05 June 2006
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Recently, I have tried to break out of my wine rut. My husband and I vacationed on the French island of St. Bartelemy, enjoying delectable food and warm sunshine. There was only one problem with our otherwise perfect holiday in paradise. There was not a single bottle of California-style chardonnay to be had at any price.
Oh, we tried. The chardonnay grape is the basis for many famous French labels such as Chablis, Pouilly-Fuisse, and Montrachet. We tried many an expensive bottle to try to feed our nasty habit, to no avail. Each one of them to our palates seemed watery, or acidic, or too tart. One afternoon, we even set off on a desperate mission to a huge warehouse literally stacked floor to ceiling with wine. The nice French lady who helped me seemed dumbfounded when I asked if they had any California wine among the thousands of bottles surrounding us. “But….thees is a French island!” she asked, bewildered.
Yes, I patiently, explained, but in the U.S. wine sellers usually offer wine from all over the world to their customers, not just U.S. wines. No, she was sorry, but only French wines were sold on a French island, and seemed honestly confused as to why I would want anything else. Later, when I explained to the proprietor of one of the island’s finest restaurants about my inexplicable craving for California (or Australian—they do it well too) chardonnay, he offered his sincere condolences. We decided to stick to pina coladas and beer for the rest of the trip.
The protectionism and chauvinism of the French wine industry is staggering. They just about admit that the Italians can do something with grapes and, if threatened by a panzer regiment, will agree that the Germans make adequate wines in the Alsatian mode but that is about it. However things are getting better. Here on the Riviera however I have seen a steady increase in the "Vins Etrangers" section of the supermarket with Californian, Australian and South American wines on offer, at in most cases, decent prices. Admittedly the Californian wine section seems to be dominated by "Turning Leaf" which is some sort of industrially produced plonk, but at least it's there and offering the chsrdonnay'n'oak combo the NRO writer pines (oaks?) for. Also what I assume is the Chilean (or was it Argentinian?) equivalent of "Turning Leaf" that I found recently - "Gato Negro" - produced an excellent Cabernet/Merlot that was both eminently drinkable and priced right at the €4/bottle sweet spot where I find most of my wine. Allegedly (I cannot speak from experience being, as noted, a cheapskate when it comes to buying wines) many of the dedicated wine sellers have decent selections of better vintages of New World wines too so if you are desperate for a non-French wine you have plenty of options.IF there's a problem with France, it is that the food is often entirely too "French." Offerings like crepes, coq au vin and cassoulet are so common that there is a danger of forgetting that they all have actual regions of origin and are not national dishes.
This danger is omnipresent in Nice, where 80 percent of the restaurants cater to 90 percent of the tourists by offering mostly "French" food, ignoring the well-defined, well-maintained, universally revered and quite wonderful cuisine of Provence. In Nice this cuisine is even more local, and it would be a shame to visit this old and quintessential Mediterranean city without indulging in cuisine Nissarde, to use the preferred indigenous word.
Nice wasn't even part of France before the mid 19th century, its local dialect is distinctively different to Provençal (no final Ns pronounced NG for example) and the cuisine is significantly different from that found in the ports of the Var - think bouillabaisse - let alone the non-maritime heartlands of Provence. Still aside from "pendantic" quibbles over terminology I thought the NYT article to be most excellent and I have noted the names to be visited sometime later in the year when the tourists have quit.