In her article In Paris, a New Breed of Wine Bar (Oct. 1, 2013), Ann Mah, assisted by a lazy editor, would have readers believe that three years ago there was “a cultural shift” that brought forth a “new breed” of wine bar in Paris that dances to a trio of beloved travel adjectives, “casual,” “modestly priced,” “convivial,” a breed that can now save us “an embarrassing collision with a heavy, leather-bound menu and the haughty gaze of the sommelier.”

The premise of the article is all wrong, as anyone capable of understanding “Bar à vins” (or “Bar à vin”) on an awning knows. The old breed of wine bar, still very much aive, is anything but a pretentious place. It has no titled sommelier, and it’s even more casual, modestly priced and convivial than those bars cited in the article. Mah doesn’t get it all wrong though, at least she wouldn’t have gotten it wrong had she written her article in a decade ago, for there was indeed a trend in wine bars of the type she describes… around the year 2000.

Ann Mah, who has just published the book “Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris,” has apparently confused the traditional Paris wine bar with the cocaine-fueled wine scene in New York in the 1980s. One wishes that in mastering the art of eating she had also learned to love research more during that year in Paris.

Upscale wine bars do exist (e.g. the delightfully smooth, somewhat stiff but ever-so-pleasant Legrand Filles et Fils, Galérie Vivienne, 2nd) but the traditional, basic wine bars in Paris, the ones on which the so-called “new breed” riff, are the furthest thing from haughty. They typically come in two kinds. There is the kind developed near market squares (the market has since disappeared in some cases) since markets and wine merchants/bars are part and parcel of the same economy. Le Baron Rouge, 1 rue Théophile-Roussel, 12th, and Le Rubis, 10 rue du Marché St-Honoré, 1st, Aux tonneaux des Halles, 28 rue Montorgeuil, 1st,  are well-known classics in the genre, very much “in their juice,” as the French would say of something that has authentically survived from another era.

The other kind of traditional wine bars are the non-descript café-bars, which might also serve cooked food during restaurant hours.  These are  places without airs, and you needn’t feel that you’re going slumming to go enjoy them since they exist throughout the city, including in the well-trodden districts of Paris, e.g. Les Pipos, 2 rue de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 5th arr., or Au Père Louis, 38 rue Monsieur le Prince, 6th. No “leather-bound [wine] menu” here, No need to know the difference between a château, a domaine and a clos or between the weather conditions in 2007 and 2008, but rather a choice between Burgundy, Bordeaux, Cote du Rhone, and maybe a Gaillac and a Sancerre. And if that’s too complicated then all you really need to know to get a drink is that rouge is red, blanc is white, and rosé is plonk.

Whether you care to frequent them or not, these wine bars are numerous and are the most unpretentious, basic wine joints around. The only “haughty gaze” in the old-fashion wine bar is that of American tourists peering in at the unisex Turkish toilet.

The breed of wine establishment that the author applauds actually raises rather than lowers the bar, so to speak, by being slightly more expensive and offering slightly better munchies. They are indeed enjoyable places—casual, modestly priced, convivial, as Mah says. Some have an edge of snobbery precisely because articles such as hers describe them as the latest greatest, but all are worthwhile if you find an open seat. Unfortunately, Mah’s use of them as exemplary of a “new breed” is simply untrue.

Even before the article appeared, Americans represented a large percentage of the clientele in some of the businesses recommended in the article. No problem with that; they’re my people too. That doesn’t mean that these bars are to be avoided as tourist traps; they are not. Trend or no trend, they are a natural choice for The New York Times Travel Section, written for an upper-middle-class sensibility that seeks safety in numbers. The editorial point of view of the typical Times travel piece about Paris (numerous as they are) seems to be based on the assumption that the last time the reader visited Paris was when she was staying with their parents at the Ritz. If true, that would explain the author’s traumatic experience with “the haughty gaze of the sommelier.”

The article quotes an American wine shop owner to voice the allegedly recent “cultural shift in France,” it plugs a wine bar and restaurant owned by another American, and it cites several bars largely frequented by Americans, leading me to wonder if what Mah has truly discovered is that a food or drink trend in Paris can’t exist without us. That would explain why the sudden appearance of several hole-in-the-wall oyster bars two or three years ago never reached trend status: there just isn’t a critical enough mass of Americans who like raw oysters.

I’m not knocking the pleasures of a glass or three and some tapas in any of the businesses mentioned in the article. Of the six, I occasionally stop at Ambassade de Bourgogne when in the Saint-Germain/Odéon Quarter when in the area for a tête-à-tête with a friend fond of Burgundy wines. (That bar is actually the odd man out in Mah’s list because less of a foodie scene and less convivial than the others.)

Still, Mah’s gratuitous mention of Le Verre Volé is where she shoots herself in the foot. Le Verre Volé opened in 2000, a full decade before the alleged 2010 start of Mah’s “new breed.” Le Verre Volé was once on the forefront of something (that something being a certain kind of organic wine snobbery, though its attitude has softened as that wine movement widened). A search on The New York Times’s website shows that Mah’s is the fifth Times article since 2009 to glowingly mention Le Verre Volé. I imagine that thousands of other journalists, bloggers and foodies have listed it as well. In fact, I’m one of them. I mentioned Le Verre Volé in the Canal Saint-Martin chapter of “Paris Revisited: The Guide for the Return Traveler,” my guidebook published in 2003. That doesn’t place me ahead of the pack so much as it shows Mah’s selection of “the city’s newest tables” to be both old news and the result of sloppy research. The bandwagon isn’t the only place to eat and drink well.

Mah is nevertheless correct, give or take a decade, that there’s been a movement in Paris toward easy-going bars and restaurants serving casual, talkative clients organic/natural wines, less industrial food, and products with a clearly stated provenance.

That movement stands on firm cultural and economic ground: cultural because Parisians are accustomed to seeking out appellation products and quality French food and drink in general (and furthermore because over the past two decades Parisians have become more comfortable drinking while standing up, though more beer than wine), economic because reducing or eliminating the kitchen is the key to a healthy bottom line in the food and drink business in a high-rent, high-labor-cost city such as this.

For all the appellation traceability promised by these wine bars, there isn’t much kitchen work involved in slicing charcuterie, cutting bread and wedges of organic cheese, and heating up some tapas. Artisanal products, though not fast food in the industrial sense, allow for significant margins when they require as much know-how and labor behind the counter as a Big Mac or a salted caramel mocha.

Thus, Paris saw the mainstreaming of sushi restaurants in the 1990s; the early 2000s saw the arrival of bars and restaurants serving organic and biodynamic wines (now broadened to include less regulated “natural” wines), which went hand in hand with an increasing emphasis on accompanying plates of artisanal cold cuts and cheeses and now other tapas (Mah’s “new breed”); the opening of the aforementioned oyster bars which coincided with the creation of appellation coffee shops, and most recently, first appearing in 2012 and coming into fruition in 2013, the creation of craft beer bars and craft beer shops. If there’s a new breed in Paris these days it has more to do with hops and malt than with grapes.

The true movement in the Paris wine bar scene over the past 12+ years has not been a downscaling towards relaxed wine bars but rather an upscaling since an increasing percentage of Parisians and tourists can easily affordable to pay for wine and tapas what used to be considered the price of a meal.

I don’t criticize this type of wine bar/restaurant. Au contraire. I go to such places with friends and I give food and may include them on my history-of-food-and-wine in Paris tours and in wine tours—typically not to bars Mah’s listed but to others (there are many) whose offerings and ownership fit in best with the evening’s themes. However, by presenting old news as new news and by failing to do simple research or, worse, by consciously scuttling any sense of history, culture or economics in order to appear trendy, the form of travel writing represented by the article treats readers as sheep-like lifestyle consumers rather than as curious travelers.

The New York Times Travel Section has long been the weakest link in a great brand (I subscribe) but it’s a weak link with significant influence. A list that appears in the Times will be clipped, printed, forwarded and used by numerous travelers for many months to come while also inspiring other journalists and bloggers to repeat the same misinformation. (Some of my own faithful readers are fond of unwittingly insulting me by forwarding me such articles along with a kindly “Do you know about these places?” or a benevolent, “You might want to share this.” Ouch!)

Last week, I had a fine dinner and an easily ordered carafe of wine with the editor of a newspaper whose territory in the New York region is occasionally covered by the New York Times. After I told of my annoyance with Ann Mah’s article, the editor remarked, “When we read an article in The New York Times about a subject we know well and realize how uninformed the journalist is it’s a wonder that we believe the rest of the paper.”

Of course, Ann Mah’s wine bar article is a fluffy travel piece, however misinformed, can lead some to happy travels. The paper’s hard news, of greater important for the national discourse, presumably receives more vetting. Still, if one of our finest news gathering organizations can be so far off about Paris, which is a 10-minute metro ride from the headquarters of the International New York Times and among the foreign destinations the mother paper most frequently covers, then maybe we should all be drinking more wine, wherever we can get it.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Mastering the Art of Travel Writing in France: Lessons in Paris Wine Bars appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

I’ve come to the town of Nyons (pop. 7000) in the Provence-leaning part of the department of Drome with a small group of other foreign journalists to investigate elements of the local economy relative to food, drink and tourism—Rhone Valley wines, appellation olives and olive oil, lavender and castles—and we’ve made a decidedly non-touristic stop for lunch. We have been invited to eat like sixth graders at the cafeteria of Collège Barjavel, Nyons’s middle school.

School is out this Wednesday afternoon but Chef Jean-Luc Baconnier and Sous-chef Pascale Duhornay have prepared for us and for working staff some lunch fare that is part of a Drome middle school program called “Manger bien, manger bio” (Eat well, eat organic). The program, in effect in the department’s 30 middle schools and available to its 13,000 students, ensures that 25% of the food served in the cafeteria comes from organic agriculture and farming, including from local producers when possible.

Drome, which stretches along and east of the Rhone Valley from just south of Lyon to just north of Avignon, prides itself on being the leading department in France for organic agriculture. More than 13% of its agricultural surface—compared to a national average of less than 3%—is certified as organic (or biodynamic, a sub-category of organic agriculture with stricter rules), representing 856 farms. The department also has 133 preparers and transformers and about 50 specialized organic shops. Within its agriculture, Drome further considers itself a world leader in organic plants used in perfumery, scents and medicines (see information on lavender in Part 3 of this article).

Implemented progressively over the past few years, the “Eat well, eat organic” program’s goal of ensuring that on average 25% of food served in middle school cafeterias for the 2012-2013 school year be certified as organic has now being achieved. The cafeteria at joint middle school/high school complex in Nyons has surpassed that goal with 33%, according to Céline Roupioz, Drome press attachée. The appetizers in front of me are among the result.

Chef Baconnier was filling the appetizer trays at the salad bar that had been placed in the middle of the cafeteria as I examined the options. I looked up at him. He had the apprehensive smile of a man waiting for someone to tell him what I thought of his work.

“It all looks so good,” I said.

“We made special efforts with the presentation because you were coming,” he said.

The “you” referred to the group of journalists that I was a part of but it still made me feel special. And I realized that the presentation did indeed look too good for a hoard of sixth graders thanks to the decoration of parsley sprigs, the black Nyons olives and popcorn and the orderly arrangement of the endive boats.

I hesitated in making my selection.

“Are you looking for something?” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to what looked like individual portions of carrot juice.

“A carrot and orange juice smoothie,” he said. “Nothing simpler and the kids actually like it.”

“I imagine so,” I said for no particular reason.

He had a tremendous spoon in his hand which he now used to point out the contents of the ramekins, trays and endive boats: “Pureed beets, leeks, squash, carrots.”

I thanked him and he left for the kitchen.

When I turned back to the appetizer bar a horrible realization took hold of me: I couldn’t remember anything that I had eaten through the entire year of sixth grade.

No, it was more than that. I had absolutely no memory of sixth grade at all. None! I tried to conjure up the school cafeteria, the names of my teachers, class subjects, gym class activities, my best friends—but nothing came to mind. I tried to remember seventh grade—it, too, a total blank. How, I wondered, did I ever learn anything? Did I learn anything?

I took a little bit of everything from the appetizer bar, everything but the grated carrots which I assumed tasted like grated carrots.

For some reason I was surprised that the carrot and orange juice smoothie tasted like carrots and orange juice. I don’t know what I was expecting, perhaps something that an American sixth grader would “actually like.”

But then it hit me again that I didn’t know what American sixth graders would like because not only did I not know any sixth graders, which might not be such a bad thing, but I couldn’t remember having been one myself. And once again I was seized by the fearful thought that an entire year had been erased from my memory and there was no way or retrieving it. And seventh was gone too.

I stared hard into my organic beets and suddenly remembered the first Earth Day. I must have been in either sixth or seventh grade. It was April. We all got off the bus a half-mile before school and walked the rest of the way, proud to be something good for the planet while a long line of buses, cars and their drivers collectively fumed in the snarled traffic caused by so many kids on the road. I couldn’t remember anything that happened before or after that, but it was a start.

I looked up from my beets and saw that everyone else had already finished their appetizers. The sight of one of the foreign journalists in the group telling one of the cafeteria workers about the food in the cafeteria in her hometown in eastern Europe brought to mind a girl on my bus who once said to me, “Let’s have a debate about why 18-year-olds should be able to vote since they can get sent to Vietnam. I’ll be for, you be against” and then proceeded to berate me for wanting to send young men off to get killed without a vote. I must have been 12 and a good listener.

I caught sight of Patricia Bilcocq, la proviseure or principal, whom I hadn’t yet spoken with other than to say hello when we first arrived. I remembered that somewhere in my childhood I’d learned that it’s principal and not principle because the principal is your pal. Apparently I’d learned something! I was feeling better already. I went over to talk to her.

France’s national education system, known as “the mammoth,” employs over one million fonctionnaires and oversees 12.5 million students and apprentices in 65,657 schools, 87% of which are public. Each and every employee of l’Education nationale is in some way a block in the final rampart defending the values of the Republic, as many of them will let you know in one way or another whether you’ve asked or not. The United States, by contrast, has a primarily local and state system where “values” as such are more open to local interpretation (in some cases questioned before the Supreme Court) and where winning sports teams and extracurricular activities are perceived as equally important as the classroom. I am not pleading here for one system over the other but pointing out that in speaking with Madame la proviseure I was aware that she represented the French Republic even while serving the locality.

The monolithic tendencies of the French state are well known; Paris dictates and coddles as it wishes (while occasionally looking over its shoulder at the European Commission), and this is particularly true of the Ministry of Education. Nevertheless, successive moves have been made toward what is called decentralization, i.e. the movement of responsibilities, agencies and cultural works outside of Paris, strengthening the hand of departments (subsections of regions and comparable in some ways to American counties) in matters concerning transportation, social services, education and culture. School cafeterias are now the domain of the department, allowing leeway in purchasing and serving, within national nutritional guidelines.

Among the complexities of who is responsible for what in the French school system, the department (Drome here) oversees the middle school cafeteria while the high school is the domain of the region (Rhone-Alpes here). The middle school of Nyons, Collège Barjavel, however, is one of two in the department that is also part of larger school complex that includes the high school, Lycée Roumanille. High school students nevertheless have more opportunities to leave school campus for a smoke and a bag of chips.

Despite Principal Bilcocq’s role in overseeing both the high school and the middle school, there was no making small talk about the football team or about this year’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” or whether or not there was a gay-straight student alliance. We talked about the cafeteria.

Between the middle school and the high school, 900 students, faculty and staff eat in the cafeteria every day in a school complex that includes 1200 students ages 10½ to 19. Those not counted among the 900 eat at home or otherwise opt out of eating at the cafeteria. A staff of 8 to 10 departmental employees works in the kitchen.

Beyond the nutritional aspects of the “Eat well, eat organic” program, Proviseure Bilcocq lauded the importance of involving the school in the local agricultural economy, whether for organic or non-organic products, since many of the school’s children come from families working in that economy.

Nyons is in the southern portion of Drome, an area referred to as “Drome Provencale” beause it identifies in terms of weather and landscape with Provence which is generally considered as beginning in the department of Vaucluse, several miles south of here. The area within 10 miles of Nyons, Pays de Nyons, is especially known for its appellation olives and olive oil and Rhone Valley wines while the broader area of Drome Provencale is also rich in lavender, truffles, honey and fruit trees (more on the surrounding area in Part 3). Though much of that is not as yet certified organic, the local economy depends heavily on agriculture.

Implementation of the “Eat well, eat organic” program involved approaching the question of cafeteria food and nutritional education at several levels. A major dual element is the purchasing price on the one hand so as to presents meals at an acceptable cost on the other. Families now pay 3.50€ (about $4.55) per student for those who have been signed up at the start of the year to lunch regularly at the cafeteria. For those who lunch here occasionally the cost is 3.86€ (about $5.02) per meal. Efforts are also made to eliminate waste, to properly train kitchen and serving staff, and to inform students and their families about nutrition. Nutritionists giving presentations in classrooms during the first year of middle school, i.e. at about student age 11.

It all sounded quite idyllic, especially on a day with no students around. Aware of that impression, Principal Bilcocq warned against a romanticized vision of Nyons’s schools. She acknowledged that despite its strong points Nyons was also confronted with the array of contemporary problems found throughout the French school system, including drugs and violence, failing students and uninvolved parents.

“We have a diverse community,” she said, citing first- and second-generation immigrants and the children of seasonal workers. “There are even some English, Belgians, Dutch and lately even a few Americans.”

Each day at lunch students have the option for their main course of one meat dish (beef, fowl, pork) and one fish dish along with side dishes that might be considered as vegetarian dishes. For today’s main course the choice was been chicken, julien (ling, a type of cod) and, as side dishes or on their own, spelt (a type of wheat grain) and cabbage and carrots, with or without pork lardons. I took a bit of each and a full portion of the organic chicken.

The grain and veggies were tasty enough. The lightly breaded baked ling was a bit chewy but still healthily prepared. And the chicken was truly and surprisingly tasty, better than one would find, say, in a decent café in Paris.

Later, when I went into the kitchen to compliment the chef, he said that the chicken served today was indeed one of the successes of the organic purchase policy. He regretted, however, that our visit didn’t coincide with the arrival of a wider selection of organic produce, hence the frequent appearance of carrots. When possible, he said, organic flour was used in the bread.

He said that discovering how to use those organic products in a way that the students would eat—after all, the goal is not simply to purchase organic food but to get students to eat it and appreciate its origin—involved a certain amount of trial and error. Early in the program there had been attempts to have some 100% organic meals to compensate for meals served when less organic produce was available, but the children didn’t care for them, so now they mix organic and non-organic dishes in fulfilling the program’s purchasing and nutritional objectives.

We were next offered a cheese course—goat, brie and some Alpine tome. It wasn’t exactly a sixth grade memory, but I don’t believe we had a cheese course at my school in New Jersey.

There followed then a selection of three desserts, fresh fruit or cut fruit, slices of pound cake and arched biscuits called tuiles.

Oddly, as I stood back at the salad bar examining the deserts I had a vision of Snack Pack pudding in my lunch bag. I couldn’t put a grade to it, but apparently I still had some middle school memories tucked away. I’d had a childhood after all, and possibly a pretty favorable one at that since I presumably would have remembered anything traumatic. I wondered if, like Proust with the madeleine, my entire middle school period would flood back to me the next time I were to taste a Snack Pack.

My lunchmates and I now said cheery good-bye to the principal and her staff. It was as though it were graduation day and none of us planned to return until we were rich and famous, or had at least filed our reports and our articles.

Already we must have done something right, because within an hour we were raising a glass to the light while attending a class at Wine University.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

Continue to Part 2 of Drome Provencal: Eat Like a Sixth Grader, Drink Like a Wine Enthusiast.

The post Drome Provencale: Eat Like a Sixth Grader, Drink Like a Wine Enthusiast, Part 1 of 3 appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.