1,000 Bottles of Wine On the Wall

Before too much time has passed, I did want to tell you about France's largest wine show, which Joey and I attended a few weeks ago. It is held in the Paris convention center, a complex of 7 or 8 buildings on the southwestern edge of town. Each of these buildings is as big as the Javits Center in New York, so the whole thing is just mindblowing.

The wine show used only one of the buildings, but even that was enough. It is a show for independent vintners -- no corporate wineries, like Lafite-Rothschild or Louis Jadot, are allowed -- and they filled the entire thing with about 1,000 different wineries, each offering tastes to the public. Admission to the whole thing costs just 6 euros:


Each white cardboard circle that you see in this picture represents a winery. The bottom part of the sign is color-coded for the region of France the wine comes from. Typically each of these booths offers tastes of between 4 and 8 wines.

Even if you spit them all out, you can't taste more than a small fraction of the wines on offer -- you'll get drunk just from the fumes you absorb through your tongue! So you have to have a plan, which in our case was to mainly to search out wines from the most prestigious parts of Burgundy.

Unfortunately, our plan didn't allow for either writing down the names of the ones we liked or buying any on the spot (we were heading from here directly to the train for our weekend trip to Burgundy). Most of the French people at the show had brought folding hand trucks so they could buy these wines by the case to restock their cellar. We will be kicking ourselves -- and the Homeland Security department; even if we could buy them, how would we get them home? -- for years that we were unable to do the same.