Drinking in the City of the Olympics
After I left school, I went to Paris and for the first time, I was left largely to my own devices. I exaggerated my age and found small amounts of work in a language school; and in the evening, I went to the cheapest restaurants I could find, often in the company of my fellow teachers.
Many of these were the so-called ‘bouillons,’ or soup kitchens, where a starter cost a franc (10p) and a main-course maybe three times as much. These ‘bouillons’ have been revived in recent years. They are still cheap, but nothing like as cheap as they were then.
If I went to a bar, I would order a beer or a much less expensive ‘ballon de rouge.’ The wine was ropy stuff, and the balloon glass was filled right to the brim so that if you were not wholly steady, you would lose a part of it on the ‘zinc’, as the counter was called. This wasn’t wholly my introduction to wine, we had had wine at home, but really only on state occasions. There was no cellar, and you wouldn’t have found any bottles in the cupboard, except perhaps at Christmas.
I went back to Britain after less than six months, but Paris remained a home from home, and I returned when my university days ended, and stayed for another six and a half years. Now, I had learned a thing or two about wine in the intervening four years, and I turned by nose up at the rough red wine of the café, but there wasn’t a great deal more money to spend. Quite often my friends and I opted for the cheapest bottles in the local shops. They contained a litre of wine, were embossed with six stars and had unforgettable names like ‘Vins des rochers, velours d’estomac’ or ‘Gévéor’.
Photo of Nicholas Wine Store in Paris-Copyright Axel Ritenis /Connoisseur Magazine
The big wine chain then was Nicolas. At Christmas Nicolas ransacked their enormous cellars in Charenton near Paris to find old vintages of special wines to release for the festivities. They were placed in the windows of their shops, grand crus classés from Bordeaux, grand and prémiers crus from Burgundy and from the best vintages since the war, but all (sadly) at prices I couldn’t reach. I ‘licked the window’, as the French say, much as I did when I went past the better pâtissiers or restaurants, but I did not go in.
Copy
Copyright Axel Ritenis Connoisseur Magazine
But things did get better, and we became increasingly adventurous in what we could buy among the cheaper wines. There were exciting new wines from the Loire, such as the zingy Sancerre, Beaujolais, the lesser wines from Bordeaux, wines from the south-west and the southern Rhone, all that was well within our slender means.
Things began to change in 1980 when a friend and I spotted an obvious fellow sufferer on the Metro Station at St Paul le Marais. The friend said ‘There’s a man with a hangover.’ The man raised his head from his hands and said in English, ‘I certainly have.’
That man was Charles Lea, later one half of an excellent small London chain of quality wine shops called Lea & Sandeman. Charles had been working for Steven Spurrier at the Cave de La Madeleine but had left to help Mark Williamson set up Willi’s Wine Bar in the rue des Petits Champs. Mark was another old boy of the Caves de La Madeleine. Charles was just putting on the last coat of paint prior to opening the bar and told me to pop in and meet Mark. I did, and that way I got to know the small, but very active British wine colony in Paris, which radiated around Steven.
Bordeaux Wine category and Vins Blanc categories in Paris Nicholas store Paris-Copyright Axel Ritenis/Connoisseur Magazine
Willi’s was principally, but not exclusively about the wines of the Rhone Valley. Every week there were a dozen or so wines available by the glass. What’s more it was conveniently positioned opposite the Bibliotèque Nationale where did my work. Charles was the first barman, but didn’t stay long, later there was Joel Payne, who became a hugely important figure in German wine as the editor of the Gault Millau Guide. Joel was followed by Tim Johnston who became Mark’s partner in the business. He was recruited from the domaine he was running in the south of France. Together they opened the Blue Fox Bar near the Cave de La Madeleine. When the partnership ended Mark continued with Macéo, the former belle époque restaurant Le Mercure Gallant, while Tim ran his own wine bar called Juveniles round the corner in the rue de Richelieu. Willi’s, Macéo and Juveniles are all still going strong, the latter now in the hands of Tim’s daughter Margaux and her husband Roman.
Steven had very close connections to the leading French critics too, men like Michels Dovaz and Béttane who taught at his wine school in the Cité Berryer, and with time I got to know them as well. There were plenty of good ‘cavistes’ in Paris, and shops where occasionally you might have spotted a bargain. There was one close to Willi’s I recall, which also sold sweets, where I would pop in and snaffle up something that I thought was underpriced. There was another place near the rue Saint Martin, where I lived for a while. In the rue Vanneau there was the eccentric Old Etonian Ivan Paul, whose shop recommended itself to many fellow Britons. He too had worked for Steven in his day.
Notre Dame in Paris -Copyright Axel Ritenis-Connoisseur Magazine
There were restaurants too where you could expect to drink top wine at modest prices, one was in the rue du Cherche Midi, but I have forgotten the name. Steven was an aficionado and would recommend neglected vintages like 1962, which could be had for a song. Le Récamier was another good bet nearby.
Great wine was easier to obtain then. It had yet to become a global market and prices were relatively modest. In 1980, I remember buying a bottle of 1971 La Tâche for 400 francs (£40), one of the most exquisite wines I have ever drunk. A place in the rue St Honoré had Bordeaux first growths from the 60s, like the 1966 Haut Brion, for sale for prices that you could just stretch to at Christmas or on other special occasions, for example. People were also generous with their wine. Two friends clubbed together for my birthday one year and bought a bottle of the 1955 Yquem which we consumed à trois. A French friend with a wonderful cellar gave dinners during which he served first growths blind to us and his fellow énarques (graduates of the élite Ecole nationale d’administration) with the hope we’d guess the wine. The French were particularly reluctant to join in, but us Britons always made a stab at it. Once the wine was the fabulous 1961 Latour. When I mentioned the 1964 in comparison, he got back in the lift and went down to the cellar to fetch it.
When I go to Paris now, I notice independent wine shops popping up on almost every street, but the selection is not what it was. On the one hand the range is not quite so dominated by French wines, but on the other the prices are much higher: a reflection of the fact that wine is no longer ‘populaire’, but increasingly enjoyed much more by the professional middle classes, and certainly not with every meal. The modern French man or woman resists the image of the hero of the five-hour lunch and the epicure of old has ceded his place to the ‘français sportif!’
*Paris Wine Bar Recomendations by Giles MacDonough
https://www.juvenileswinebar.com
https://www.maceorestaurant.com
