The joys of vining and dining
A brief history of my wine & gastronomic adventures
This piece steps outside the confines of Paris and the Île-de-France to reflect my broader experience in the vineyards and culinary meccas of France. So before we get any further, I invite you to join me to expand your viticultural horizons by booking a regional wine tour:
Or contact me (geoffrey@tastings.fr) to have us organise your personalised, tailor-made wine and gastronomic tour with exclusive entrances to some of the greatest wineries in the world!
My life in France, which now exceeds by many years the time I spent where I grew up in Canada, has been entirely unplanned. I had never intended to live in France, and certainly never thought I’d spend the better part of my life here. But one thing lead to another and every time I thought I’d leave, which happened more than once, something came up to keep me here.
Do I regret having spent most of my life in France? Not in the least! By many people’s standards I have lived a dream life, travelling the most beautiful country in the world, tasting the immense diversity of its wine production, and discovering the heady extent of its culinary genius.
So, in a slightly nostalgic vein, I thought it might be fun to review some of the wine & gastronomic tours I’ve created, prepared, guided, and lived, in part too to encourage any of you out there who might want to partake of this vast experience, to contact me and let me put together the wine tour of your dreams.
After my first year in France working on an organic vineyard in the Côte de Castillon eleven kilometres from Saint-Emilion, and then selling wine in Bath in the UK, I came back to France and spent three years working as a hotel-barge captain in Burgundy with a side in hot-air ballooning, obtaining both a class 1 inland waterways pilot’s certificate, and a bus driving license along the way. After this in-depth initiation into ‘la France profonde’ I began leading luxury cycling tours around Europe and working as a freelance guide and chauffeur for small-group themed tours that involved private chateaux, exquisite gardens, tapestry tours, oyster tours, art, culture, and the endless beauty of the French countryside, all of which included wine and gastronomy. Primed by these diverse and enriching experiences, I started my own travel business in 1987, focussing very specifically on wine and food.
The first big tour I ever did was with 40 Australians and extended over 3 weeks. It included four 3-star Michelin-rated restaurants and at least twice as many 1 and 2-star. Regrettably, I have no pictures to share with you as cameras hadn’t yet been invented. At least not the ones we carry around with us in our pockets, that sometimes also work as telephones…
The tour began in Germany and continued on through Alsace, Champagne, Burgundy, and the Loire, ending in Paris. Breakfast, vineyard visit & wine tasting, lunch, vineyard visit & wine tasting, and gastronomic dinner every single day, with visits to chocolate makers, bakers, cheese shops, and local markets also squeezed in here and there. It was a fabulous experience that ended with a dinner at Jamin, Joel Robuchon’s first restaurant. I thought that we would all be too sated to enjoy it, but Robuchon woke us up like no one else could, bringing all of us to an animated, euphoric state of sheer pleasure. So much so, that I simply walked up to him at the end and gave him a hug. No words could convey the sense of well-being and joy he had given us and so a hug seemed like the only option.
That scale of travel, though fun and deeply engaging, was of course exhausting and rather conspicuous. We still manage large groups for wine tastings and walks in Paris, but divide them into smaller groups to maintain personalised service.
Since that auspicious beginning I have travelled the length and breadth of the country and observed the transformation of the wine industry (and the food industry) from being proudly unapologetic about industrial practices, to the gradual embrace and adoption of organic and biodynamic approaches. When I made ‘In Vino Veritas’ in 2008, biodynamic agriculture was marginal, considered weird, and entirely misunderstood. It is now mainstream. Which is heartening as it suggests that there might yet be hope for the planet…
But that’s another subject. There are far too many stories to tell in this brief missive, and I now realise that this might not be one, but two, or even three pieces, and that, keeping only to the highlights. As time is at best an illusion, I won’t include dates or years (mostly because I’m very bad at keeping track of details of that sort, and it would require looking things up on old hard-drives, or in places I’ve forgotten). So here’s one more.
Another Australian group (only 13 participants), escorted by Mietta O’Donnell began in Lyon with an exclusive visit with Alain Chapel to the three main city food markets. The afternoon and evening before our visit, which was scheduled for 9am, I called his restaurant repeatedly to have confirmation that he would be there. Every time I called, I was given the same answer - Monsieur Chapel could not take my call. As the evening wore on, I began to panic as the beginning of our tour seemed to be heading towards disaster. Finally, around midnight, and insisting that the person responding to my calls explain what was going on, I was informed that Monsieur Chapel was not there, that he had most likely forgotten about our rendezvous, and would not be home that evening until the wee hours. She agreed to give me his personal telephone number but demanded that whatever I do, not to let him know how I got it, because she correctly anticipated his fury.
Every year he would celebrate the end of the grape harvest chez Marcel Lapierre in Beaujolais with friends by cooking a fabulous feast, transported no doubt by the moment and the joys of ‘ivresse’. Suffice to say when I called at 7am he was not happy and so I repeated, ‘Mietta, Mietta, Mietta, Mietta…’ over and over again until he clicked, apologised for yelling at me, and telling me he would be there.
Chapel had spent 2 months working in Mietta’s restaurant in Melbourne and so the connection there was very strong. After trying to maintain pace with him and share what he was saying, he and Mietta and her partner would carry on to the next market in his white Mercedes, while I tried to follow in a bus.
The visit was the most frenetic whirlwind tour of any market I’ve ever had, and as it was impossible for me to translate and for everyone to keep up, I gave up trying and would summarise once we were back in our bus. This was repeated over the three markets and so proved to be both exhilarating, and exhausting. Many of the people he would buy from in the market were not farmers, but hunter gatherers - people who would pick fruit from trees that were abandoned, or bring wild game to the back door of his restaurant. One of the things I’ll never forget Chapel saying was that were the tax people to ever control any of this, French gastronomy would be lost.
The main course for the fabulous dinner that evening in his three-star Michelin restaurant was quail (brought in through the back door), from which we bemusedly extracted countless pieces of buckshot… One of the other things he told me was that he would never, ever do a market tour again. He was true to his word, as he tragically died six months later.
Some time later, I was travelling for “La Vie de Château’ (an agency I helped develop that featured bed & breakfast in private castles in Europe) in New Zealand and Australia with the French Government Tourist Agency, and spent three days in Melbourne. I was invited to a surprise dinner at Mietta’s restaurant, held in my honour, that was attended by eight of the thirteen participants I had hosted on the tour with Alain Chapel, some of whom had flown across the country to attend. Mietta pulled out all the stops, beautifully recreating some of Alain Chapel’s dishes, and featuring many of the wines we had tasted during the tour. As Oscar Wilde said, “life imitates art far more often than art imitates life”, and rarely does it get better than that.
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My book, ‘The Hidden Vineyards of Paris’ (reviewed in Jancis Robinson’s wine blog, the Wine Economist, National Geographic Traveler UK, UK Telegraph) is available for purchase via our website and at anglophone bookshops and wine shops in Paris. You can also find it at the Musée de Montmartre and the Librairie Gourmande.
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