Aussie Lunch Break, French Breakdown

‘How’s work?’ friends of ours asked my French husband Maxime recently. ‘Is it much different working in Australia to Europe?’

'In Australia, work is very casual compared to Europe,' said Maxime. 'There are no formalities to follow. You can even swear!'

Maxime made a few observations of this nature. Then he suddenly announced that at work in Australia ‘no one has lunch.’

The friends looked puzzled. ‘No one eats lunch at your work?’

‘They DO have lunch,’ I qualified. ‘Just not one that counts to Maxime. They eat a sandwich at their desk.’

That is, Maxime’s co-workers ingest various coloured pastes on pre-sliced bread, including margarine which Maxime believes is toxic (and pronounces with a hard ‘g’ so it sounds like a variant of Margaret). All this is Not Food, hence these people do not have lunch.

‘It’s so depressing!’ Maxime sighed to the friends.

Not Lunch

Our friends were at a loss. After all they’d been ‘not having lunch’ themselves for years. I explained that in France, everyone from the babies at the crèches to the school kids at their school canteens to the grown-ups in their grown-up canteens expect three course, cooked lunches. Processed paste on bread at your desk is such a far cry from the convivial lunches with friends Maxime used to have in France that it’s more of a distant whimper.

Now that he works in Australia, every lunchtime, Maxime leaves his workplace to forage for ‘real’ food. But sadly, he’s in a part of Melbourne famous not so much for super gastronomy as for supermarkets. In desperation, he ends up buying tins of tuna from Woolworths. This is all the more upsetting for him since he knows what Melbourne can offer in terms of food:

Before he started his current job, Maxime would occasionally go on a trip into Melbourne to network. He always prepared these trips very carefully, spending the evening before researching diligently. In The Age Good Food Guide. He'd adored The Press Club and Vue de Monde. Then one lunchtime, he really outdid himself. He came home on the day in question bright eyed and flushed. He was raving even before he was through the front door:

‘I just had one of the best meals of my life!’ he exclaimed.

‘Did you?' I said. 'Great! Where did you go?’

‘I went to Shoya. It was amazing.’

‘Is that Japanese? What did you have?’ 

I sat down and settled myself in for a lengthy conversation, knowing Maxime was going to describe every bite, down to the last grain of sushi rice in intricate detail.

‘There was this fantastic dish – sashimi served in a spherical ice container. Their degustation menu was incredible,’ he said.

‘You took a degustation menu?’ I was surprised. Degustation menus are usually about five courses long. I’d feel silly eating a meal like that on my own. Even provided I could fit it all in ‘How many courses were there?’ I asked.

‘Fourteen.’

‘FOURTEEN?!’

Maxime looked a little sheepish. ‘They were only small courses.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, trying not to imagine what this all cost. Then, (not) thinking of cost, something occurred to me. ‘What did you drink?’ I asked, narrowing my eyes.

More sheepishness. Much more of this and Maxime would be starting to grow wool.

It turned out that he’d washed his little lunch down with most of a bottle of Mount Mary. He produced a mostly empty bottle with a glass’s worth left in it that he said he 'saved' for me - to placate me for the fact that he had just literally eaten a giant hole in our budget. Thus I learned that you let a Frenchman loose in Melbourne at your peril.

It was very lucky for our savings that Maxime started work not long after that. Now, alas, he no longer dines on spherical ice receptacles of sashimi, but spherical tin receptacles of tuna. And no wonder Australian work lunches make this grown frog cry.

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What Does a Frenchman Watch on TV? (And Does He Find Pépé Le Pew Offensive?)

Actually, now that we’re in Australia, Maxime doesn’t watch anything on TV. I tried to get him to watch Doctor Who once. What was I thinking? I mean, what would a Frenchman think of a hero who doesn’t have a sex life?

I nevertheless did my best to explain: ‘So … there’s this guy who can travel through time. In a phone booth,’ I said.

Maxime blinked.

‘That’s him in the big rainbow scarf,’ I pointed.

‘The gay one?’

‘He’s not gay! Or at least … I don’t think so ...’

It didn’t help that although I’m sure the daleks used to be scary when I was five, now they just looked like excited male compost bins with knobs on. Maxime was in hysterics. But recently, it’s been my turn to have a giggle at the expense of froggy TV: Maxime’s taken to looking up French shows on the internet.

‘Did you watch Wattoo Wattoo the superbird when you were little?’ Maxime asked me the other day as he trawled YouTube for improving French cartoons.

‘Er, no.’ I said.

Maxime had already introduced me to Barbe à Papa, a cartoon about an environmentally conscious, heroic blob of pink fairy floss. Wattoo Wattoo, I discovered, is another hero about as unlikely as spun sugar with superpowers. He/she/it looks like a fat, spherical magpie. He comes from a cube-shaped planet and can breed asexually by splitting in two (or more). (And Maxime thinks Doctor Who has an odd sex life!?)

I think Maxime is looking for French cartoons about fat magpies and magic fairy floss because he wants the kids to watch something in French. He’s afraid of them losing the language. I can sympathise with this at least. I used to worry the kids would never learn English when we lived in France, and was frustrated that even cartoons from England and the US were dubbed into French. Even the ‘words’ in the Teletubbies and In the Night Garden were dubbed into French, which increased their absurdity tenfold. I used to imagine the poor Frenchman doing the dubbing. Jacques sitting hunched over his café in front of a mike, cigarette drooping from his lip, attempting to sound enthusiastic about having to say lines like ‘Ooh, Upsy Daisy, regarde, c’est le Ninky-Nonk.’ The French certainly came up with some strange translations too: 

'Want to watch Wee-Wee,' Chloé said one day.

Interesting choice, I thought. ‘Wee-Wee’ turned out to be poor old Noddy (Wee-Wee is spelled ‘Oui-Oui’ i.e. Yes-Yes, i.e., Noddy). Tweety Bird lucked out in translation too and landed ‘Titi’. Ironically, the French fought shy of Winnie the Pooh and preferred to tactfully call him Winnie the Little Bear. 

I tolerated Chloé watching Oui-Oui because it was one of the French-English bilingual cartoons shown on French kids' TV, although it was actually French speakers who said the English words. They mangled the words so badly I wondered if it wasn’t all counterproductive. ‘Furny’ was how they said funny, which is what it wouldn’t be if the kids learnt to speak like that. And I hoped fervently they didn’t all grow up to sound like Dora.

But now we’re in Australia, we have a new problem. An embarrassing one – you never realise until you’re sitting next to a Frenchman how many cartoons we have that send up the French. In the Mr. Men cartoon, Mr. Uppity has a French accent (actually, I personally find this pretty funny). There are also French salt and pepper shaker characters on Sesame Street who make also sorts of nasal sounding French snorting sounds while they talk about ‘ze num-bear nine’. Luckily, the kids seem oblivious to the fact that Sesame Street is taking the mickey out of their accent. And then there’s Pépé Le Pew. When this is dubbed into French for French TV, the French choose not to embrace the Frenchness of a love-drunk, smelly skunk and pretend he’s Italian instead. Instead of l’amour, just like a big pizza pie, it’s amore.

This morning, I decided to ask Maxime what he made of all this:

‘Do you find it offensive how in our cartoons here, there are all these cartoon characters parodying the French?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Maxime. ‘Because it doesn’t sound French to me.’

It just sounded like someone talking a bit strangely, apparently.

‘But what about Pépé Le Pew? You know, Pépé le Putois?’ (As he’s called in French.)

I thought he might really be upset by that one, but somewhat disappointingly, Maxime just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t care.' And he added, typically Frenchly and philosophically, 'Only truth hurts.’

He meant that the French aren’t really smelly, so they don’t care. (Because everyone knows that’s the Italians!)

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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A Testing Wine

On the night we met, I told Maxime I thought French wine was overrated (I based my opinion on a plastic cup of Côtes du Rhône Villages I’d had on the plane from Australia. It tasted more like Coats du Rhône). I think I may also have told him I thought rosés were crap. Since then, of course, he has shown me (extensively) how wrong I was. Which was annoying … but then … from another point of view, rather nice.

And then things got serious. One evening in France, Maxime got out a bottle, which was not unusual. Then he faced the label away from me.

‘Guess,’ he said.

‘Guess what?’

‘What the wine is.’

Oh God.

‘Um …’ I began a stream of consciousness, working my way through grape varieties until arriving at what I thought might be a plausible answer, which was my way of playing for time. I could think of four red grape types: Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Merlot and Pinot Noir. This, I figured, gave me a one in four chance to get it right. ‘Ummm … Shiraz …?’ I said finally.

‘In France, it's Syrah. Syrah and?’

‘And what?’

‘And what other grape?’

‘Oh God, I don’t bloody know.’

‘Viognier.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘How about the region? And the vintage?’

‘What? You’ve got to be kidding!’ I laughed. ‘I’ve got no bloody idea. Look, the dinner’s getting cold.’

‘1996. Côte-Rôtie. North Rhone,’ intoned Maxime.

`

‘1996 Rotty what? Can you really guess those things?’

I was skeptical. I also really hoped we wouldn’t be doing this every evening.

But now, in Australia, it’s revenge time! I’m the one that can guess the shirazes (mind you, I still wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was Heathcote or Yarra Valley). On the other hand, Maxime’s been working very hard to learn about Australian wine. A week after we arrived in Oz, he’d bought himself Jeremy Oliver’s wine guide, The Age Good Food Guide and other essentials and literally spent nights researching, cross-referencing between guides and looking on the net. The morning after a sleepless night, Maxime's notebook was full of notes in illegible handwriting and his head full of names like Clonakilla, Mount Mary, Bindi and Cullen.

‘What on earth are you doing, staying up all night reading about wine?’ I asked him.

‘I wasn’t sleeping anyway,’ he said.

‘Well you certainly won’t sleep if you spend all night looking up wines, that’s for sure.’

Some weeks later, we are at Giant Steps in Healesville for dinner, having done the Sanctuary with the kids. In an excess of folly, Maxime orders a Mount Mary Triolet, carefully hiding the price of it by putting his arm over the wine list. 

He takes his first glass of it, tilts it this way and that, swirls it, inhales, another swirl and finally a sip, which he swishes around in his mouth for what seems an age while I’m waiting on the edge of my seat for the verdict. If he rubbishes one of Australia’s top wines I will bloody well tip it on him. But, mouth still full of wine, Maxime starts to nod his head while waving his free hand around like the Queen.

‘That is wine,’ he says finally.

I must say I find his critique of the wine to be a little on the simple side. But hey, at least Aussie wine has proved itself to one of the world’s most fussy frogs!

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For more on the wine, see https://www.mountmary.com.au/category/estate-wines/triolet/