Wine bar

I went to the excellent Doisneau exhibit at the le Musée de l’Ancien Évêché with Franck and Chantal after work. Snow and sleet along the way, but preferable to being mired in traffic in a car. I felt a little like a garbage man walking into the museum though -- pulling off layers of waterproofs clothes, including shoe covers and helmet. The museum closed at 6 pm, so we did not have a lot of time to peruse the show, but it was a very nice collection. We all agreed that we wanted to come back. Anyway, there are some real gems in the collection. From there, I followed Franck en velo past our old place on Place Jean Achard, and on to a restaurant called La Verre a Soi, which I LOVED. You pay for a card with a certain amount of money on it, and then can serve yourself from a bank of three wine preserver/dispensers. For someone like me, who appreciates wine, but is not a wine expert, it was a wonderful way to experience the contrast between different wines. Being scientists, Franck and I had some doubts about the precision of the dispensation -- the actual volume dispensed from a 20 mL pour seemed to vary inversely with the value of the bottle. More likely, our expectations were elevated when we switched to something that we knew that we liked like the Meursault. I looked up the company that makes the wine dispensers, which is called Enomatic, and they appear to be all over the place. I encourage you to try one out, as it's pretty fun experience. In my search for more information about them, I was really surprised to find a lot of posts from people that hate them. This quote: "Do you really want to put an Enomatic machine in your restaurant? You know, that romance-killing stainless steel wine cage that spits out three-ounce pours with grace of a soap dispenser?" made me laugh, because I noticed it as well, and that's a fair point! It's worth pointing out that the criticisms she makes are from the perspective of a restaurant manager/owner rather than a customer, but I feel that some of her points seem a bit elitist. We can't all afford to have a pro sommelier expertly pouring perfect glasses of whatever wine we want. And furthermore, the enomatic allows people like me to sample a far greater range of wines at a reasonable price at one time than would otherwise be possible. I have never been to a restaurant that made more than a handful of wines available by the glass, and certainly not at the minimum volume that the enomatic allows (with associated low cost). I'll keep in mind that there is the possibility that the machine is not preserving wines as well as advertised, but this is France! I bet even those 300 euro bottles of Petrus (at 10 euro or so per "soap" squirt) don't take very long to drain.

Anyway, I loved it, and will certainly be going back. The big discovery for me was the Croix de Beaucaillou, 2009. I've never really "grokked" Bordeauxs -- my favorites have always been the Bourgogne, but this one was something really special. I'd love to find a bottle somewhere to bring back to the states. We ended with an award winning Crozes, which was like getting smacked in the face with a board after all the subtlety of the previous wines.