By Paige Donner
La Revue du Vin de France held its wine salon this past weekend in Paris at the "ancien Bourse" which is the old stock exchange of Paris. As you can see here, it's a beautiful building. It's spacious and airy and the perfect place for wine tasting on a sunny Spring Sunday afternoon in May.
Honestly, if I have one recommendation to make to visitors to France, it's that you really must coordinate your travels with these wine salons. For a few Euro, you get to not only see the interior of a national monument, you get to drink and taste your way through the wines of France.
I was so pre-occupied with tasting wines from Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Loire and Provence that I had to remind myself to sip a few drops of champagne every so often - just to clean the palate, you know.
So many wonderful wines. It will take the rest of the month to wade through all my tasting notes.
And the crowd was super friendly. Maybe it's the sunny weather in Paris in Spring or perhaps it's simply that good French wine brings out that "conviviality" that the French speak so glowingly of when discussing their wines. Whatever it was, the LRDVF crowd was super friendly, very forthcoming with anecdotes about the wines they were pouring and the wines they were tasting and just plain, well, welcoming.
If there is only one little note I might give it's that the Spanish wines were much too hard to find. Certainly, once I found my way upstairs, I loved the private room where the Spanish winemakers had stashed themselves, with the old stock exchange board that featured handwritten company signage such as Printemps and Paribas on it... But they were much too isolated up there. Since it's the first time the salon has welcomed foreign wines amongst its midst in its 5 year history, perhaps affording them more accessibility would be a gesture of convivial diplomacy.
By the time I left, it was with a full glass of Spanish red liqueur wine. So sweet and rich and nothing like "ice wine." I'll definitely have some words to share about that and about the Priorat wines I discovered at the Paris Stock Exchange.
*LOCAL FOOD AND WINE*
TWITTER.COM/LOCALFOODWINE
FACEBOOK/LOCALFOODANDWINE
Follow us On Tumblr * Follow Us On Twitter * Like Us On Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment