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....

Why Frogs Love Frogs' Legs

A few years ago, my French husband Maxime and I went on holiday in the Dombes region of France, in the Ain. 

On the second day of the trip, we were driving to the restaurant Maxime had selected for lunch when Maxime announced, 'This is a gastronomic region!' and his eyes gleamed.

I looked at him, puzzled. 'I thought all of France was a gastronomic region.'

'No!' he said. 'The only true gastronomic regions are Alsace [of course, Alsace is Maxime’s home region], around Lyon [i.e., where we currently were] and the South West.'

‘What about Paris?’

‘Pffff!’ Maxime pffffed.

‘And what about all those I dunno, cheeses in the north of France, and Normandy's Isère butter and Champagne’s…um, champagne and – '

‘No no. In true gastronomic regions, the food and wine are accessible, affordable - enjoyed by everyone – it’s democratic food.’

I thought about this for a while. 'OK ... so what’s this wonderful gastronomic region were in now famous for, then?'

'Frogs.'

'Oh.' 

I felt a little crestfallen. Not truffles or brie then. Not even something edible.

Maxime explained that the whole region was full of man-made ponds, and was hence famous for frogs' legs. The Dombes was frog central.

‘Well, quite frankly, I don’t think I’ll mind if the Dombes people don’t want to democratically share their frogs with me.’

But Maxime said, ‘I can’t wait to eat some!’ and his eyes shone even brighter.

He was getting inordinately excited about frogs' legs, I thought. But it can be amazing what foodstuffs can rouse the passions of Europeans. They don’t just celebrate the births and ressurections of deities but also hold fetes where they can worship snails, asparagus and particular varieties of onion.

'But there’s so little meat on frogs,' I said. 'I mean why do you bother? Why not just eat chicken?'

'Because frogs' legs are thin,' Maxime said. 'When you fry them, you get this caramelised juice that you get at the surface of a chicken wing. It’s like the chicken wing surface without any of the boring stuff underneath.'

'Hmm,' I said, unconvinced.

At lunch, of course, Maxime ordered legs. I had actually seen frogs' legs before, at a gastronomic restaurant in Alsace. In that case, people were served a little leg with sauce. You could have almost pretended it was little bit of quail or something, and that’s what I was expecting Maxime would be served now. But what the waiter brought out to us was a metal platter piled high with stiff-looking V shapes. I leaned forward for a closer look. And then I recoiled with a cry. The V shapes were whole cut-in-half frogs.

'Oh, that’s appalling!' I exclaimed, trying and failing to not imagine someone cutting all the little frogs in half. 'You can’t eat those! They’re too … froggy looking.'

Not to mention the fact that in this case, Maxime'd be eating not just the legs but the frog’s rude bits too.

No amount of caramelisation could lull me into forgetting that I was eating a demi-frog, but Maxime just said ‘mmmm’.

And it wasn’t just Maxime who loved frogs' legs. An Alsatian friend of mine who liked to educate me in the culinary ways of Alsace talked once of the fabulousness of frogs’ legs:

'They're delicious,' Patrice said. 'Although in my Grandma’s day, the legs were better.'

‘They were more shapely back then?’ I smiled.

‘No, no!’ said Patrice, serious because it was a serious topic. ‘They were smaller - more concentrated in flavour.'

I was doubtful that strong frog flavour was a good thing, just quietly. But if you ever find yourself in a suitably ‘democratic’ region of France, you can judge for yourself.

Why DO the French Eat Snails?

‘Did you know Daddy eats snails?’ one of our daughters asked another the other day. ‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Does he eat spiders too?’ asked Elise.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘Good question,' I said. 'I don’t know.’

I mean, if my French husband Maxime eats something as unappetising (and slimy) as a snail, then why stop there? Why not ingest arachnids and suck on slugs? And so I put the matter to him.

‘Spiders have no meat,’ explained Maxime. ‘Snails are a lean meat with a nice texture.’

‘I think the snails are just a nice excuse to have garlic butter. But why not put the garlic butter on something nice, like chicken?’

‘Non!’ exclaimed Maxime, getting surprisingly agitated. ‘The combination of chicken with garlic sauce would be AWFUL! They don’t compliment one another. You need the snail texture.’

The combination of the snail-y texture with garlic sauce. Quite frankly, the thought of snail texture makes me gag. Mind you, I have eaten snails. The first time was in an Alsatian winstub (a 'wine pub', serving rustic local fare). I’d been dismayed to find the snails were served still in their shells. (It’s one reason I avoid crustaceans – I hate having to dismember something in order to eat it.) Maxime had then shown me how to hold the snail shell with the special snail tongs and prise it out with the special snail-gouging fork (and although it involved no dismembering, I still found the process quite disturbing). As I forced myself to chew the freshly shucked snail, I enjoyed the warm garlic butter sauce but I didn’t have the impression the snail added anything to the experience and more than a piece of rubber would have.

‘Snail has quite a subtle taste,’ Maxime had said, chewing with pleasure, a far-away look in his eyes.

‘Like dirt,’ I said, spoiling the moment somewhat.

‘No!’ Maxime replied, forced yet again to defend his national cuisine against my barbaric cluelessness. 

He raised his hands as if about to expound upon the loveliness of snail, but then let them fall in defeat. I was a hopeless case. (But it did taste like dirt.) I allowed Maxime to finish my snails while I concentrated on the wine he had chosen for the meal: a Riesling. He'd explained you need to pair snails with a dry wine. I imagine it was dry to counterbalance the sliminess.

Then I wondered how people ever came to eat snail. I wondered if during some sort of medieval wartime, the French began to eat them to avoid starvation. They’d sometimes been driven to eat rat in wartime, I knew. But then for some reason in time of peace, they continue to enjoy snails but shun fricassee of rat.

Actually, I read that the French have been eating snails at least since Roman times – as the Romans did too, apparently. Indeed, Maxime and I ate snails on holiday in Rome (I gave them a second chance – it was a two-Michelin-star restaurant. I'd wondered if two star snails would do it for me. Nup. Still tasted like dirt. Expensive dirt in this case.).

I had no more contact with snails after that until another holiday a few years later, this time in Burgundy. We had kids by this time and our five-year-old Chloé had come upon a snail on the hotel terrace. She ‘rescued’ it, putting it in a glass full of ice. I didn’t view being put in an ice bath as being rescued personally, but I left Chloé to it.

‘What are you rescuing the snail from?’ I asked her.

‘From the hunters!’ she replied.

‘Snail hunters? People don’t hunt snail.’ They sort of don't require chasing.

On the other hand, I reflected, maybe people gather them, as they gather mushrooms and things. Maybe that’s a sort of hunting? I decided it was best to keep this upsetting idea from Chloé, the small defender of snail rights. And things went well until lunch the next day when Maxime ordered half a dozen snails as an entrée.

‘Maxime, what are you doing?’ I hissed at him. ‘You know Chloé is attached to snails at the moment!’

What would Chloé do when she saw Papa dining on murdered molluscs?

The answer, to my relief, was nothing. Chloé apparently didn’t connect the need to hunt with the fact that Papa was eating something. Similarly, she’d been terribly upset to find out that her grandfather hunted deer, but didn’t react to people eating venison stew, as we did a lot in autumn in Alsace.

Venison – now there’s an improvement on snail. But as for the French, they eat snail because they really actually like it. There's also the French attraction to frogs' legs - another highly emotive issue. I'll deal with that next time!

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.

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.

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.

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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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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Hollande Causes an Upset

It appears Président Hollande has grand plans for merging regions, such as Alsace with Lorraine (and Champagne-Ardennes too perhaps).

'Alsace has nothing in common with Lorraine!' My French husband Maxime cried when he heard. 'Hollande is trying to destroy our culture!'

This is all salt in a longstanding wound for Maxime: the rest of France seems not to understand Alsace very well, from what he says, and nothing is apt to drive him out of his tree so much as when French politicians lump Alsace together with Lorraine. 

'It's because the politicians don't know their history. They think the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine!' Maxime will shout (referring to the German occupation of 1870-1914). 'It was Alsace-Moselle that was occupied, not Lorraine!'

The first time Maxime shouted this, I rather cluelessly said, 'Isn’t Moselle in Germany?'

(And he still married me despite this!)

'Moselle is a département of Lorraine. But the rest of the Lorraine was not occupied,’ he explained.

To be honest, (which I luckily wasn’t), as an Australian, I was still coming to terms with the fact that Lorraine was a place and not just a quiche.You would think that the Moselle was a purely French river from the way Maxime spoke of it. I subsequently rushed to Wikipedia just to check that The Moselle River flows into Germany too. It does, of course, and many fine Rieslings are made there, but for the sake of domestic harmony we try not to mention this.

And what is worse about this whole merging of regions is that Maxime suspects Hollande of wanting to copy the Germans. Like many Alsatians, Maxime is rather sensitive about the German thing: the history of the Alsace is perhaps best summed up in the joke by the Alsatian cartoonist Tomi Ungerer:

Q. Why is Alsace like a toilet?

          

A. It’s always occupied.

The history of the region is often sad. Alsace was decimated during the thirty years war, and in 1870, it was the Prussians’ turn to invade. They didn’t quite see themselves as invading though. On entering Alsace, they assumed they would be welcomed as liberators by their 'German' brothers. The Alsatians unfortunately didn’t share this point of view:  the people of Alsace may not have been French for long (since Louis XIV or Napoleon’s time depending on the town), but they weren’t German either. They were Alsatian, having previously been largely independent as part of the loosely bound hotch potch that was the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans kept at it and forbade the speaking of French, and forced the Alsatians to fight as Germans in the wars. These soldiers were called the ‘malgré nous’, fighting the Allies ‘despite ourselves’, since it was made clear to them that their family back home would suffer if they did not comply.

So you can imagine how incensed Maxime gets when the French, even worse than lumping Alsace in with Lorraine, lump them in with Germany! 

The French misunderstanding of Alsace was illustrated to me by a Vietnamese lady we met when we were living in France, who told us how she’d come to Paris as a refugee. Trouble was, she didn’t warm to Paris. Being from the country, she wanted to seek out a more pastoral corner of France, and putting her finger randomly on a map of France, she hit Colmar, capital of Southern Alsace.

'Oh la la!'  the Parisians had cried, 'you can’t go there! They don’t speak French!'

'That’s OK,' she replied, 'neither do I!'

                                                                              

A couple of weeks later, she got off the train to find she had debunked a Parisian myth - the Alsatians all addressed her in French. Oops. 

Perhaps it's best not to ask Hollande what language he thinks they speak in Alsace while Maxime is in earshot - just in case!