French Tips on Mixing Business With Pleasure (a.k.a. Food and Wine)

The other day, my French husband Maxime observed rather mournfully that Australians don’t do business lunches very often. Personally, I'm not so keen on business lunches - I’d rather have a break at lunchtime, and do business meetings at a table without getting crumbs in my computer and sauce on my reports.

‘But it’s the ambience,’ Maxime said. ‘It’s nicer to be in a restaurant than a sterile office. And the good food makes me feel happier.’

‘Business meetings aren’t supposed to be about pleasure,’ I said.

Or are they?

When we lived in France, Maxime had ‘business’ lunches every day. His calendar was planned months in advance,detailing whom he would meet at which restaurant. I would ask each night how the business lunch went, and Maxime’d go into raptures about the food and tell me which wine they chose. So not much business got done then, I thought to myself. Unless it was the business of eating and drinking. Maybe his business lunches should have been called 'pleasure lunches'.

Of course, in Australia, things are different. Maxime has been forlornly lunching alone and wineless. But now it seems things have taken a turn for the better: Maxime came home from work yesterday brandishing a bottle of 2003 Pinot Noir from Orange, NSW, and grinning from ear to ear.

‘It’s for work,’ he explained.

‘Is it?’ I said doubtfully.

‘We found dozens and dozens of crates of wine in the warehouse!’ Maxime’s eyes were shining like stars. ‘And my job is to taste it to make sure it’s OK!’

‘And who decided that would be your job?’

‘Me.’

Surprise, surprise.

Maxime's work for the weekend

But now that I come to think about it, wine has been very helpful to Maxime at work. He's always been respected for his wine knowledge by his bosses. What's more, he's used wine in recruitment: when we lived in France and Maxime held job interviews, he always asked the interviewee if they liked wine. 'I need to know if they'll fit in the team,' he would say. The German who replied to the question 'do you like wine?' by saying 'yes, when it’s mixed with coke' did not get a job.

What is worse, (or perhaps better?), Maxime also uses wine to decide how to vote. He was delighted a few years back when he read in a French wine review that the people he favoured in French politics were those who most liked wine, and was thrilled and vindicated when he read that François Bayrou got drunk on pacharenc (a fortified wine) to cure a speech impediment.

Sarkozy, the teetotaller, is of course completely despised by Maxime. 'A bit of a yobbo,' Maxime calls him, showing how well his Aussie slang is coming along. Sarkozy is 'totally lacking in culture'. Not only is Sarkozy a teetotaller, but Maxime suspects that when Sarko was president, Carla Bruni, who knows her wines, was drinking the French presidential cellar dry together with hordes of Italian interlopers.

Then, horror of horrors, president Hollande sold off the rest of the presidential cellar to the Chinese! Maxime was incensed when he heard. 'But that's the French patrimoine!' he cried.

In 2011, Maxime announced to friends that if it came down to a choice between those two wine dingbats Sarkozy and Hollande in the 2012 French presidential election, he would emigrate to Australia.

And of course, he did! Now that's how to take wine seriously.
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