Bacchus

Hoooraaahhh


Finally, after much running around and a few people not being able to come at the last minute, we were fifteen to taste and sample a choice selection of very nice and expensive wines.

The theme of the evening was 'Which wine marries best with which cheese'.

To start with, the guy gave us a brief description of the major wine growing regions, how the soil, the grape and the weather conditions combine to influence the final product.

He explained to us the principal qualities that one needs to look for when deciding if the wine is good, bad or just plain old vinegar.

He also explained that wine glasses should be of a very specific form - almost bowl like at the bottom, then tapering inwards at the top - so that you have the taste and the aroma that hits you at the same time, just like in the photo above.

But, before we even got round to swilling anything, we were given little phials to sniff... no stooopid, not 'them' kind of phials

Each one contained synthetic ingredients to simulate the most common aromas found in wine - musk, red fruit, licourice, apple - and were then asked to say which was which; we only got about half of them right :-(

Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours of theory we were let loose on the practical side of things.

I have to say before i go on, we had six; we had a fougeres, sancerre and champagne ... but the last three just .. kind of escape me .... It's shameful to admit but i've forgotten what they were :-(

We each had a plate with various cheeses on it. We first had to define each wine by its characteristics - la robe, le couleur, l'aspect and l'arome.

We weren't very good at that either :-(

We then had to say which wine we thought, without tasting just by the aroma, would go best with which cheese - we had little notebooks to write down what we thought.

We were all useless on that point too :-(

Then, at last, we were allowed to have a swill, a slurp and swallow - no spitting - and then we had to decide if we still stuck by our original judgements.

At the next sip, we had just the tiniest, minisculest piece of cheese that you've ever set eyes on to eat at the same time.

That's when we all realised we were really, really useless at this game and that under no circomstances whatsoever should we try this at home without adult supervision... pffft ...

To cut a long story longer: champagne marries very well with parmesan (i didn't know that), sancerre is best for non-salty goats cheese (that was easypeasy), fougeres is really good with camembert (as long as the wine is heavy and fruity - you have the impression your eating cheese with jam on it !) ... and heuuhhh ... i just can't remember the last three.


The guy's pad is something else altogether.

It's on the rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Louvre and Tuilleries.

Evidently i couldn't resist taking a few shots for prosterity - this is the third time i've done the wine tasting, but the first time i took my camera.


Evidently, we're going to have peach of a view onto the Eiffel tower.

Y'know, you kind of get up in the morning, open the window, eat your cornflakes and this is what you're looking at ....


I took quite a few photos of inside the apartment - it's not at all my kind of style; i'm not into antiques and all that kind of thing - but you get the gist of how it looks with bits of old furniture and stuff.

On a side note, somebody told me yesterday that it's the flat where Chezane would have stayed after a night out on the town.








A final shot as we were leaving at sunset.