Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: So Many Wines, So Little Time

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Crossposted at the HuffPost.com.  Comments not included here.

By guest columnist Blair Graves, who is known in some circles as The Cheese Princess. She likes to drink wine, too.

Note from Beth Arnold: I may live in France and so drink French wines, but my daughter Blair, who lives in San Francisco, has the palate of note in the family. She's one of those people with super taste buds and a super sense of smell, which I put to good use when we're together. (You may have read, last year in The Huffington Post about the mother-daughter trip we took in March 2009 up the coast of northern California, which included the sharing of some delicious wines.) Wine tasting and drinking with Blair in her adopted state inevitably grows my appreciation for California vineyards. And the French are wild about San Francisco and northern California, where the food and wine culture in the U.S. most resembles France. So when Blair signed up for this stellar wine event in San Francisco, I asked her to please write us a dispatch. Let's sell more California wines to the French! Here's her report:

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On February 20th, at Fort Mason in San Francisco, the winners of the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition were opened to a public tasting. This was the culmination of more than a week of hard work by 63 judges, who had evaluated almost 5,000 wines during the closed competition at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. The categories were broken down by varietal (or blend) with several price points in each category as subcategories. One hundred wines in each category were awarded Best In Show. Add in Gold, Silver and Bronze for each category and you had hundreds of winning wines.

Prior to the Fort Mason event the San Francisco Chronicle ran a list of the Best In Show, and there was also a website that listed all the medal winners. Thinking about all those wines and the crowds (6000 people supposedly) milling in to taste them in such a short amount of time (2-5 pm) made me feel really overwhelmed, so I spent some time coming up with a tasting strategy. My plan was to skip only but the highest price point Chardonnay (since I don't love most Chardonnays here) and the dessert wines. The plan was to taste the low, a medium and a high point in each category if I could. I was not going to allow myself to taste any wine that I'd had before no matter how much I loved it, and I was not going to taste any wine that I see around a lot.

Letter From Paris: Cafe Verlet and The Exquisite Fortune Teller

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It started when I got the email from My Little Paris:

Fortune telling. I guess we would all try it if it weren't for the fear of entering a shabby shack in the middle of nowhere and the prospect of facing a turban-hatted gourou with clinky rings. What if you could have your future (and fortune) told in a chic and respectful venue in the heart of Paris ? It's happening right now at Café Verlet, rue Saint-Honoré, a few blocks from Hermès. 

Well, My Little Paris doesn't know me.  I have happily been to plenty of psychics, healers, and other sensory advanced and aware individuals, in the city and in the country, which some would call the middle of nowhere--though none of them wore turbans or clinky rings.  (But wouldn't it be sort of divine if they did?)

Pooh-pooh me if you like, but I look at it like these gifted individuals just have a skill set I don't have.  They left channels open that I closed, or they received expanded perception through some energy blast that cracked through panes of space and time. 

So I called up my home boys, stylist James Leland Day (more about him in a future blog) and artist Theo Edmonds (whom you've read about here), and we met up at the good Café Verlet.

It was in my old neighborhood.  I'd walked by it a million times.  How had I missed it?

Letter From Paris: On Location--At Versailles

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I know...I know...Versailles.  Who really wants to go, right?  Once is enough.  That had been my position. 

But since I've lived in France, I've consumed a lot of French history and was totally compelled by the biography of Marie Antoinette that Antonia Fraser penned (and Sofia Coppola spoiled with her frivolous film, including its miscasting--Kirsten Dunst...please.).  So a few years ago, I wanted to see the guillotined queen's pretend village Hameau de la Reine before it was closed again for renovations, and the Lone Wolf and I made a trip out to Versailles.  We were not disappointed.  One could almost see and feel the aristocratic shepherdesses skipping to and fro along the lake by Antoinette's tiny faux village.

A year and a half ago, the Jeff Koons exhibit at Versailles didn't lure me in, though my friends who went sang its praises.  And I must admit I liked the artistic juxtaposition of Koons' work with the Sun King's milieu that I saw in photos.

Gates into Chateau de Versailles (photo by Beth Arnold)

Letter From Paris: The Inevitable Beaujolais Nouveau

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The Lone Wolf and I had the loveliest evening with a herd of our friends at Theo Edmonds' first Paris art opening.  Well-heeled Parisians mingled among Theo's paintings while tasting a bountiful list of wines and champagne.  Other artists were represented, but my eyes were on Theo's work--that is when I wasn't ogling the cool loft space where the show was held. 

How had it slipped my mind that it was Beaujolais Nouveau Day?  I love the festivities!  And this is what we found at our corner wine bar when we traipsed out of the Metro:

It was a party!

Letter From Paris: The Season for Cèpes

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Ten years or so ago, I was entranced with Monet's Table: The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet that lived happily in my kitchen with the other cookbooks that I collected, which lined my white shelves.  This particular book was a favorite because I loved France so.  She  had long since sung her siren call to me, and I had called my Arkansas snort back to her that I was doing the best I could to get there.  (This was before I'd thought of the book that the Lone Wolf could write that did get us here called Chasing Matisse.)  I lingered over the pages in the book and soaked up the beautiful photos of the Monet house and gardens as well as the luscious recipes the Monets served their artist celebrity guests.  Even with the painter's strict schedule, the Monets frequently entertained--at lunch--and were generous hosts and servers of feasts.

So I decided in the middle of May of that year that I would give myself a French fix by throwing a long Monet lunch.  On the record, the lunch was 10 hours long for those who hung in there until the drunken end.  (You can read about it in another book my husband wrote called If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House.)  And by late afternoon on that Sunday (which is a key bit of information since we couldn't buy any liquor), we were out of champagne and, yes, driving to the houses of friends in an enormous chocolate Cadillac to inquire whether they happened to have any cold bottles of bubbly that they could loan us.  It was purely and deliciously glorious.

This magic book of Monet's life and recipes carried me away to the painter's house in Vernon and made me dream of good food and France. One of the recipes that I turned to over and over again was for cèpes. 

Letter From Paris: Falling for Fall

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La Toussaint--All Saints Day--is over.  The luscious golden, orange, violet, and ivory mums I saw sitting in pots at Père Lachaise, being delivered by men and old ladies in vans and being carried in their arms to the lost people they loved, are decorating the homes of the dead and the living in Paris. 

 

Mums are one of Fall's embellishments that make October days seem lush...just before color leaks away in Winter.  For Americans (and Europeans?), mums are one of Nature's signals that it's time to close our windows and cuddle up.  

Letter From Paris: On Location

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We moved from our turquoise nest in the 2nd Arrondissement to our sunny perch in the 20th, because our landlords were moving into the darling apartment they'd rented us for the last 5 years and 3 months.  L. couple is always well-dressed if a trifle bizarre and keen on being fashionable.  So once they knew we'd set a moving date, they brought a contractor over to get an eye view of how he could transform the space into their stylish new rooms--and let's be honest--into something a little more comfortable.

Husband and I fled as fast as our feet would carry us to see Gerard Butler in the movie that is called Ultimate Game here and Gamer in the English-speaking world.  Sometimes, I find it totally satisfying to watch extreme violence on a movie screen.  The perils of moving house had put me in such a frame of mind, and I have to say we both felt the film terribly satisfying. I, perhaps, felt more content about how hot Gerard Butler was than husband.  (Ladies and gay friends, I've included his photo here for us.)

After the movie let out, we scooted home and unluckily found the unwanted guests still encamped in our residence.  When we hotfooted it away this time, we treated ourselves to dinner at Olio Pane Vino, an Italian restaurant I'd heard good things about for a year or more. 

Olio Pane Vino

Letter From Paris: What I Miss in Paris

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I lovelovelove living in Paris, but there are some things that I miss from my own country.

What Beth Arnold misses from the USA: 1. Great authentic Mexican food / Tex-Mex / a kick-ass taco and burrito, cheese dip and real homemade tortilla chips to dip it in and fresh Pico de Gallo to put on just about anything. Oh, man! Not to mention a real Margarita that is made with lime juice and Tequila.  Ole!

I couldn't resist this:

                                                                                    ---Beth Arnold

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Letter From Paris: Parisian Bunnyland

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I was actually headed to Galleries Lafayette to hit their gourmet food hall.  For those in the know, Le Bon Marché's sensuous La Grande Epicerie may be the most luxurious grocery in Paris, but I relish the occasional foray to the also lovely Galleries Lafayette.  I'm a sucker to bring home plump dim sum dumplings or some of Eric Kayser's bread (even though I can get it closer to home), Moroccan tagines or Italian Osso Bucco.  I must sit at the Spanish Bar once or twice a year for a lunch of salty Serrano ham with Manchego cheese and a good glass of Rioja.  Yum yum yum...

On this day, I left the metro entrance in front of the Printemps department store and found myself surrounded by Parisian bunnies.  I loved them so!  I was in Parisian Bunnyland. 

Letter From Paris: The Hemingway Bar

When I'm feeling glamorous or want a fashionable drink, I head over to the Hemingway Bar at the legendary Ritz at the Place Vendome.  It's my favorite bar in Paris. 

Intimate and cozy, the Hemingway Bar has been a favorite glam watering hole for decades--yet another that writer Ernest Hemingway anointed with his tipple fairy dust.  And in the Hemingway tradition, not for sissies.  The drinks are 30 euros.  But it's a little indulgence when high cocktails are called for--and sooner or later this is definitely the case, even if one is in wine country.

 Hemingway Bar at the Ritz with Ernest Presiding