” at Cave Paul Bert – the wine bar next door to Bistro Paul Bert (a restaurant where I had one of the best dinners of my life a long time ago). The vibe in there was very cool, the music was great, the wines skewed natural but I was able to order by the glass and taste interesting stuff that wasn’t too challenging for this GenX Davis grad to appreciate. In fact, I liked it so much I went back there for dinner a second night in a row.
I made an effort to leave the 11th for two reasons. First to hit CityPharma the discount pharmacy in the 6th that I’d always read about but never visited on past Paris trips. I polled my girlfriends here in Seattle if I could bring them back any of their favorite French skin care products. The pharmacy was not as hectic as I feared (I was picturing Fairway Market in NYC, no browsing) and I was thankful to have screenshotted the list with pictures of exactly which products my friends requested because it’s super confusing. I was too shy to ask for any of the pharmaceutical products that are technically over the counter but physically behind the cashier but that was fine because I spent enough euros just getting sunscreens, serums, hand creams and weird chapstick.
The other destination I was on a mission to go to was the Fromagerie Laurent Dubois. Through David Lebovitz’s website I learned about Jennifer Greco who runs cheese tours of Paris. She wasn’t running any tours when I was visiting but through her, I did my own sort of cheese tour and I learned about special cheeses to look for and try (including Hercule, a hard sheeps milk cheese from the Pyrenees which we found at an Epicerie in Bordeaux).
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/10-favorite-french-cheeses/
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/top-10-cheese-shops-in-paris-french-fromage-fromagerie/
Laurent Dubois won the MOF - a very French award for “best craftsman of France”. What was interesting to me was that he won not for making the cheese himself but for aging other cheesemaker’s cheeses and then selling them at the exact moment each cheese was perfectly ripe. This is sort of next level cheese appreciation that is really hard to do here in the US unless you’re at a great shop. No disrespect Costco but y’all aint no affineur. That Kirkland Brie or Humbolt Fog may need a lot more ripening before it’s ready to go. I was able to have them slice small pieces of a 3 year old Comte crunchy with (tyrosine?) crystals, a quarter of an oooey gooey Reblochon, and an entire small fresh sheep cheese that I forgot the name of. All super delicious and it was fun to taste all the different toothpicked samples they had out as well. I love cheese.
