Wine Salon - Take 2

My colleague Beverly hooked us up once again with tickets to the spring wine salon. Slightly more prepared this time than we were in the fall, Abe and I headed to the Espace Champeret for a few pleasurable hours of wine tasting. Since we are in the midst of planning a trip to the Provence region (and since we have learned that we tend to prefer the deep red wines of the south of France), we decided to concentrate our tasting on wines from this region. We tasted a few excellent wines before stopping at the stand of Beatrice and Bernard Rivals who run vineyards a few fields away from one another in Saint-Emilion in the Bordeaux region. M. Rivals, dressed in a black shirt and red bow-tie was very friendly and led us through a series of wines from both his and his wife's vineyards. I asked if they compete with one another and he said, no, the year is long and one can drink many wines. The last wine he had us try was the "Excellence" pure Merlot (very rare in France to have a wine made from a single grape). He had only produced 300 bottles of this particular wine. It was incredible. Despite the extravagance (30 euros which by our standards is outrageous, our typical wine here is 3-4 euros and quite good at that), we decided to buy a bottle (bottle #145 to be specific), along with 2 other, less extravagant, bottles packaged in a handsome wooden crate.

Having completed all the wine buying we were going to do for the day, we decided next to take advantage of the "initiation to wine tasting" courses that were offered. The 1 hour class was offered by the Ecole du Vin - a group in Paris that offers wine tasting courses throughout the year. The course was really interesting. We tasted 3 wines and analyzed each one, learning lots of interesting wine tasting facts along the way. For each wine we went through the three steps of look, smell, and taste, picking up clues about each wine. He taught us a bit about pairing wines with foods (wines with hints of citrus go well with fish, spicy wines should be paired with non-spicy foods to balance one another, etc). We also did a cool exercise where they had put 4 little vials of aromas on each table (the ecole promotes a 36 vial box of aromas to hone your wine detective skills - for the truly committed). We were to smell each vial and try to figure it out - first grouping it as fruit, floral, vegetal, animal, or grilled, and then trying to pinpoint it from a list of aromas. We identified honey without a problem, vial #35 smelled like Vicks (it turned out to be pine - we were close), we knew that #8 was a fruit, but did not guess Muscat (largely because we didn't know what the word "muscat" means), and finally, mistook musc for caramel, which in retrospect seems ridiculous, but at the time was very subtle. The most amazing part of it was that the entire 1 hour presentation was in French and Abe followed the whole thing!

We took a break for lunch and then went back to taste a few more wines before picking up our crate and heading home. Along the way, we stopped at a stand selling artisinal honeys. In the same style, the vendor led us through a series of tastes of honeys produced by bees using honey from various flowers. The range and depth of the various tastes was not to be believed. We ended up buying small jars of 5 or 6 of our favorites - each one with a completely distincitve flavor.

Today, we had Olivia, Laura, Jolane, and Sarah over for Ella's birthday party. Despite the challenges of organizing and running a party in French, it was an overall success. Last night, at about 1 am, I had the brainstorm to organize the party around a series of notes left by a fairy. The kids put together the notes (which had been cut into simple puzzles) and the notes led them from one activity and game to another (from lunch, to decorate your own cupcakes, to pin the hat on the fairy, to freeze dance, to pass the parcel [with prizes for everyone - fairies are generous that way], to painting their own flower pots and planting flowers in them). The kids loved the "magic" of the fairy notes, and and the prizes that mysteriously appeared in the fairy box (thanks to Abe), and had a great time with the projects and games.

This afternoon we interviewed a potential babysitter. Often when people come to our home, if Jonah likes them, he brings his toys out one by one and presents them to the guest. At one point, he brought out his Noah's ark toy, and the babysitter asked, "Is this Noah's ark?" and Jonah answered, "no, it's mine." He chatted at length with her, in French. In fact, she asked us if his English is as good as his French! (in fact, I think his English is still better than his French, but just barely, and French is catching up rapidly).