Salon de vins

Today, after dropping the kids off at school, Abe and I headed out to the Port de Versailles, where the Exposition Halls are located. One of my colleagues at INSERM had given me two entries to the Salon des vins des vignerons independants (Wine show for independent winegrowers). I had gotten a book at the second hand book store that was supposed to teach us everything we needed to know about wine. We had browsed through it over the weekend, grasped the basic notions of the various wine growning regions of France, and felt well prepared. We went in, gave them our tickets, and were each handed a glass. We walked a little further into the room, and I'll admit froze like deer in the headlights. Imagine being in a room with an empty glass and over 1000 wine growers each waiting to let you try their product. At that moment, we needed a lot more than a book. A personal sommelier would have been very welcome. So, we flipped through the brochure and came up with a system. Keeping in mind a 4 pm meeting with one of my research collaborators, we knew we had to limit our selections somehow. We decided we would try a gold medal winner from each region. Alsace, conveniently white wine and first alphabetically was a good place to start. We tried a pinot gris and an gewurztraminer. So far, so good for our system. We then went upstairs (yes, not one, but two endless levels of wine) to look for a good place to taste wine from the Aquitaine region. We found a nice looking stand from that region and were discretely trying to look it up in our catalogue when the owner called out to us, "I'm not in the book. You have to pay extra to be in the book, and I didn't pay. But, come taste my wine anyway." He turned out to be a really friendly guy who told us all about his wine (we tasted Cote de Blaye and Cote de Bourg), the region where it's grown, the gravel content of the soil there, and the fact that no one ever comes to visit Blaye even though it's really nice. In addition to the wine tastes, he gave us several tourism brochures about his region. As we stood in the aisle pondering our next move, another wine grower invited us over to his stand. Lo and behold it was another Cote de Blaye grower, just as friendly as the last. We left feeling a certain sentimental fondness for Cote de Blaye wines. Starting to feel more relaxed, and the system already blown, we turned to the new approach of wandering aimlessly stopping at any stands that caught our fancy. We bought a bottle of 2001 Medoc (from the Bordeaux region) from an amusingly arrogant grower, and a bottle of 2003 Provencal wine (a very "drinkable" blend of merlot, cabernet sauvingnon, and some other grapes) from a British grower who taught us a lot about the insane French laws governing wine labeling. Towards the end of the morning, we tried a couple of varieties of chateauneuf-de-pape (from the Rhone valley region). Then, we finished with the best champagne either of us had ever had served along with small chocolate truffles. This was the kind of day sabbaticals are all about: a certain amount of uncertainty, lots of opportunity for learning new things, and more than a little bit of decandent pleasure.