| Wine. Glorious Wine. |
| Written by Brendon Green |
| Wednesday, 02 December 2009 08:10 |
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Today I went to heaven. Ok, it wasn’t actually heaven (Zooey Deschanel wasn’t there and Avril Lavigne wasn’t doing an acoustic set in the corner), it was a wine expo. The Salon des Vins. It’s a 5 day event for vineyards and winemakers from all over France to display their wares for hotel and restaurant owners, and the occasional interested tourist who stumbled onto free tickets (that’s me!). It was held in Pavilion 7 of the Paris Expo, which from what I could tell is a huge expo centre that could well be it’s own suburb. Pavilion 7 was the size of the Logan Campbell Centre and the number of pavilions was in double figures. In the pavilion was an overwhelming number of stalls: there were 20 rows (A through T) each with 74 stalls. By my calculations that is 1,480 stalls, each with around 5 different types of wine, and all with free samples. (See above for heaven comment.) I went with two friends in hopes that they could cover up my impressive lack of knowledge about wine (upon tasting some kind of Red from stall A33 I claimed to have noticed a hint of Ribena). It worked, and they were totally able to pronounce Gewurztraminer correctly. Even though it was the last day of the expo and the stall operators were either dead bored to tipsy off their own cargo, we felt like impostors. So, decided to come up with a back-story. I took out my notebook to write comments and look official, and if anyone asked, we owned a restaurant in New Zealand. As the sampling progressed, the restaurant in New Zealand developed into a hotel in Buenos Aires with a French sounding restaurant called Che Fu. (Which incidentally, when said out loud, sounds like Chez Fou, which is French for Crazy House; making Che Fu, if it were possible, even cooler than he already is.) There was a bucket in front of each stall to empty your glass and spit the wine after tasting. But spitting in gross, so we thought it best to properly drink all our samples. Half-way through we visited the food stalls for some chocolate and much appreciated bread and olive oil (I took a pass on the Duck pate though), then went back for more wine. Don’t worry, we didn’t embarrass ourselves or bring Che Fu into disrepute. But we did each manage to find a bottle of wine to share on Christmas. On the way out of the expo I almost lamented the fact that I had missed the motorboat expo going on in Pavilion 5, but for some reason I was feeling warm and content with having spent those hours sampling French wine. |
