Why You Should Never Go Wine Tasting With a Frenchman

Now that my French husband Maxime is into a fitness regime, we don’t go wine touring so often. This was making me a little sad … until I reminded myself what wine tasting with the Frog was actually like.

Back in France, we often took visiting friends and family to one of Maxime’s favourite wineries in Alsace – Domaine Marcel Deiss, situated in the half-timbered medieval wine village of Bergheim near Colmar. My uncle and aunt were among the fortunate first to be taken there. And, as often happens in France, we were greeted not by some black-apronned flunky but by the winemaker. Or in this case, Jean-Michel Deiss’s wife. My aunt and uncle traded pidgin French for pidgin English with Mrs. Deiss and things started well.

Especially since she gave us all a glass of crémant (Alsatian sparkling wine), which went down a treat.

‘Ooh, champagne!’ said my Aunt appreciatively.

‘It’s not champagne,’ began Maxime.

‘Don’t you start!’ I warned him.

Then we tasted a wine made of a blend of different Alsatian grape varieties known as Edelzwicker in Alsatian dialect (just trying saying that after a few glasses of Alsatian champagne). Most Edelzwicker, which means noble mixture, is not very edel at all, (one winemaker once let on it was just all the leftovers the Alsatians pass off on the Germans). But Jean-Michel Deiss, relishing tradition, terroir and trend-bucking, went back to the ancient co-planting ways, and worked hard, employing the most fastidious winemaking methods until he was given a big elephant stamp by critics for his Edelzwicker experiments.

In short, these mixture wines were the pride of the Domaine. Presenting us with the flagship wine, Mrs. Jean-Michel waited expectantly to hear how we liked it. And this was when the wine tasting got dangerous. When asked what I thought of a wine, I usually came out with terrible clunkers:

‘It smells like petrol,’ I would announce to a winemaker.

‘No! It’s got great minerality!’ Maxime would hiss in my ear.

‘Oh right. It’s very minerally. Yeah. And it smells a bit like grass.’

 A small groan beside me.

On the way home in the car, Maxime would explain.

‘You don’t say it’s like grass, you say herbaceous or lively,’ he would scold. ‘If you don’t like the wine, then go ahead. But to say the wine tastes like petrol or grass you’re telling the winemaker you think it has a defect!’

I had been also been known to observe that wines smelt like ham, hessian sack or green capsicum. If what Maxime said was true, the maker of the hessian sack wine no doubt went out the back and shot himself.

Now, holding a glass of Mrs. Deiss’s husband’s pride and joy, I felt a few butterflies. What could I say about it that would not cause Madame Deiss to slit her wrists or keel over in a faint? What did Maxime say I should call petrol wines again? I should have written cheat notes on my hand.

Luckily for me, Madame Deiss turned to my unfortunate uncle for feedback. He went red as he tried to think of something to say.

‘It’s nice ... and ... and ... warm,’ he said finally. He brightened, having thought of something to add. ‘Yes. It’s like sherry!’

There was a silence. Jean-Michel’s wife knitted her brows and cocked her head on one side, waiting for my uncle to elaborate. A wine tasting like sherry may be approaching the asymptote of divine for my parents’ generation, but in winespeak, it was more like saying ‘it’s crap’.

Maxime threw his hands up in the air and was about to harangue my uncle when I tugged him by the sleeve.

‘What do you think of this vintage compared to 2003?’ I asked him hurriedly.

Successfully distracted, Maxime now began a rather lengthy monologue about recent vintages in southern Alsace.

With a bit more sleeve-tugging on my part, we managed to negotiate the rest of the wine tasting. I was quite exhausted by the time we left, the car boot loaded up with crémant and sherry-wine.

After the wine tasting, we headed off to an architecture exhibition at the open air Alsatian museum, the Ecomusée. My uncle is an architect himself, so at the architecture exhibition, he would enjoy being the knowledgeable one while Maxime would be the novice. Until we came to the house made of bottles, that is.
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