Lovers of wine... la premiere part

A couple years ago I wrote about how it felt to be a Beer Drinker in the land of Perpetually Flowing Wine.  Things have not changed for me and are very unlikely to, but...

The Wine Season started with a pleasant bang.  Remember the nouveau Beaujolais I posted an image of recently?  Well, it turns out the nouveau B's of my youth were indeed sh*t.  The stuff on offer here is, quite frankly, FABULOUS!  No need to age wines.  Nope.  None at all.  My internal compass for what's good and what's not, vise a vis my expectations, has been appropriately re-calibrated.

To le salon with friends - Night One

The Wine Season quickly reached Full Bellow just the past weekend.  This year le salon des vignerons independent held their vast Wine Selling Spree in Salle Trois à la porte de Versailles.  More than nine hundred vinters showed up to hawk their wares.  Imaginez vous, nine flipp'n hundred stands offering free tastes of wines and liquors.  I said free and I meant what I just said.  It's a very dangerous place to visit and they won't make things more difficult for you, either.  They hand you a cute little tasting glass, at no cost, free, nothing, pas de sou, when you enter Salle Trois.  Gods!  Be still my quivering liver.  It took three visits to properly cover the event.

Day One was actually Night One in that we visited the salon after sundown.  In the process of walking around the show we purchased cartons of our favorite cremant d'Alsace.  We uncovered a second crement, it's something fun (Pinot Noir and a couple other cépages) from le Bourgogne.  All we needed to do was to collect them the next day when le diable was at hand.

We went with friends.  We laughed and had a good time.  On the more serious side, they taught me about les pineau de Charentes.  I'd been looking for something tasty to supplement our rapidly and seriously dwindling Coelho Porto supplies that were provisioned from the Porto Institute in Lisboa last March.  Deborah may have just introduced to us a good French supplement.

With our teacher of wine - Day Two
Day Two quickly arrived with a call from Jacky.  Whenever I visit le salon with him I learn so many things that I can't keep it all straight.  This year was no different.  We worked our taste buds down le Bourgogne and concentrated our attention on the whites.  The Big Names like Gevry, Chassagne-Montrachet, et Meursault all called to us and were duly sampled.

Sorting through the various vineyards was a very enlightening exercise.  I knew these were cent pourcent Chardonnay.  Yes, there were small differences between each of the vineyards.  Yes, the better plonk came from the tops of the hills.  Yes, the clay or limestone soils influenced the taste.  But...  and yet... I wasn't Blown Away by any of it.  Sure, some of it was pretty good.  Particularly the 30Euro bilge-plonk.  But...

We Ping-Ponged our way down the aisles.  After tasting a particularly good Meursault, Jacky spied something across the way. Over we went and he proceeded to explain to me where this vineyard was from.  It's just north of Beaune in an area with what they call a mountain (though it's more likely a nice big hill of some kind or other).  Around this "mountain" are several vineyards.  This particular vinter owned three plots.  So we tried a little white from each of these three.

Explaining how a "mountain" is surrounded with different  vineyards and plots - Day Two
Into our glasses went the first taste.  To the lips came our portions.  *swirl* *swish* *inhale*  Jacky had a radiant look on his face when I asked him que penses tu?  He raised my eyes to the heavens and said one single word.  "Sublime"  C'est tout qu'il peut dire.  Finally we found something of note.  From my side all I could think was how interesting it was to have passed through some of the very best vineyards in the world to stumble upon something truly spectacular from a vintner who may not be known outside France.  Je prends trois bouteilles, s'il vous plaît.  Et le même pour mon ami.

Loading up le diable with quatre cartons de crement plus the three Ladroix we were off and headed for home.  That's then disaster struck.  Le diable shed a roulant and I was nearly dead in the water.  There I stood with nearly ninety pounds of wine.  Ugh.  What to do?  As we were only half a block from the apartment I lifted/drug the poor dying diable home.  No crement was spilled.  Nous avons eu de la chance.  Except for the sore back.  The things we suffer for, right?

How le salon is laid out.   There were 9 aisles like this.   Each aisle holds more than 100 vintners hawking their wares. Yes. It's true. This was photographed half way down one of them. The other half is behind me. Vasty tracts of vin, me-thinks.
In preparation to Day Three at le salon I was up and out early the next morning to acquire a new diable.  Suitably diable equipped Jude and I returned to le salon to find her a few vins rouge.  But this was no easy task.  It turns out the reds of le Bourgogne are terribly expensive and, well, they don't taste all that great.  I know.  *shock* *horror* *gnashing of teeth*  Same with les vins de Bordeaux.  Ugh.  What to do?  The two "greatest" red wine regions in the world (according to well paid marketers) and nothing appealed to us.

I remembered something our wine teacher said two days prior.  When I told him what Judith liked he suggested the cabernet franc of Chinon from the Loire.  So off we went and, guess what?  Jacky is right.  Several vintners were approached.  Two good vindages were located (for an amazingly low price).  A couple cartons were purchased and we finished off our visit by adding to the haul a carton of Rhone and one of the Languedoc-Roussillon.  Le nouveau diable est charge and to home and hearth we went.

I moved les crements into le cave and rearranged our upstairs cave (aka closet) to take les vins rouge.  We're nearly fully stocked for the year.  Life is good.

Little did we know la vie des vins was about to get even better.

[To be Continued...]

Le Diable un peu charge. Just prior his leaving us. Sure. The wheel looks intact, but it's not. And I didn't realize it until it was too late. He's soon to be mort dans le champs de bataille.

Re-entry...

Gird your loins for herein lay a sad tale of mold, mildew, and discarded clothing.

Sometimes living here in Paris has felt like we live in a third world country.  The plumbing can be dodgy.  Plaster falls apart.  Paint peels.  Crotte de chien (dog poop) rests peacefully on the sidewalk and remains untended for days at a time.  People stand in the middle of the sidewalk (adjacent to the crotte) quietly smoking their lungs out and sharing clouds of nicotine when anyone who is brave enough to walk by.  Clothes seem to rot without any encouragement.  Mildew abounds and fungus spreads unchecked.  We've often wondered why we moved here.

During our trip to visit family back in the States we rediscovered the joys and happiness of clear and clean plumbing.  Walls are straight, true, and remain upright.  Paint faithfully does what paint should do.  Dogs are more normally picked up after.  People on the sidewalks don't hinder progress.  Lungs are less often subjected to the hazards of smoking.  Clothes are usually clean and dry.  By these measures America has a lot going for it.

When we were in Lisbon Jude asked if I'd please throw away some knit shirts that had mildewed.  Our clothes drying arrangement is the typical European hang-dry on racks bodge-up.  We have two of them (racks that is, we already have plenty of bodge-ups).  Using this approach we can do two or three loads of laundry in the early morning and have some of the things dry by bedtime.  But this happens only if we turn up the heat in the apartment and put the racks near the heat sources.  By accident clothes sometimes get put away not fully dry.  Hence the mildew problem.  I can't tell you how many articles of otherwise good clothing we've tossed out.

Heaven must have clothes dryers.  Surely.

On a fait un peu de recherche.  C'est a dire, we used Google to see if there might be a suitable alternative to drying clothes en plein aire.

*tappity*tippity*tap*tap*tap* went the keyboard, and... what's this?  Huh.  We can live in Crotte Paradise and Clean Clothing Heaven at the same time?  How is this possible?  No.  Say it isn't so.  We've lived for over four years without one of these and now we learn we needn't have suffered?

Salvation comes in many forms.  In our case it is a condenser dryer.  We don't need to run a big tube through an ancient crumbling plaster wall to have dry clothes.  I know.  It's shocking.  But we're here to tell you that it's true.  It turns out that self-contained dryer units are much more common than I ever thought.  We went down to Darty to confirm what Google suggested.

Et voila!  C'est vrai.  Voici notre nouveau meilleur ami.

All it took was a valid credit card and a day or two wait for the kind garcons (qui était vraiment costaud) to make the delivery and we are now the proud owners of a condenser clothing dryer.  We simply plugged it into a wall outlet and away we went.

No longer are our days spent managing laundry.  We can now get up in the morning and have our laundry duties done by noon.    We can process as many loads of laundry as we need in a day.  Into the wash machine go the clothes.  Over to the dryer when the spin is finished.  Ding goes the dryer when the clothes are ready to fold and put away.  Repeat until done.  Completely done.

Bonus:  Our afternoons are now free to explore the city in scent-free never again to be donated to the homeless garments.

We feel as if we've just left one of the lower level's of Dante's Hell and have passed through St. Pierre's Pearly Gates to enter Heaven.

It's strange how suddenly little things like smokers and crotte and plumbing feel rather less important.  Afterall, isn't there room for these people and these things in heaven, too?

A little something to drink...

If you recognize this, you'll no doubt recognize one of the more famous French marketing successes.



Here is a fun little explanation.

Old Fashioned Fun

When I was younger I really enjoyed all things motorized.  I've owned two Jaguar 3.8 litre Moss crunch-box E-types, a Fiat 124 Sport Coupe (the pretty one, not the post 1970 style), four Ducati's (one rubber band drive and three bevel-drive), several Moto Guzzi, Moto Morini, three Yamaha RD 400's and a pretty Yamaha 650 Seca (not the ugly turbo-Seca).  It seems there's been more than my fair share of fun sitting the garage.

Moving to Europe included our conscious effort to lead a car-free life.  Spell check wants to correct that to carefree life, but I put it correctly in the first place.  Hopefully we're not naive enough to believe we could have no cares simply by changing location.  No cars?  Yes.  No cares?  No.  We intentionally lead a car-free existence here.  There's enough CO2 in the atmosphere without our contributing to it, too.  Or something like that.  Have I mentioned how crazy the traffic is here?

Returning to the US to help my father clear out a few things and to attend a wedding put us squarely at odds with our car-free ideals.  In America if you don't have an automobile it can be really difficult to get around.  And where we were headed it might even be impossible to get there without one.  Once there, an automobile was essential.

It didn't take me long to remember where my youthful passion for cars and bikes came from.  My father has his own small collection of toys that he roundly loves.  This includes my Great Uncle's 1931 Ford Model A Deluxe Roadster, a 1965 Chevy Corvair 140 Monza (with four carbs), and a newer BMW Z4 decapote.  He wanted me to drive all of them as a way of sharing the fun.  So drive we did.  Oh gods! what fun we had.

The Ford Model A required double clutching when changing gears.  The brakes are weak, but the top speed is most comfortable at 45mph or less.  The steering is a little vague and the seats are rather close to the dashboard.  Those Large of Girth need not apply.  They can't fit.

The Chevrolet Corvair 140 Monza has a nice flat 6 cylinder air cooled engine.  This car has a rather lumpy (semi-race) cam, too.  It sounds great and goes well enough until you want to stop.  At which point you really (and I do mean really) need to stand on the brakes.  It felt like my foot was trying to move a brick.  The speed was difficult to scrub.

The BMW Z4 is a thoroughly modern vehicle.  It brakes well.  It steers perfectly.  It goes like stink.  I learned this one evening on our way to dinner.  Dad told me to drive as he played navigator.  My brother and Jude followed in Conrad's car.  Dad said "punch it."  My brother and wife quickly disappeared from the rearview mirror and we gobbled up the road at a very great rate of knots (thank you Henry Manney III).

OK.  So automobiling can be fun.  It can be a whole lot of fun, in fact.  Sharing the experience with my father was one of the highlights of my trip.  The smile on my face told Jude that after returning home a cute little Citroen 2CV might be somewhere in our future.

Out in the workshop...

To keep a promise I'd made to my father when we last saw him in Madrid,Jude and I visited the US starting in late summer.  We were there for six weeks.  Four of those weeks were spent with my father fulfilling my promise to help him clean out some of my mother's many things.

When we were thinking through all the details of what we wanted to accomplish easily distracted us from looking forward to enjoying our time there.  After all, the task appeared daunting.  We had one room in the house, a medium sized workshop area in the garage, and an entire wall and floor area also in the garage to go through and clear out.

My mother passed some years back and my father hasn't had the energy nor desire to go through her things and to find new homes for all of it.  After we arrived I could see why.  Whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, my mother was something of a hoarder.  The room in the house was filled with dolls, teddy bears, and doll furniture.  Her shop area was filled with doll body part molds, kilns for firing ceramics, and supplies that could've stocked a hobbyist's store.  The garage was literally stacked to the rafters with plastic tubs filled with things that'd followed my parents north when my father retired.  This was a much bigger task than I feared.

One of my father's goals was to be able spend time out in his own shop making musical instruments.  My mother's things weighed on his mind.  It was such a big thing to take care of that I'm sure my father felt like the whole thing was simply too much.  He'd already identified the things he wanted to remember his wife by and had already set those things into a display area in a way that pleased him.  Even now, he is devoted to the memory of my mother in a way that shows he still feels a deep bond with her.

Fortunately, my brother Conrad came up from Napa to lend a hand.  He stayed with us for 10 days.  At times I wasn't sure there was enough time in the schedule to get everything done.  But with my brother there we were able to muscle everything that needed to be muscled and a large part of the task was completed.  Before he left, we stuffed a 15foot UHaul box van to the roof with my mother's things and took them to a local hospice thrift store as a donation.

After Conrad headed south to home and hearth Jude and I were able to continue on.  I was able to sell a few things of value and we were able to have the hospice thrift store van back up to the door and haul the remainder of the to be donated items.

My daily routine included going over to my father's place and knocking on the door, poking my head in, and saying "Hey Pops, are you there?"  If he was, I was greeted by his two schnauzers.  They'd come over and say "hi" and I go to try and find their keeper.  If the dog greeters weren't there I knew my father was in his shop working on guitars or ukuleles.  Very often he was doing the very thing he said he wanted to do.  My mother's things were no longer weighing on him they way they used to.

Over the course of the month Jude and I watched has he built a tenor ukulele.  It's for my wife and when my father has finished it he'll send it to her.  It was quite the experience to see a brand new instrument take shape.  It was amazing to see how my father makes all the not-so-small decisions that go into the making of something so beautiful.

Watching my father build a ukulele was, of course, only one of the highlights of visiting him.  There were other enjoyable things, too.  Before we knew it, it was time for Jude and I to make our way north to Portland for our son's wedding.

I expected that saying "goodbye" to my father would be difficult.  The parting was made easier when he said "I'll see you next spring in Europe!"

On French Soil...

I stumbled upon something potentially interesting to folks familiar with the history of expansion of nation states.  While being in the US for six weeks helping my father and then attending our son's wedding I may have inadvertently added to French overseas holdings.


When visiting my father I took to occasionally Watering the Gophers.  You see, his yard was filled with evidence of their underground excavations.  Years ago I read where buying panther urine from a local zoo and twinkling a little around one's property can help keep the predators at bay.  Since the gophers were predating on my father's grubs and insects I thought I'd run an experiment.  If panther urine worked, why not human wee?  Hence the Watering of the Gophers.

I love success stories and this is one of my favorite.  When Nature Called, I'd head outside, locate a mound of fresh soil and urinate on it.  The mound would decrease in size and the gophers seemed to find another area to excavate.  So if my theory was correct, I was helping keep the Gophers at Bay.  Success!  Though I'm not sure just how grateful my father is for proving the point.

One day while driving home, Conrad, my brother, took us on a tour of the Bandon Dunes Golf Course.  We were on a nice and windy road when Nature Called.  She struck like a Bolt of Thunder!  [ed: No.  Not like the 1975 Ducati 750GT/Sport, though from the sounds of things there might not have been much difference.]  "Oh driver!" I demanded.  "Pullest Thou Over, s'il vous plait."  Out I jumped and, well, the surrounding shrubbery will be a brighter green come next spring.

Readers of this blog may note a prior entry wherein I recorded the Insanity of Car Rentals.  What I haven't previously described is what happened when we parked the BMW Z4 on the grass by a large blackberry bush next to Mr UHaul's Garage in Port Orford.  Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say, come next spring the blackberries could grow darker and juicier than in prior drought years.


It was then that I realized the Error of My Ways.  Or, rather, the Unintended Consequences of Taking an al Fresco Leak wherever my bladder demanded.  My father had been waiting the Right Moment to inform me of a few of the nuances of Nation Building and European Expansionism.

Frenchmen, well known for watering the scenery in wide open nature have used the principal of Peeing in Public in place of planting their country's flag in the soil and declaring that ground for France.  This, according to my well informed father.  Bon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly introduce to you the newly discovered and now declared France in the New World.  Of course each place will need to be renamed in place of the former English appellations.  Bandon by the Sea will become Bandon sur mer.  The Bandon Dunes Golf Course will be opened to gophers as a safe haven against Men Who Pee.  It's new name is la merde de golf.  Sand traps will be replaced by little mounds of soil.  Lastly, Port Orford will now be referred to as la Sainte Porte Orphord du garage de UHaul and the blackberry bush will be the site of a new shrine.  No suitable name for the shrine has yet been identified and numbers for the new departements shall be coming forthwith.

Residents of these areas will forthwith be notified.  Passports may need to be reissued.

It should be noted that la ville des Hipsters in the northern part of the region called Portland will not be joining France as a newly annexed area.  We're not quite sure how to proceed as our editor was seen being hauled away by the local constabulary after attempting to take a leak in public.

Car rentals in the US...

As part of this summers activities I'd signed my wife and I up for a trip back to the US to help my father clear out a few things that he was having trouble getting rid of.  The trouble wasn't in terms of attachment.  It was in terms of sheer volume.  There was a tremendous mountain of things to find new homes for.

Our ride north in... what???
My father lives in what we like to call Sherwood Forest.  To get there requires a two legged flight from Europe and a five hour drive to the remote south Oregon coast.  This trip we did it in two steps.  The first day we flew from Paris to Oregon.  The second day we drove from Portland to Bandon.

Since we don't own a car, we needed to rent something in Portland and drive it one way to our destination.  Our son Daniel very kindly helped procure a Hertz rental and the next morning we were on the road and on our way.  We arrived in style as the only car we could reserve on the 'net from Europe was full size.  It was not cheap.  The cost of the rental was a bit shocking and came within spitting distance of matching the cost to fly from Portland into North Bend, which is the closest airport.

Plenty of room back here!!!
After nearly a month working on moving my father's Mountain of Things we were ready to return to Portland to attend Daniel's wedding.

When we were in Coos Bay we stopped by the Enterprise car rental agency and enquired about scheduling a car for our drive up the valley.  What we learned nearly bowled us over.  As this would be a one way trip (and not in/around town) there was a $125 "drop fee."  There was also a three day minimum.  Add taxes and other fiddly bits and our all up costs were well over $450.

It was suggested we check with Hertz to see if we could get a cheaper ride.  Well, no.  In fact it was slightly more expensive than Enterprise for the same class of automobile.  Yikes! This was quickly reaching the outer limits of insanity.


Pee-stop in beautiful downtown Drain (yes, there's a joke somewhere in here but it's true as written)
It was also suggested that we check down the street at UHaul to see if we could get a really cheap one-way vehicle.  So this we did.  We were hoping for a pickup truck or a van.  All they offered was a 10foot box truck.  Such silliness as all this needed to be clearly documented as we doubted anything would ever believe us.

Our drive north from Coos County to Multnomah County was going to be yet another adventure.  Instead of arriving in Stately Elegance via some classy or not so classy automobile, we would be driving a truck suitable for moving furnishings, household items, and personal effects equivalent to all the things needed to kit a one room apartment.  All this for five large suitcases and a of couple laptop computers.  It seemed the only way to save over $250 on this segment of our trip.


The hand position on the wheel would never pass for "correct" in France, where they're  supposed to strictly remain placed at  10o'clock and 2o'clock.  But this is America. So there.
We felt we had little choice and decided to save $250.  The UHaul 10foot box van was rented.  Our suitcases and laptop computers were loaded.  We borrowed some rope from my father that helped keep things from shifting around that vast cargo space.  Bidding Bandon and our Cleaning Project farewell, we pointed the nose of the UHaul van north and drove out of town.

Vastly open spaces...
No Stately Elegance, this.  We didn't need to arrive in style, but it seemed rather funny that it'd all come to this.