Colours of home

Colours of home

Friday 22 August 2014

What Sort of Wine Deserves a Medal?

When we lived in France, I did a wine course, as I recounted in an earlier post. Not only that, but I topped the wine exam at the end, beating all the frogs – a fact which is a constant source of satisfaction to me, especially the fact that I did better than my French wine-expert husband Maxime. 

But the story doesn’t end there: having done well in the exam, I was invited to go to Colmar to be a judge at of the latest Alsace vintage. It was to be one of those events where they award those little medal stickers you see on some bottles in the supermarket. How exciting! I thought. But I was too shy to ring up and accept the invitation in French. I decided to make Maxime do it for me.

Of course, he had no problem making the call for me. In fact, he seemed strangely eager to do it. 

After Maxime made the call, he got off the phone and said, ‘Yes, it’s fine – you’ll be judging Riesling and I’ll be judging Crémant.’

‘What do you mean you’ll be judging Crémant? YOU didn’t get invited!’ I said indignantly. 

What’s more Crémant was MY favourite wine! How come Maxime got to be the Crémant judge?

‘I asked if I could be a judge too, since I also did that course. And they said yes.’

No wonder he’d been so keen to do the call. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I said.

Actually I could. Maxime has more front than Myers. This is a man who talked his way into a private tasting with Didier Dagenau (when he was still alive) and inveigled himself into being invited to Vinexpo.
Awarding a medal to my nightly drop

The judging day began at 9 in the morning, in a great barn-like exhibition building in Colmar, capital of South Alsace. An old wine official bloke began proceedings by giving the assembled judges (there were actually dozens of us) a briefing. We were meant to award wines that reflect what is typical of Alsace, and of the grape variety, so that the consumer would get an idea of what ‘Alsace’ should taste like. To some winemakers, this is an anathema. What should be celebrated is the individual terroir (that mystical term encompassing climate, soil, topography etc. of an area of land) and the variety of taste you can have thanks to each terroir’s uniqueness. You should not be trying to produce some sort of common denominator wine! As one Alsatian winemaker complained to me once ‘they want us to make wine which is typical. But which typical is that?!’

It seemed I was going to work for the Dark Side of the Force.

After being given our instructions, we went to our tables. I sat at the ‘Riesling table’ with two other judges, who were both Alsatian winemakers. It made my head spin to think that when I’d first come to France, I didn’t even know that Riesling was grown in Alsace. My knowledge of Riesling back then had been based on encounters with four litre cardboard casks of ‘Rhine’ Rieslings back in Australia, labelled Kaiserstühl or some such. Now I was to judge real Riesling from out of a bottle instead of a cardboard box (and the real Kaiserstühl was just up the road). 

The two winemakers and I had nine Rieslings from the year before to rank and one reference wine that was meant to illustrate what the powers that be deemed to be ‘typical’ Alsace Riesling taste. The samples are tasted very young – as the tasting went on, it began to feel as though the acid was stripping all the skin off my lips and my teeth felt strangely furry. It did not at all turn out to be as much fun as I thought it would be. Especially since only some winemakers submit their wines for medal awards and the top winemakers tend not to. They don’t need a little medal sticker to sell their wine. My fellow judges and I sipped our wine tentatively, and the winemakers looked at one another in dismay and made ‘pfff’ sounds. They didn’t want to give a medal to any of the wines. But award we must.

Maxime, on the other hand, seemed to be having a fine old time on the Crémant table. He and the others at his table were laughing and rosy-cheeked.

‘This is actually quite good – taste this,’ Maxime said, handing me a glass as I approached.

Bastard! I thought. He not only bloody muscles in on my wine judging debut and scores a spot on the Crémant table but he gets decent wine!

Of course, Maxime didn’t really need to be appointed a wine judge. He is one naturally. And no one is safe from his pronouncements. Now that we live in Australia, not even the Australian Prime Minister is safe. Upon reading an article on the contents of Mr. Abbott’s wine cellar, Maxime adjudged it to be ‘the cellar of a yobbo’. And as I’ve said before, wine rules Maxime’s politics. So the PM should be thankful that he can’t vote in Australia! 

Yet. 

Maxime plans to get citizenship ASAP so he can vote for someone who appreciates Clonakilla Shiraz Vigonier.

Mind you, Aussie wine critic Jeremy Oliver can dish it out almost as harshly as Maxime. I particularly love the bit in the article where he says that in the PM’s cellar, ‘the only Riesling listed is from Margaret River, where it should be classified as a weed.’ 



Can you imagine having dinner with a pair of wine critics like that!? Actually, it’s probably better not to.

Friday 15 August 2014

Can the French Play Footy?


It doesn’t seem to have had much publicity, but nonetheless, the International Aussie Rules Cup is on at the moment in Melbourne. The important thing from my French husband Maxime’s point of view is that it provides yet another excuse to hang out with his fellow frogs. Thus it was that last Sunday, we trekked up to Royal Park to watch France versus Britain. I was looking forward to a fierce fight fuelled by the traditional French-English rivalry. Last year, England beat France in the final of the Euro Aussie Rules Cup, so what with that and Waterloo, the French should have been keen for revenge.

We arrived a little late, and Maxime headed off in search of nourishment in the form of woodfired pizza (such are his priorities). It was almost quarter time when he returned.

‘Where’s France’s score?’ Maxime asked as he approached with the only slice of pizza which had survived the journey back from the pizza van.

‘Where’s France’s score’ effectively summed things up.

‘There isn’t one,’ I said. ‘But, I mean, they don’t stand a chance. The French players are all microcscopic.’

The Brits towered over the Frogs, easily outmarking them (not that the marking was great, I have to say), and brushing them off with relative ease. With the average French player being the size of Napoleon, the game was rapidly turning into another Waterloo. (Les Coqs versus the Bulldogs. Seriously, who would you predict to win a fight between dogs and chooks?)
Napoleon and Asterix take the field for France

‘The French seem hesitant,’ said Maxime.

I’d be hesitant too if I was 4 foot nothing and playing on a yeti.

‘Look, there’s Asterix!’ said Maxime next, spotting a small blond French player we’d met at the meet-and-greet the week before.

‘They don’t need Asterix, they need Obelix!’ I said. ‘Where’s the magic potion? Give the man some supplements!’

By the last quarter, France were yet to score a goal. Nevertheless, a crowd of perhaps 70 French watched the game through to the bitter end. Not that the French supporters provided much in the way of actual support. They were the most silent footy crowd I’d ever stood with, muttering the occasional ‘ah merde!’ or ‘ce n’est pas vrai’ or ‘Oh prostitute’. The only vocal member of the crowd was an Aussie bloke, who would periodically yell ‘man up, France!’ I’m not sure the French understood what this meant. At any rate, they certainly didn’t do it.
France's end. Which about sums it up.
The final score was 88 to 7, with France’s only goal kicked just before the final siren (which I missed it because I’d chosen that moment to go to the toilet. Maybe should have gone more often!)


Today there might be a chance for France to score a win. France takes on the Indonesia garudas, who were comprehensively squished by tiny Nauru (227-7) and Fiji (208-0). According to Wikipedia, a garuda is a ‘large mythical bird’. So there’s definitely hope for France – Indonesia are birds too. What’s more they don’t even exist. Allez, les Coqs!

Friday 8 August 2014

Can a Frenchman Love Footy?


Honestly, sometimes I think we're still in France. My French husband Maxime tends to organise our social outings and they involve one (or preferably both) of the following elements:

1. Food
2. French people

But last night's food-and-French-people outing at least had an additional element to interest me - Aussie Rules!

It was the meet-and-greet with the French Aussie Rules team, over from France to contest the International Cup in Melbourne. Over 300 French expats were expected to come along, and maybe the police got wind of it, because the venue was flanked with booze buses. Maxime was even breath-tested on the way in (maybe they also caught wind of his form when it comes to wine). But the police were out of luck - Maxime hadn't had a drop (in fact, the police were keeping him from having some drops). Billy Brownless may have stubbies rolling around in his car (as he announced on Triple M's Rush Hour), but our car is, sadly, a dry area.

As we entered the venue, the French football team was busy giving a rendition of the Marseillaise. So in true footy spirit, I sang 'We Are the Boys From Old Fitzroy' (OK, it was really just to annoy Maxime by messing up his anthem). Then the players introduced themselves to the assembled French expat masses. (We learned that the players included one with the nickname of Asterix, which means the opposition will need to look out for rovers on supplements.) As I listened to the player introductions, I looked about me and noted from the banners that the French team had chosen the name of 'the Coqs' (roosters). A little foolhardy for a competition in Australia, I thought. At any rate, I'm not sure I'll be shouting 'up the Coqs!' when I see them play ...
Singing the Marseillaise

French footy was actually born in Maxime's home region of Alsace. Maxime didn't start it, of course. But he did come across the Alsatian footy team when we lived in France. He had been surfing the net to find information on the microscopic size of Aussie footballers' ... shorts. (Such are the things Maxime looks up on the net). Instead of short footy shorts, he found a footy team - the 'Strasbourg Kangourous', just up the road from us in Alsace, and started by one Marc Jund. Back in the 80s, a couple of games of Aussie Rules were televised in France, and Marc had seen them. Probably it was a slip-up - the network probably meant to show some weird European winter sport involving someone going down a slide in sub zero temperatures dressed in Lycra. Be that as it may, Marc had been hooked and decided to start his own Aussie Rules club. He sought help from the AFL, and received a couple of footies and the rules in English. Which no one spoke. So much for that then, you might think.

Not at all! The dogged Strasbourgeois kept up their club. They did their best trying to nut out the game, watching all the footy replays they could get their hands on. More than ten years later when Maxime and I visited the Strasbourg team, they still hadn't worked out how to bounce the ball. (And so I showed them. 'Ah!' they said, fascinated as though I'd just performed an arcane act.)

And so it was that footy gradually caught on in France despite considerable odds and the inability to drop punt. The reason it does survive in France and other countries in Europe is down to European footy players who are not so much footy mad as footy insane. Like a Czech tigers fan I ran into in Europe whose entire house is festooned in black and gold. 

Last night, I met a case in point: as the French footy meet-and-greet evening wound down, and les Coqs became les Coqs au vin, I was introduced to a tall Toulousien at the bar named Gregoire Patacq. I asked whether his club, the Toulouse Hawks, had had any support from the AFL (some rules in English, perhaps). No, seemed to be the answer.

'When Demetriou said the AFL wasn't interested in expanding the game, I was devastated,' said Gregoire. 'I'd had a hard week at work and then that. It was really tough.'

'Did he really say that?' I said. 'I seem to remember someone telling me the AFL were practically throwing money at the middle east in order to get them to take it up.'

Then I added a few sympathetic things about things not being fair even in Australia - about how poor old Tassie doesn't ever get an AFL team, for instance (despite actually wanting one).

'Well,' said Gregoire defiantly, 'we still have footy. And we're not giving it up!' 

And I understood that if any football authority ever tried prevent them from playing it, the French would be up on the barricades. The French are always so passionate about things. But who would have thought one of those 'things' would be footy? 

Fantastic.

Friday 1 August 2014

Just How Badly Do the French Cope With a Melbourne Winter?


In his spare time, when he’s not looking up restaurants on Urbanspoon, my French husband Maxime is doing something you don’t necessarily associate with Frenchmen. He’s looking up the weather on the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology).

Actually, Maxime used to look up Météo France too, when we lived in France, but that wasn’t half as much fun. It never caused him to throw up his hands in horror and exclaim that the ‘weather is absolute crap’. This is because he considers French weather to be perfectly acceptable. If it was minus 20 and blizzards, he’d say ‘I love snow. It reminds me of my childhood.’

Take, for instance, a particularly cold winter in Alsace. 2006, I think. In February-March, the region was covered in snow for six weeks straight. I was depressed because I was too wary of snow to go outside (I mean, it might be cold!), and I didn’t like having to dress up in so many layers I looked like the Michelin Man in order to do it.

‘What are you complaining about?’ Maxime said one morning. It’s sunny!’

And it was - for once. So to demonstrate to me how perfectly hospitable a metre of snow is, Maxime took a bottle of champagne, went outside and stuck it in the snow. Then he retrieved a couple of glasses and some cheese.

‘We can have a pique-nique,’ he announced.

I ventured outside and moved gingerly towards the champagne. I secured a large glass of it and then retreated inside to have my picnic in front of the fire.

And it wasn’t just me who thought it was cold. When holidaying in the south of France, people would say, ‘it's very cold in Alsace, isn't it?’ and shiver at the very thought of it. Maxime would scowl and say that people in the south of France thought they knew about Alsace based on their preconceived ideas, but really, they had ‘no clue’.

They did have a clue. Winter in Alsace was like living in a chest freezer.
Le Grand Ballon, Alsace
So you can image that one of the things that made it so great to move back home was that in Melbourne, the coldest daytime maximum temperature is 9 or 10 degrees C and not minus 36. Nevertheless, I wondered if Maxime’s neck would be able to make it through our first Melbourne winter. Without me strangling it.

Now that we’re in Melbourne, Maxime takes a rainy day as a sort of personal affront. He’ll protest at the injustice of having his day dampened and wait testily for the clouds to apologise. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to say ‘look, Maxime. It just rains in winter, OK? Get over it!’ And then there's Melbourne's famous changeable weather, or ‘brutal changes of temperature’ upon which Maxime blames all of his colds.

One day he actually said he thought winter was worse in Melbourne than in Alsace. My mouth opened. And then I shut it again. I mean, there are some statements so patently ridiculous you can argue with them.

Maxime’s behaviour put me in mind of a French student I knew back when I was studying at Melbourne Uni. I called him ‘The Sad Grover’, due to his endless complaining and to his resemblance to a certain blue Sesame Street character. He was an avid movie-goer, and I began to relish, in a perverted way, asking him each morning how he liked the film he’d been to the night before. His answer was always the same. ‘It was crrrrap!’ He seemed so perpetually miserable that eventually I took pity on him and invited him to a party. I offered him a cup of cask wine, not realising I may as well have offered him a beaker of horse urine.

‘No thanks,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to lose control.’

Hmm, shame, I thought. And just like Maxime, the temperature was never right for Sad Grover in Melbourne – the restaurants were too cold, he asserted. Why didn’t we take heating seriously? And the girls were also too frigid, Sad Grover thought. Maybe they just didn’t like depressed Muppets.

Our little French kids, at least, have no problem with the weather in Australia. Except that there’s no snow. 'I miss snow’ they would announce over and over last winter.

‘It’s because I was born in the snow,’ Chloé said. (It was snowing in France when she was born.)

'No you weren’t, you were born in a hospital,’ I countered. ‘And anyway, there is snow here. You just have to go to the mountains.'

The kids didn't believe me, and so we took them to Lake Mountain to demonstrate the existence of Australian snow.
Lake Mountain last year. Enough snow if your snowballs aren't too big.
It was - um - not a success. We paid a fortune to enjoy a patch of snow about the size of someone's front lawn, with 500 odd people gamely trying to go sledding on it. 

'It's cold and wet,' remarked Elise.


Well, yes. It's snow.

Maxime and Little Miss I-was-born-in-the-snow were the only ones at ease. Elise was yammering at me about going home, and so we left, after a whole 20 minutes: I had managed to coax Maxime off the mountain with the lure of  lunch in a Yarra Valley winery. Works every time.

And as long as we don't discuss the weather during lunch, everyone's happy.