Food and Drink

Only a fool tries to guess exactly what awaits at a French karaoke bar. But on a Saturday night in Avignon, I wasn’t expecting to find a crowd of twentysomething hipsters drinking American-style IPA and singing “Mr. Brightside” and “Friday I’m in Love.” France, in all its stereotypical glory, has always been a wine country. Edward Lear wrote no limericks about a “young man from Saint-Étienne, who liked drinking Old Speckled Hen” but things are changing. France has the most breweries in Europe and beer is now the most bought alcohol in supermarkets, though if you ask a middle-aged Frenchman why young people are embracing beer instead of burgundy, you are met with the most Gallic of shrugs and a “bof... je ne sais pas.” So, why are they doing it?

Regular readers of my cocktail column probably get the formula by now: I give a short history of the drink in question, probably with an anecdote about my time in bartending, then provide a classic recipe, following by various flavor and format variations. But the Bloody Mary doesn’t fit neatly into that structure. For one thing, the drink’s origin has never been firmly established — given that it started as a spiked tomato juice, how could there be? Do we really care who invented the vodka-cranberry? The Bloody Mary is the same way. It probably came around during the 1920s, gaining popularity in the 1930s. By 1939, you see the first real mentions of it in print.

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

It’s 1951 and the Hotel Monteleone burns bright, a gilded island of light and liquor adrift in the New Orleans dark. Inside, the air is thick with the sweet tang of cigar smoke and the murmurs of polished conversation. Over in the Swan Room, the trumpets blare, their brassy notes cutting through the gentle chatter, their absence filled with the lively, gravelly voice of Louis Prima. The crowd sways in rhythm, caught between the pulse of jazz and the flicker of chandelier light. Outside, the French Quarter is still alive.

The October 15 issue of the Wine Spectator carries two intriguing features. The first is a series of reports, with lavish photographs, on “The World’s Greatest Vineyards.” This list of ten superstars is followed by a cast of twenty supporting actors, wineries the editors regard as “world class” but relegate to slightly lower rungs on the scale of vinous celebrity. You might think that any such listing would be powerfully subjective. Isn’t one’s taste in wine a classic instance of de gustibus non disputandum est? Well, yes and no. You don’t have to be Immanuel Kant to appreciate that in judging wine there are some objective, or objective-like, features, as well as wholly subjective ones.