Drinking well in Paris, Burgundy and Reykjavik
If you follow my instagram, you probably saw (and hearted) my borderline gratuitous travel posts from June. Came back last week from France, just before the unrest in Paris started. My somm friend Katelyn (check out her instagram) and I started the adventure in Reykjavik taking advantage of Iceland Air’s stopover policy and then we flew to Paris where we met up with my winemaker friend Rebekah (check out her instagram too). Stay tuned because after Paris, we had an epic tour of Burgundy which I’m in the process of writing up and sorting through 10zillion vineyard photos.
TLDR drinking champagne with your friends in beautiful wine bars of the world is fun. Here’s a list of some of our favorites from this trip.
Divvino in the 3rd, Paris
A bottle shop upstairs and a wine bar in the cave below. Legally they must serve food with the wine so oui, we were forced to order salty crispy potato chips with our champagne. I tasted two delicious champagnes I had never heard of here - Joseph Perrier and Andre Robert.
La Cremerie in the 6th, Paris
A converted dairy shop turned bottle shop and wine bar that now has a Berkel slicer like mine for charcuterie and a lovely offering of cheeses to pair with their organic wine selection. We were able to order Champagne Lalarge-Pugeot by the glass. I met Clemence Lalarge when she visited RN74 in Seattle a couple years ago and remembered liking her wines a lot. Being organic in Champagne is a big deal because the disease pressure in the vineyards is high.
Septime La Cave in the 11th, Paris
Super natural selections but thankfully the staff was amenable to giving us a little taste before we committed to anything too wacko. After many glasses of wines from autochthonous varietals I never heard of, we enjoyed a bottle of 2022 Pinot Noir from Claire Naudin. I tried to get reservations at the Septime restaurant but was unsuccessful. We did have a fun dinner at their fish restaurant called Clamato.
The Little Red Door in the 3rd, Paris
I tend not to be a cocktail person, my liver has its work cut out for it with all the wine I drink, but my friends Rebekah and Katelyn wanted to check out a “farm to glass” concept cocktail bar called The Little Red Door. I ordered an interesting red wine based drink called “walnut” which was garnished with a nut sitting on top of one of those perfectly clear gigantic ice cubes that I am not cool enough to drink around without sloshing half the cocktail onto my dress. Can’t take me anywhere… This place is on the 2022 best bars in the world list.
Coincidentally, back in December I went to Liquoreria Limantour in Mexico City which is also on the best bars in the world list 2022. The paloma I ordered also had a bigass clear ice cube in it which similarly impeded my drinking and splashed a tidal wave of grapefruit soda and tequila down the side of my cheek and neck. Remember the movie Airplane “and that as much as anything else led to my drinking problem”.
A new Burgundian Wine Bar I can recommend
La Cuverie de Comtes Liger-Belair in Vosne-Romanee, Cote d’Or
A Google search for “wine bar near me” brought us here - we were all kinds of thirsty after spying on DRC vineyards. It’s a new hotel and wine bar that has an eclectic list of wines by the glass both from their own production and from other regions of France (I tried their 2018 Bourgogne rouge and a 2020 riesling from Zind-Humbrecht.) Our server Chris worked in their vineyards and he showed us the unique trellising of their biodynamic plots in Vosne. Also - the wallpaper in the bathroom is these Larmat maps of Burgundy.
Reykjavik
My friends who had visited Iceland told me Iceland is expensive and wow were they right. Katelyn and I walked by this cute basement wine bar and enjoyed their natural and classic wine by the glass selections from all over Europe. “Tiu sopar” means 10 sips in Icelandic. The folks there were nice and they played fun music. It had a good energy and seemed to be a place that real Icelanders hung out.
We popped into this coffee house after a soak in the neighborhood pool called Vesturbaerjarlaug. I was thirsty after the hot tubs so I didn’t drink wine here but it looked like a really cute spot.
