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looked around nervously, waiting to see if
les flics
(the cops) were hiding behind the piled-up
Christmas
bûches de Noël
and seasonal tins of
marrons
. They weren't, but still I felt uneasy
going through the till, even though I explained with the help of Father Christmas why I wasn't
paying for the stationery set.
It's all conspired to make me rather nervous about the place, and certainly if my intention
one day was just to observe people and their purchases in the wine section I really think they'd
ask me to leave. And really, is that the best way to buy wine? Just because a Frenchman likes
it? They're French, they will, all of them, give the impression that they know their stuff; it's
ingrained in the national character and good for them. I have never, in the years I've lived
here, heard a French person admit to lacking in knowledge about wine and they are also
fiercely patriotic about it too. Our local supermarket has until recently only stocked French
wine choosing to ignore that there may even be others; it has now begrudgingly started stock-
ing Lambrini as if to say, 'Look, this is the muck the others are making. Plebs.'
Following a local around the wine department presupposes that that person has good taste
and not everybody has, and they are also sold on this myth themselves. I was in the supermar-
ket one quiet Monday lunchtime, and as usual dressed more for a late-night Central London
mod 'all-nighter' than shopping with farmers, and I noticed that I was being followed. Now
obviously this isn't entirely unusual in the supermarket as they have it in their heads that I am
a rampant shoplifter, but this wasn't an employee, this was a local and I could tell that she
was checking out what wines I was looking at and then picking up the same ones. I played
up to it for a while (and I hope she liked her selection) but really she would have been very
disappointed by my wine-choice criteria.
I was looking for wines with rude names.
Look, what else have I got to go on? Like I said, I don't know about grapes or what was
a good year; rude names are a starting point, that's all. I found a beauty, a red from the
Languedoc-Roussillon region called Seigneur d'Arse, literally the Lord of Arse. I bought a
couple of bottles, thinking that any more would open me up to claims of immaturity, fully
intending to go back for a couple of cases later. Unfortunately, even later that day, they'd sold
out, clearly to some other expat using the same childish wine selection technique as me.
I gave a bottle of Seigneur d'Arse to my friend and fellow comedian Paul Thorne, who is
not only as puerile as I am but also considers himself to be something of a wine aficionado.
Again, I haven't the knowledge to contradict him on this, but it seems his expertise manifests
itself by asking 'What shiraz do you have?' then swilling the stuff around his mouth and de-
claring it to be 'metallic'.
Paul came out to stay while Natalie and the boys were away in England and the idea was
to do a fair bit of wine-tasting - unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan. Like the rest of
France I was under the weather as, according to the newspapers, we were in the grip of a gast-
ric flu epidemic; Paul was walking into a germ factory and it didn't take long for the symp-
