Wine Show

This weekend is the Salon des Vins des Vignerons Indépendants at the Porte de Versailles convention center. Vignerons Indépendants is a trade organization that promotes small, independent winemakers.

This is their logo:

To use the V.I. label, winemakers have to do it the old fashioned way- growing, vinifying, bottling and selling their wines with respect, tradition, blah, blah, blah. Aside from a worthwhile commercial mission, Vigneron Indépendant throws a hell of a trade show. Admission, a wine glass and tasting pours are all free. You can buy whatever you like directly from the person who made it. Endless wine for free, from several hundred winemakers from all over France. That's a party. As you can see below, it's popular.

This is about 1/10th of the whole scene. It was a crush of people, many drunk or at least slowed by a decent buzz. We fought through the crowds for a while, tasting whatever looked interesting, before the chaos became too much and we fled.

A Walk in Parc de Bercy

Parc de Bercy is in the 12th Arrondissement, about a thirty minute walk to the southeast of Chez JeffnLia. A recent addition to the Paris park system, it was built in the 1990s on land once used for wine warehouses.It's tucked away between the Gare de Lyon railyards and the Seine. The neighborhood is known, to me at least, for having the train station, a huge stadium and a lot of office buildings. Parc de Bercy kind of slid down our to-do list. That was stupid, the place is amazing. It's a beautiful collection of gardens, ponds and walkways. The park is set on lower land, isolating it from the city. Many of the gardens are surrounded by tall hedges or trellises, making it feel more intimate and surprising when you enter a new area. There are still quite a few flowers in bloom but we will definitely have to make a return trip in the spring.

the rose bower

Lilac bushes

late fall color and some kind of white berry plant

ivy

grape vines

a couple cool sights near the park:

Cinémathèque Française

Josephine Baker floating swimming pool

Beaujolais Nouveau

It's the third Thursday of November, so we figured we ought to grab a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. Sure, it's a marketing ploy and lots of wine people won't touch the stuff, but I think it's fun to play along with the yearly tradition. For this bottle, we walked down to Spring Boutique and Le Garde-Robe Restaurant on Rue de l'Arbre Sec. The two shops, across the street from each other, teamed up to bring Jean-Claude Lapalu in from Beaujolais along with a giant oak barrel of his wine. For €8 Jean-Claude personally funneled his wine into a bottle, corked it, stuck a label on it and handed it to us, all while sitting on the sidewalk enjoying a few glasses himself. The wine in the photo lived about an hour in the bottle before being opened. It's good - light and young and full of red currant and cherry loveliness.

We picked up a rotisserie chicken and potatoes on the way home.

Lia approved.

Apartment scene

Not a whole lot to report at the moment. But here we are, doing the usual:

I was trying to be sneaky and get a picture of Jeff without him knowing, but of course he noticed. It's hard to get away with these things when the other person is never more than a few feet away.

Links!

I know a few of of the people who read this are planning trips over here, so I thought I'd add links to a few websites that might be helpful. A couple of them are in French, but I've seen people set up Google to automatically translate websites for them. This results in the sort of stilted, translator-speak you'd expect, but it's still comprehensible.

Yesterday we had a break in the weather - the sun actually came out and the rain stopped for a while - so we had a nice day of wandering around. The goal was to go buy sweaters, but our destination store, an oasis of decent basics called Uniqlo, turned out to be closed. There was an angry mob of confused shoppers outside the door and a nervous employee trying to look nonchalant as he blocked the way. Electrical problems, apparently.

Across the street we saw the window displays at the Galleries LaFayette, and they are truly frightening, featuring dancing robot teddy bears in scenes from Mamma Mia! and Hairspray. In one scene they appeared to be frenetically destroying a Chrismas tree, Godzilla-style. It did not seem right.

Today it is Armistice Day, a national holiday; just now I heard a ton of church bells ringing and realized it was 11:00. The rain is coming down again and we won't be doing much walking if we don't have to. Plans involve baking things and braising other things, plus a lot of reading.

Fall colors

Last weekend we went for a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park at the western edge of Paris.

On November 1st we visited Père Lachaise cemetary. It was a gorgeous fall day with a breeze and the trees at peak color. This is the one photo I got before the camera lost power. Oh well. It was very beautiful, trust me. Or take a look at these photos, taken by someone else on the same day.

Avignon

Here are some pictures from our short trip to Avignon during fall break. This is the city in Provence where the popes were based for a few hundred years when things in Rome got a little too hot for them. While in residence, the popes fortified the city and built themselves a pretty impressive palace, and everything is fairly well-preserved as far as I can tell. If you imagine a cross between a stereotypical medieval city and Southdale mall, you will have a pretty good idea of what Avignon is like today.

Our original plan involved renting bikes and riding them to the Pont du Gard, the very famous Roman bridge and aqueduct about 25 kilometers away. When we arrived, however, the famous Mistral wind rendered that not such a great idea. So we wandered around the city, got a bunch of stuff at the market, and had a picnic at the Rocher des Doms park right above the Palais des Papes. By luck, we got together with a friend from the University of Minnesota who is working in Montpellier this year. And we went for a good long walk outside Villeneuve-lès-Avignon on the other side of the Rhone river. Here are some pictures of these exciting events.

 

 I should say Avignon is well preserved with the exception of the famous bridge, which people got tired of rebuilding in the seventeenth century or so. I guess there is a well-known nursery rhyme about dancing on the bridge of Avignon, though neither Jeff nor I had heard of it. 

Lunch! terrine, cheese, olives, tart, baguette, wine.

 Flattering shot of me with Provençal tart.

 The olives were definitely good. Jeff thought they were fabulous. 

I ate two and almost liked them, which is high praise considering how I generally feel about olives.

You get a great view of the countryside from the Rocher des Doms. You can get an idea of that and of what the wind was like from these little videos Jeff took. I later read that due to the Mistral, most trees in this area grow leaning towards the south.

 That second video shows part of the Palais des Papes. This is the biggest gothic castle still standing. Here are some more photos of it.

This is the Fort Saint André near Villeneuve, seen from our walk near the river. 

It was built by king Philippe le Bel towards the end of the 13th century to help keep the popes in line.

Walking around the countryside near Villeneuve. It was nice to get outside of an urban setting for a while, and even the big parks in Paris are full of people most of the time.

So that's the news for the moment; today we are reading books in the apartment and listening to the rain on the roof.