Drink
A weeping willow bows silently towards the vitreous waters of the Seine. It is too cold for snow. Naked trees - still, frozen - flank the crumbling buildings with their shutters and iron balconies. Elegance seems always to have been there.
But such precision of beauty goes not unpunished. The Parisians may swathe themselves in stylish overcoats and settle down in the Flore with a cafe au lait, an existentialist text and a Gauloises soft-pack, but they still embrace the festival that even the British have grown to regard as the last word in naff. Come the third Thursday in November, Parisians flock the streets in celebration because their local bars and wine-merchants are flooded with Beaujolais Nouveau. Haven't they heard of postmodern cool?
It seems not. The wine producer Georges Du Boeuf, the king of Beaujolais, is responsible for much for the hoo-ha surrounding each year's release of this famous burgundy. But a large proportion of blame can be laid at the feet of the Sunday Times journalist who, in 1972, challenged his readers to be the first to bring a bottle to his desk and sparked the great Beaujolais race - an absurd practice which has died down only in the past few years, subsumed by the predictably 1990s race to drink the new best thing.
My latest love and I, celebrating my quarter-century with a sojourn in Paris, are greatly alarmed by this Gallic enthusiasm. We go to a quiet, classy restaurant one evening, only to find its usual staid decoration transformed with bright, flowery Beaujolais posters. The chandeliers are festooned with enormous bunches of papier mache grapes that dangle dangerously close to my lobster bisque, and there are streamers (I can scarcely believe my eyes) hanging from the ceiling. Beaujolais Nouveau has certainly arrived.
On the Eurostar we did, I confess, eagerly polish off a couple of glasses (Georges Du Boeuf, again) but it slipped down so easily after the champagne. Today, on the Ile de St Louis, mummified in scarves and fur against the bitter cold, we leave the street for the warmth of a tiny restaurant - all dark wood and low, red cushions, with a chef sauteing and fricasseeing with cast-iron pans in the corner.
And there we begin to understand. Today is the first spell of Siberian cold, and how better to celebrate the forgotten harvest and changing season than with a glass - well, a couple of bottles- of the year's first wine? It is lunchtime. There is only one thing to drink with the 88FF set menu of onion soup and poulet provencale. We don't want a warm, heavy claret - the opiate of afternoon drinking - or a chilly, austere white. We want to suck the lifeblood of the Gamy grape only just pressed into the bottle; to fill our glasses with the translucent, scarlet liquid - surprisingly silky though it bridles with youth. It is fruity and clean, and we feel we could drink it all day. So we do.
And this is where the British err in their appreciation of Beaujolais Nouveau. Going to such lengths to extract a bottle from the Continent, one imagines oneself to be possessed of a liquid of divine properties, a veritable nectar. But one is not. First of all, we haven't quite realised that the Beaujolais Villages is superior to plain old Beaujolais. Second, we certainly haven't realised that it does improve as the months go by, so will be much softer by next Easter, possibly even good enough to upgrade to a dinner wine. But mainly, we should appreciate that Beaujolais Nouveau isn't there to be swilled lovingly around a lolling tongue: it's there to be drunk by the bucket - a vin de table - at a cool temperature with a hearty, simple meal.
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