FOR: PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — It was with some trepidation that I first walked in off the sidewalk into the small establishment on the narrow Rue Daguerre near Montparnasse with the words “Bar A Vin” written across its front glass window. It was 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, a strange hour. In Paris, it was neither late, nor early. An uncertain hour.

I had been headed home to my nearby hotel bed, having eaten a full dinner down the street and decided I needed a good nigh’s sleep. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this small restaurant. Inside, I could see people huddled around the small bar, talking and laughing while they swirled liquid in glass goblets.

I was about to enter what I would discover was one of the better examples of an institution that still exists in Paris, the wine bar. Ranging from fancy to casual, it’s a place where you can order a variety of carefully-chosen wines by the glass, and talk with both staff and customers about their various merits or lack of them. The environs can range from fancy crystal and tablecloths, to dirt floors. They are a great place to sample a lot of wines, and gain a familiarity with different regions and grape varieties.

My wine bar had bare wooden tables and no formalities. In fact, the “Bar a Vin” seemed a step back in time. The customers, mostly in their 30s and 40s, were dressed without any fashion in particular. It had a tile floor, a pewter metal bar, and an old coat rack in the corner. A soft yellow light spread across the whole restaurant, giving everyone a soft glow.

But it also had the air of a thoroughly neighborhood place. Everyone knew each other, or so it seemed. When I entered, everyone turned and looked at me, a tall, obviously foreign, stranger. They weren’t smiling.

The waitress behind the bar, who was pretty in a kind of timeless Gallic way, with a thin face and aquiline nose, came over and said shortly in French, “What do you want.” I had hardly had time to even glance at the blackboard where the names of ten red and ten white wines were scrawled.

“Give me a minute,” I stammered. She shrugged and walked away. When she came back, I ordered a glass of “Chinon” quickly, thrown off by her bluntness.

Chinon is the region in the Loire Valley named after the city of the same name there. Made with Cabernet Franc, the wine can be like a Bordeaux in its better years, that is austere and flavorful. But this one tasted mostly just austere.

As I sipped the wine, I looked around the restaurant. This was a place for people serious about wine. The half-dozen men and women grouped at the pewter bar were having fun, laughing talking and of course smoking. But they were taking their wine seriously. At each swallow, they would sniff deeply of the glass, tilting it to the side so as to favor one nostril. This seems to help odors penetrate one’s head more deeply. Once the liquid was in their mouths, they would aerate it by sucking air through it, which makes a gargling noise.

After Chinon, I tried something called Vin D’Ardeche. This was a small named region inside the Cote Du Rhone. The wine was marvelous, really special. It had a huge, intense jammy taste, with little tannins. It was similar to an Amarone from Italy, with its raisiny full taste.

I was starting to make inroads with this crowd. The guy behind the counter, who was the manager, recognized I wasn’t a complete slob. He poured me some “Saumur,” the red wine from the Loire valley, and I won points when I noted that it was made with 100 percent Cabernet Franc grape.

The manager seemed classically French. Years of drinking wine had not given him the bulbous nose and layers of flesh sometime typical of wine lovers; instead, it had cured and condensed him. He was lean, with dark hair and a taught face showing a 11 p.m. shadow.

Beside me, an older man, dressed more formally dressed in a tweed sport coat, was talking intensely with the bartender. He turned out to be the owner of the Saumur vineyard that had produced the wine I had just tried. He started talking very animatedly to me about his theories of wines and vineyards.

The Loire Valley has traditionally been considered too cold to produce wines as good as Bordeaux and Burgundy. But global warming, he said, would change this.

Then he started criticizing American wines, particularly those from California. They were, he said, like a woman who used too much perfume. They deliver the “attaque spectaculaire” that unexperienced wine drinkers liked, but which was similar to a woman who wore too much perfume. The odor you were appreciating was more of a created effect, rather than the natural odor, like the natural scent of a beautiful woman.

I was grateful to this Frenchman for conforming to national stereotypes. Not five minutes into a conversation about wine, and he was comparing them to women. Great! I considered running further with this metaphor. Could California wines be considered like their women? Too “easy”? Did French wines require more finesse in their approach, as did their women? I had better stop such thoughts.

I was feeling better. From the tall, awkward, foreign stranger who they looked at suspiciously, I was now the tall awkward foreign stranger who they looked at with some amusement.

The wines the restaurant served said a lot about wine drinking in France. The establishment served almost nothing known to your average American wine drinker. I had noticed this trend in other restaurants and brassieres I had visited. The famous wines were too expensive for daily drinking.

I wrote down the red wines the “Bar a Vin” was serving that night: St. Joseph, Alsace Pinot Noir, Patrimonio, Chinon, Bandol, Cote du Rhone, Cairanne, Vin D’Ardeche, Anjou Village. These were regions, not grape varieties, as is the tradition in France.

I asked the bartender why he didn’t include more well-known regions. “Because Burgundy and Bordeaux are too easy,” he said. “You open a book and there they are.”