What Do the French Think of Australia's Top Restaurants?

My French in-laws were in Melbourne recently. As a birthday present, we got them a voucher for Attica, Australia's top resto.

We got them this because on their last visit to Oz they hadn't known where to go for good food.(And being French, of course, sourcing good food was priority number one!). They'd gone to fish and chips shops, for instance, hoping for fresh seafood - and then spent hours afterwards peeling batter off fish. My mother-in-law pleaded staff not to batter the scallops to no avail (and much peeling).

My husband Maxime had an additional reason for wanting to arrange things for his parents to do.

'Otherwise, they'll just spend their time going to Coles,' he explained.

So you can imagine his chagrin when he read their email recounting how they'd spent their first day in exciting Melbourne, beginning with breakfast and then shopping 'chez Cooles [sic]'.

In comparison to Coles tubs of mashed potato, and deep fried flake, Maxime and I were quietly confident that their evening at Attica would be a roaring success.

But it wasn't entirely in the bag. Never under-estimate the powers of the Frenchman to criticise. They would have to be the most imaginative, creative critics in the world. What's more, my mother-in-law Jeanne, herself an accomplished cook, says she always orders risotto in top restaurants - because it's so hard to get right. (When I first heard this, I made a mental note never, ever to cook it for her myself). And she was taking a notebook in order to take copious notes throughout the meal. Maxime and I kept our fingers crossed ...

The next day, they gave us their detailed analysis of the night.

'Some people dressed very casually, while other people dressed up.' Why don't they feel the need to show respect to the restaurant and the other diners?'

Because we're barbarians. 'Erm, well -'

'There was a series of small plates - really microportions - of tastes of native herbs. Sebastien was hungry so he ate all the bread. And he asked for more.

In this sentence, Jeanne got to diss the resto AND her husband all in one go - nice work!

'And then there was this sort of undercooked potato thing' Jeanne was completely mystified by this object. The hungi homage had totally passed over her head. Oops.

'But the strangest thing was when I went to the toilet.'

'Ah,' I said, thinking, I'm really not sure I want to hear this,,,

'The waiter led the way and then held the door open for me!'

This was apparently deeply shocking.

'It would NEVER happen in France!'

'Why not?' I aked, confused. I mean, it wasn't as if waiter had asked if she wanted to do a number one or number two.

'Because we don't do this!'

'Why?'

She was astonished I even needed to ask and was at a loss to explain something so obvious.

'It's too intimate.'

Well. I don't find toilet doors very steamy myself, but then I'm not French.

Luckily, Jeanne recovered from having the door to the intimate toilet world touched by the waiter and managed to continue with the meal.

'The dessert was too sweet. Of course, Sebastien wolfed it down.'

Bingo - another double whammy. She was in good form!

But the micro-portions thing stuck in my Australian craw.

'I mean, the French invented nouvelle cuisine!' I complained to Maxime later.

'That was the Parisians,' he said, smugly happy to stick the knife in to those smug Parisians. 'You wouldn't see that in Alsace!'

No, I thought, but you do see a lot of diabetes....

What Happens When You Transplant a Frenchman into Australia for Christmas? Christmas Conflicts

A few years ago, my French husband Maxime and I were set to travel back to Australia for Christmas, as we did every other year. We had one last lunch with French friends before the flight. They were curious to know what an Australian Christmas was like.

‘And the family in Australia … do you fit in?’ Sebastien asked Maxime as he swirled a glass of Alsace Riesling.

‘Oh yes,’ said Maxime easily.

‘Err … it wasn’t always that way,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh, well, yes. The first Christmas there, I made a few mistakes,’ Maxime confessed, referring to his first ever visit to Australia, when things had gone ... interestingly. Especially where food was concerned. ‘At Christmas,' Maxime continued, 'they have this sort of gummy cake, the Christmas pudding. And they serve it with some sort of amorphous mass.’

The amorphous mass he was referring to was actually brandy butter. My sister’s girlfriend Wendy the Fluorescent (named for her colourful tracksuits) was immensely proud of her contribution to Christmas dinner. She was thought by everyone to have considerable pudding savoir-faire, and had spent the entirety of Christmas morning whipping up a special brandy butter flavoured with Cointreau.

‘When they put it on the table,’ Maxime said, ‘I made a remark about its appearance that wasn’t appreciated.’

‘Um, actually you said it looked like vomit,’ I said.

‘Oh putain!’ laughed Sebastien.

When Maxime had offered this choice observation that first Christmas lunch, there’d been a pause as everyone tried to decide whether or not he had really just described Wendy’s labour of love as vomit. Eventually deciding vomit must be French for lovely or something, people got on with their pudding.

But it wasn’t just brandy butter that got Maxime into hot water that first Christmas in Australia. My family were meeting him for the first time, and were expecting a polished, sophisticated European.  Mum had been vacuuming the house twice a day for weeks in preparation for his visit. To be fair, Maxime CAN do a decent line in polished and sophisticated at home in France. But somehow in Australia, it all unravelled. I suppose it was because all the rules are different here – when there are any.

And prehaps the little gastronomic shocks Maxime had to cope with rattled him. The first in store was when he discovered that at lunchtime, rather than coq au vin, Australians ate square pieces of bread. ('You eat sandwiches? Every day?' he'd said.)  But it was our Australian Christmas Eve that really took the cake (or the presliced bread). The thing is that since Mum would be doing a lot for Christmas dinner the following day, we’d decided to order takeaway pizza for dinner on Christmas Eve. When it arrived, the boxes were arrayed on the kitchen table and Dad got out some tumblers and a bottle of milk.

Maxime had stared at the table in utter horror.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked in concern.

‘It’s December the 24^th!’ Maxime squeaked.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘But it is Christmas!’

‘No no,’ I said. ‘That’s tomorrow.’

‘No! Christmas is today.’

‘What?’

‘In France, we celebrate Christmas on December the 24^th.’

Oh shit. It was French Christmas Day! Maxime would normally have been feasting on canard à l’orange and champagne and here he was with a bendy slice of pizza and a glass of milk. Maxime nibbled his slice weakly.

After the shock of celebrating French Christmas with takeaway pizza, Maxime was perhaps not in the best frame of mind to celebrate Australian Christmas the next day. He perked up a bit just before lunch when someone offered him a glass of champagne, but sagged again when I was forced to admit that it wasn’t real champagne, it was just a five dollar bottle of Aussie bubbly. By the time he got to the brandy butter, Maxime’s gastronomic expectations had sunken considerably. Although to think he was being served vomit was maybe going a bit far.

Christmas food ...who knew it could be so contentious?

And so our Christmas had continued. After lunch, Mum asked Maxime if he’d like to take a look at our garden. We all knew that the garden was Mum’s pride and joy. Well, all of us except Maxime. We were all waiting for him to say ‘I’d be delighted’ and so we were a bit taken aback when Maxime said, ‘Oh, no thanks’.

Maxime had made the mistake of thinking Mum was asking if he genuinely wanted to walk around and look at her climbing roses. ‘In France, you show respect to your guest by making them comfortable, you fit in with their wishes,’ Maxime explained to me later.

Sadly, Mum just thought that all this was not because he was French, but because he was a philistine.

The failed garden tour was followed by a BBQ on Christmas night. My uncle was doling out drinks. He gave Maxime a glass of sparkling wine which he called champagne. I winced, but Maxime accepted it with reasonable grace and took a sip. Then he promptly spat it out on the lawn. We stared at him aghast.

‘It’s corked,’ Maxime said. Then he saw everyone staring at him open-mouthed. ‘What?’ he said.  

Maxime simply couldn’t understand what everyone was upset about. ‘They get offended as if they made the wine themselves!’ he said.

We left Australia after that Christmas having offended most of my friends and relatives, all of whom urged me to ditch the rude Frog.

But I didn't of course and things are different now. Maxime has leant to feign interest in gardening where appropriate, and my family expect him to do strange things with wine. And nobody forces him to eat takeaway pizza on Christmas Eve. He has fish and chips.

The Victorian State Election: As Seen By a Frog

My French husband Maxime is in self-imposed political exile.

Well, sort of. At any rate, when we lived in France, he announced to friends that if it came down to Hollande versus Sarkozy in the second round of voting for president in 2012, he would emigrate to Australia. And so … he emigrated to Australia. Nor, in his disgust, did he bother to vote in 2012, since in France, voting is optional. Some people think that’s more democratic, but how representative is a government that’s voted in by a measly 30% or so of the population (and zero Maximes)?  Even the ancient Greeks realised that people need a little prod to make democracy work. Well, to the extent that it can.

I voted in the 2012 French presidential second round, however. I’d only just got my new, shiny French citizenship and voting rights, and I wanted a ‘go’ of them! On the sunny voting day morning of the 2012 election, I walked down to our local hall in Alsace to vote. The streets were deserted. The only faces I saw were those on the election posters (I noted with amusement that someone had drawn a Hitler moustache on Sarkozy). It was so quiet at the polling station the only thing missing was a couple of tumbleweeds floating by and a whistling, empty-sounding wind.

Not only was there no queue at the polling station, but voting itself was over in a literal click of a button - a simple click on a computer panel for Sarko or Holloande and Bob’s your president. I have to say, it was a bit dissatisfying. I’d had to wait four years for my French citizenship, fill out around one billion forms, and have the foreign police visit my house to check that I was really married and not in a ‘mariage blanc’ (the Frog’s underwear hanging to dry all over the lounge probably convinced them). After all that effort, I wanted a bit more fanfare as I exercised my rights for the first time. I wanted a few more boxes to tick and people to choose from and a senate paper the length of the Seine like we have in Australia. It was like looking forward to Christmas and then waking up on Christmas morning to find you have only one present. Not that politicians are much like Christmas presents. Maybe it’s like Christmas when all you get is socks.

But what I wanted even more than a smorgasbord of political choice on that French election day was a sausage. I wanted the traditional Aussie post-vote reward of a freshly sizzled snag from a stall outside the polling station run to support a local school or kinder.

How different it was when I voted during last Saturday’s Victorian State election. In the car on the way to the local school, I heard on the radio that there are even websites advising people on what food is available at whichelection station. Even sites that rate the quality of your snag!

Returning home from voting (and sausage consumption), I announced triumphantly to Maxime that I had the answer to France’s abysmal voter turnout issues:

‘You need sausage sizzles in France – you’d improve the voter turnout no end.’

‘Yeah! True!’ agreed Maxime, perking up as usual at the mention of food.

I wondered how come the French of all people haven’t come up with a foodie solution for their voting issues. Maybe if Sarkozy had been out flipping burgers in 2012 he would’ve got over the line (OK, perhaps only if he'd provided foie gras burgers). What’s more, Maxime himself is proof that intelligent use of food would work in French election campaigns: once, he even tried to vote for a sausage - le Chien Saucisse, a sausage-dog running for the seat of Marseille. (Sadly, however, we'd not been in Marseille, but in Alsace, and no sausage-y candiates were running.) Maxime’s estimation of French politicians also correlates suspiciously with their appreciation of wine. Come to think of it, why not have a ‘vin d’honneur’ after voting – a free glass of wine just like they have after wedding ceremonies in France (and after just about any other official occasion except, apparently, voting).

Speaking of Frenchmen and elections, you might be wondering what interest Maxime has shown in the Victorian election. Not being an Australian citizen, he can’t vote, so you mightn't expect him to get too excited about it. Nevertheless, his interest might have been engaged had it not been for the fact that the main issue of debate (apart from federal politics) seemed to have been over Melbourne’s east-west link. (Not only does the link lack interest for Frenchmen, the poor ol’ regional Victorians must be feeling a little under-cherished given the central focus of the election too.)

‘Why don’t they join up that road-in-the-north-whatever-it’s-called to the Eastern road and complete the ring road?’ Maxime asked me. ‘A city the size of Melbourne deserves a ring. The ring might be longer but it must be cheaper than digging up the city. I’m in favour of doing things the proper way, not the shitty way.’

Thus Maxime dealt with the east-west link project with typical French harshness (perhaps the frog smelt a rat!), and after this, he largely lost interest. What he’d REALLY like to see is laws relaxed to allow you to drive at your speed of choice after a seven course lunch with matching wines and possibly coffee and a balloon of Armangac, but no-one seemed to be running on that.

‘And the Melbourne public transport is a joke for a population its size,’ Maxime had added.

‘We’ve got the same make of tram as Alsace,’ I said lamely.

The Frog shrugged.

Regarding Melbourne’s public transport, it’s true that I ‘ve been shocked myself to find that after 13 years away, the Melbourne transport network hasn’t changed even though the city has at least half a million more people in it. In that same period of time in France, Alsace was connected to Paris and Dijon by a super-fast TGV, and our local area in Alsace got a new tram network. And this was all apparently without people even bothering to vote for it.

Ah well. There may be a lack of Aussie candidates at elections proposing Frog-approved infrastructure, but at least here, I get my sausage ‘n’ sauce!

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.

What Sort of People Take French Wine Tasting Courses?

At first, naïveté makes everything like Christmas - all newness and wonder. But when it comes to wine tasting, after a while you get tired of knowing less about wine than even your glass does.

When we lived in France, every night at dinner, my French husband Maxime would retrieve a bottle of wine from his wine safe. Then he'd hide the label, make me taste the wine and try to guess what it was. These incessant wine tests and my incessant failing of them reached the point where I’d had enough. I didn’t want to stop drinking the lovely French wines, but I did want to stop getting a headache every time I did.

So I came up with a plan:

‘Tonight, I’M choosing the wine,’ I announced to Maxime one evening. ‘I mean, it’s not fair, you get to choose every night!’

And if I chose it, I was certainly not going to test myself on it.

Maxime looked at me dubiously. ‘OK …’

I grinned triumphantly and jumped up to grab a bottle. But um … which one? Oh God, I could feel another headache coming on. I could imagine several things happening:

a     a. I’d inadvertently choose a sweet wine

b     b. I’d inadvertently choose something that wasn’t ready to drink

c     c. I’d inadvertently choose something Maxime was saving for a special occasion

Luckily I had a solution. It was to say ‘oh bugger it!’ and pick a wine at random.

I ferried the random bottle to Maxime, flinching a bit as I handed it over for inspection.

‘This is undrinkable,’ he announced.

Oh. At least that particular answer was unexpected.

‘Well, what are you doing with an undrinkable wine in your fridge?’ I answered back.

‘I was given it by a friend.’

The poor friend, I thought.

‘You can drink this if you want, but I’m not,’ Maxime said, and marched stiffly off back to the wine safe.

I sighed. Here we bloody go again. Then something occurred to me. Maxime couldn’t have been born knowing about wine (although you could certainly be forgiven for thinking so). He must have learnt somehow.

‘How come you know about all these wines?' I asked him. 'How come whenever anyone makes you guess a wine, you always get it right?’ (I can’t tell you how annoying that is. You’re just hanging out for the Wine Lord to take a fall.)

‘I did a wine course.’

Oh. Oh good! I thought. Maxime’s not really a supernatural wine freak. He had to learn like a mere mortal! And … I’m a mere mortal. Maybe I could learn too …?

And so it was that every Friday evening after that, I drove to the Alsatian town of Rouffach on the wine road. I would spend a couple of hours with a room full of others in an building that looked like an old schoolhouse, covered in shaggy stork’s nests, and listen to Alsace’s wine experts hold forth. ‘Apple taste, malic acid, in Sylvaner grape,’ I would write. ‘Chaptalization - adding sugar - what some naughty winemakers do in Alsace.’ After the theory, there was the practice: we students went to our benches, each with a sink for rinsing, and the teacher would pour samples of wine for us to guess and describe. We covered the six Alsace white grapes, learning what makes a good wine, and how to comment on it, judge it and detect a range of defects. Sounds good, right?

Not good. The thing was, the course was in French and the other students all worked in the wine industry. I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Would Maxime divorce me if I failed a wine exam?

At the end of the course, I went to the Alsace wine headquarters in Colmar for the wine exam. The interior of the building was UFO shaped and laid out like a futuristic parliament. The examiners were seated in the middle on a dais, dressed in official wine robes. They looked like real wine lords, looking down on us with grave faces. No one said a word as the robed ones got up and walked around, silently filling our glasses. With a shaking hand, I took a large sip of the first glass to settle my nerves (that’s the advantage of an exam in wine. I could've done with a big glass of Riesling in year 12 maths. My answers might have gotten a little more creative than is desired for maths, but hey, it would’ve been a lot more fun).

The first task was to identify the grape varieties, and then guess the defects in various wines the examiners had added things to. The finale was a commentary on a mystery wine to be delivered before the examiners. When my turn came for the commentary, I was left in a room by myself to bond with a glass for ten minutes before being summoned before the examiners. I picked up the glass and found myself sniffing and swirling the way I’d seen many a person I’d assumed to be a pretentious git do, and what Maxime does. (But Maxime, when he tastes, doesn’t seem to be out to impress anyone. In fact, it seems that at that moment, he wouldn’t care if he was alone on the planet.)

Having finished my git-like wine swirling routine, I went back into the UFO and stood before the robed examiners. I was to start by giving them a visual description of the wine. We had been taught to begin by saying ‘I am in the presence of a white wine’. But I simply couldn’t bring myself to say something so bloody naff. I said I thought the wine looked dark gold instead. Luckily the wine lords didn’t appear to mind. I moved to the nose, the bouquet.

‘I can smell mushroom,’ I announced. Not very bouquet like, that wine.

‘OK,’ said one of the examiners. ‘And does the wine also taste like mushroom?’

I couldn't taste any mushroom. I panicked. Oh God, should it taste of mushroom? Should it? Maybe he was trying to trick me?

‘No,’ I said finally.

‘Good. It shouldn’t taste like mushroom.’

Phew.

My palms were sweating like two little fountains by the time we finished. Feeling faintly sick after the harrowing session with the mushroom wine (drinking at nine in the morning may also have had something to do with it), I milled about with the other wine students while the examiners marked our papers. Eventually, we were called back into the UFO. The examiners announced who had passed, and who had got the highest mark. Well! Let’s just say the result was a turn up for the books. I came out wearing a smile wide enough to crack my face. I had done EVEN BETTER THAN MAXIME! It was a real David shoves it up Goliath moment.

So Maxime wouldn’t have to divorce me after all. Wait a minute, I thought - Maxime got a lower mark than me, so maybe I should divorce him? Or at least make him do the vacuuming.

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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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France versus Australia: Who Will Win the Argument?

I was a bit disappointed with the trip away on the weekend. Me and the Frog (my French husband Maxime) and our kids had travelled far, far away from the bright lights of Melbourne, and more importantly, far from the bright lights of its restaurants. I expected that being out country, we’d have some spectacularly dreadful meals and Maxime would say spectacular things about them, seasoning his sentences with French insults concerning people’s grandmothers in shorts - thereby giving me fantastic material for this blog post. But the food was good, damn it! (We were too close to Daylesford, apparently.)

And so, sadly, there was no parmigiana Parmageddon.  But then on Sunday, we stopped at a winery on the way back home and, oh joy! The winery delivered!

The Wintry Way Home, Warmed by a Winery

 It wasn’t the food or the wine – they were fine. Nevertheless …

Maxime and I had made our workmanlike way through the list of wines on offer. And of course, the ciders, due to the Frog’s rather dubious predilection for them). But at first I was worried: during the tasting, Maxime was calm; polite; complimentary. Don’t tell me everything’s OK?! I thought.

Then afterwards, in the car, it all came out. Not the wine - the French rage.

‘I couldn’t stand that guy!’ fumed Maxime (referring to the man serving us in the wine tasting). ‘He only served borderline acceptable amounts in the glass. And he knew nothing, nothing!’ (The hapless winery bloke had told us, ‘I only pour the wine, I don’t know about it.’ Which I think was a joke. But if you’re French, wine is not the stuff of jokes). ‘AND,’ Maxime went on, ‘after the sweet cider, he didn’t give me a new glass for the dry whites!’

‘Serve you right for drinking lolly water!’ I laughed.

‘So I used the Pinot Grigio to wash my glass out.’ (Which Maxime thinks is as good a use as any for Aussie Pinot Grigios. He prefers the French-spelled ones.)

But here’s the interesting thing - Maxime didn’t actually say anything to the winery bloke’s face.

This is something of a first for Maxime. He has – or at least used to have - the Gallic way of venting when something is bothering him. You just yell. And getting yelled at doesn't bother you, because you know not to take it to heart. In short, the French believe in letting off steam instead of stewing, and there’s something to be said for that. Except if you're not used to French culture and you're on the receiving end. For instance, instead of suggesting that perhaps it might not have been such a good idea to leave the foil on the bottle neck, Maxime would cry ‘what the hell are you doing!? You’re completely deranged!’ Then, having screeched at me for ten minutes, he would put his arm around me and suggest trying the wine. I would look at him in amazement. ‘What?’ he’d say in surprise. ‘Are you upset?’ I’d be almost lost for words.

‘Of course I’m upset! You just said I was deranged!’

‘Oh is that all? Of course I didn’t mean that, I was just angry. Why do you take everything so personally?’

‘You called me deranged! How much more bloody personal can you get?!’

I would stick to my guns and insist that Maxime may not have meant to hurt my feelings but he nonetheless had, and demand an apology. To give the Frenchman his due, he always gave me one. But even when I was furious, I was curious. The French way of seeing things was so different. (Curiosity kills the K, I thought.)

The Anglo-Saxon – French differences in argument style were a problem for Maxime at work too, when we lived in France. Anglo-Saxon colleagues sometimes felt he was too harsh.

‘What exactly did you say?’ I asked Maxime on one such occasion. He told me. ‘OK … you know, there are other, gentler ways of telling people they could do better,’ I suggested. ‘You shouldn’t really say to an Anglo-Saxon things like, “this document is a piece of shit and working with you is a complete nightmare.”’

But now that we’re in Australia, it seems the Frog’s French edges have become softened with Anglo-Saxon restraint. Well, that’s all to the good. I won’t get called deranged anymore! Until I run into another Frenchman perhaps.
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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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If You Drink Wine and Drive, You're a Bloody Frenchman?

I never saw a booze-bus in Europe, and now that we're in Australia, we see them every other weekend. My French husband Maxime shakes his head in wonder at them. He got tested twice the other day on one of his forty minute Odysseys in search of decent bread. But it doesn't stop him enjoying wine when we go out if he wants to. He knows his limits. Although ... Maxime's limits seem to be quite large.

In more than twenty years, Maxime's only been stopped and breathtested twice in France. On the first occasion, we were in the pretty village of Villefranche de Conflent. At dinner, Maxime ordered a bottle of wine as usual, seeming to overlook the fact that I was pregnant and wouldn’t be drinking half of it. I nursed a token glass while he made his workmanlike way through the rest. 

'Orrrgh, your breath reeks of alcohol!' I complained when he tried to kiss me after dinner. 

My sense of smell got hypersensitive when I was pregnant (it’s the closest I've ever come to having super powers). I coughed and waved away the last of Maxime's alcohol fumes and then we got in the car and started the half hour drive back to our hotel.

Just a few hundred metres from the restaurant, however, we spotted some flashing blue lights.

'Oh. I don’t have my driving documents with me,' remarked Maxime.

 'Oh Maxime,' I sighed as the gendarme signalled to us to pull over.

'You’ve just come from the restaurant?' asked the gendarme. 'What did you have, a beer or two?' 

'Err, something like that,' said Maxime, trying to sound offhand. I strove to make the pregnant nature of my form more obvious in a bid for sympathy.

'Please breathe in here,' he said. Maxime did so. 'Hmm,' mused the gendarme.

Oh God, I thought. I’m pregnant, it’s late at night, and now I’m going to have to walk home from Villefranche de Conflent.

‘It’s zero,' said the gendarme. ‘OK, you can go.'

I don’t know how that happened. If the gendarme’d used my nose instead of the breathalyser, Maxime’d probably just be getting out of jail now.

The second breathtest occurred in the Doubs, after Maxime had consumed half a bottle of wine, a beer and a drinking glass full of farmer’s homemade absinthe at a local farm. Again, Maxime was exonerated by the breathalyser. The conclusion we came to is that Maxime must carry a special French version of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene giving him super alcohol metabolising powers.

But despite the fact that drink driving laws cause Maxime no particular problem personally, he is still very upset about the ‘police terrorism’ in France as are many of Maxime's friends, especially a winemaker friend of ours called Seppi (short for Joseph). Seppi told us he'd written to the government to complain about the drink driving laws. 

'The state is systematically destroying French culture, strangling the French wine industry,' he explained. 'They stake out village wine fetes with gendarmes. And what happens as a result of the persecution of wine? The young people get drunk on alcopops and beer!' 

Just like those culturally retarded Anglo-Saxons across the Channel, he was implying. Maxime is in wholehearted agreement with Seppi. The wine lake, according to Maxime, is a problem not because there are too many producers in France making bad wine, but because Sarkozy cracked down on drink driving. Friends in the restaurant industry agree, upset because people don’t order a bottle of wine with lunch anymore.

But despite all this, now that we're in Australia, the Aussie police would be unlikely to catch Maxime over the limit irregardless of the battalions of booze buses, since not only is he the fastest metaboliser in the West, but, he’s been inspired by his new life in Australia to start a health kick: he's started to cut down on wine and chocolate. He splashes out on a Mount Mary or visits wineries and terrorises tasting room staff less often than he did. Mind you, there's a limit to everything: the Bruny Island cheese parcels keep on arriving on our doorstep with a a surprising frequency.

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Meeting Your Winemaker

On the weekend, my French husband Maxime and I indulged and took in a few wineries on the Mornington Peninsula. Maxime was struck as always by the contrast to France. In French wineries, you always meet the winemaker or one of their family. He will let you taste everything that’s for sale, whether it be sparkling, or expensive or rare. Sometimes, they become so enthusiastic they bring out vintages not normally for tasting, and give you a free bottle or so if they really warm to you.

New World wineries are often huge megapolises with restaurants and convention centres and swarms of employees in branded aprons who herd you like cattle through the tasting. During a holiday in New Zealand a few years back, I took Maxime to Cloudy Bay in Marlborough. Then wished I hadn't. First of all, Maxime and I were given wine to taste that seemed to have been measured out with an eyedropper.

'This is unacceptable!' Maxime said to me. 

Then he asked the girl behind the counter in the branded apron if he could have a proper amount.

The apronned girl looked at him with a you’re-just-here-to-get-drunk sneer and asked if he would like to see the manager, imagining this would intimidate him into shutting up. She hadn’t had much experience with the French, I guess. They don’t mind making a scene, in fact, I suspect they rather like it.

‘Yes, I would like to see the manager,’ said Maxime firmly.

He then subjected  the manager to a lengthy dissertation about the physiology of wine tasting.

'If the wine doesn’t fill the mouth you can’t taste it properly,' Maxime said, and went on to explain why in great detail.

Eventually the manager grew weary of having her ears bashed and instructed the girl to settle us apart from the other tasters and give us a goodly 50mL or so. The rest of the public, I saw out of the corner of my eye, continued to get the eyedropper treatment as usual.

Enough to taste

I’ve learned the hard way that you have to treat wine properly around Maxime or you cop it. So I’m always relieved (and a just a tiny bit amused) when its someone else on the receiving end of a pasting. Like our Dutch friend Michel when he came to visit us in France. On one such occasion, we were just about to have some nibbles and a nice drop of Alsatian Riesling before dinner when the phone rang. Maxime answered it, and asked me to open the wine in the meantime. Hmmm. I don’t think so!, I thought. Bottle opening sounds way too risky.

'Michel, why don’t you open it?' I suggested.

'OK,' he said, and did so.

Maxime got off the phone.

'Arrrrrrrgh!' he cried.

'What? What?' said Michel, his blue Dutch eyes bulging with alarm.

'What have you done?!'

'Well, I opened the bottle….'

'No, no, no! You didn’t remove all the feuilletage!' Maxime cried. Then he sighed heavily like he was dealing with children. ‘Putain, putain!” (prostitute, prostitute) he muttered as he peeled off the foil from the neck of the bottle.

Michel turned on me accusingly.

'So that’s why you wanted me to open the bottle!'

I smiled, and said, ‘Only the Wine Lord knows how to do it.’

But the evening’s performance wasn’t finished. Later that night, Maxime retrieved a second bottle, produced a cloth and began to polish it. Michel and I both watched in fascination.

'What do you do that for?' I asked in respectful tones, wondering if there was some mystical oenological reason behind bottle polishing.

The Wine Lord looked at me in surprise.

'So it looks nice!'

Given all this, you can imagine that when Maxime first arrived in the land of the corporatised winery with drink now styles and eyedropper tastings, there were going to be teething problems. But on the whole, living in Australia has somewhat beaten the wine fastidiousness out of frog. No longer does he meet managers or fume about foil. He just goes with the flow. Nevertheless, even now, even though he hears it at every single family celebration in Australia, when someone comes up with a bottle of Aussie sparkling and offers Maxime a glass of ‘champagne’, he will correct them quietly.

‘You mean Australian sparkling wine.’

I guess there’s a limit to everything.
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