Which would you choose?

   

So, the mid-term break has arrived. Have a guess where I’m going for a few days…

Snapshot: eyebrows

Surely €5 well spent, spotted in Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany…

Spit or swallow?

Earlier this year, BBC television broadcast a light hearted travelogue presented by the wine guru Oz Clarke and the motoring journalist James May. Oz and James’ Big Wine Adventure played a fairly straight game. Clarke (a renowned wine lover and expert) was taking May (a renowed ale drinker) to France in order to educate him about the subtleties and delicacies of French wine. In keeping with the shambolic Englishmen-on-holiday look, they were exploring France in a big old Jag convertible. Predictably, and probably playing up to cameras, both men stood their ground: Clarke attempted to get May to appreciate to gentle flavours and nuances of each wine they tasted, while May did everything he could just to get Clarke to shut up and let him just drink the stuff.

Despite the best of intentions, I felt a lot like James May when I found myself at the Vigneron Indépendant Salon des vins at the Strasbourg Exhibition Centre at the weekend. I lost count of how many independent wine producers were in attendance, but perhaps the photograph above will help you work out just how big it was. The yellow banners hanging from the ceilings mark the five aisles that ran the length of the exhibition centre. This photo is taken half way down the hall, so imagine the same number of exhibitors behind the camera as well. Hundreds upon hundreds of vinyards and producers were representated, normally with two or three people at small stands. Upon entering the salon, your ticket could be exchanged for a wine glass, allowing you to browse the salon and try pretty much anything you fancy.  Just don’t forget to sample the white wines before you move onto the red wines.

With my flatmate Adella, a bewildered couple of hours was spent milling up and down the aisles. It was probably quite obvious to anyone behind the stands that we were a pair of students hopelessly out of our depths. The true wine amateurs were there in full force. They could be spotted by their well thumbed catalogues and notebooks, in which the floorplan of the hall had been doodled on and marked with various symbols to mark particularly notable finds. As they started to make their purchases, little foldable trolleys would appear, and increasingly tall piles of cases would be strapped in.

I introduced myself to a few wine producers, hopelessly banking on being accepted for being inately charming, naïve and hopeless with French culture (Louis Theroux, I turn to you for guidance). The fiercesome complexity of French wine was soon apparent: whereas ‘new world’ wines can be classified by their origin remarkably easily, French wine can be described or classed according to it’s origin or grape, and those two can easily be carefully crafted blends of two more or more varieties. I sampled some sharp Bergerac Blancs, and a really fine Fitou. Sensing that we might not have been the most astute wine tasters in the hall, Adella and I made a bee-line for the free introduction to wine tasting at 15h00. In a small partitioned classroom at one end of the hall, a lively oeneologist was introducing the different parts of the vine and the grape, and the different wine producing regions of France. A tasting followed in which two whites and two reds were compared. They were, of course, two pairs of the most different wines that could be found. Using a nose that was designed (or evolved) for probing wine glasses, our guide taught us how to examine first the colour, then the aroma and finally the taste of the wine. Another Fitou in particular was astonishing: meaty and solid throughout the mouth, but suddenly on fire with spiciness when it found two small patches of my tongue at the back of my mouth.

What impressed me most about observing others who were in the course of the free-for-all dégustations (tasting) was the remarkable ease with which they would be able to swill the wine around their mouths and then, after no more than ten seconds, spit it out. It wasn’t the spitting of perfectly good wine that got me (I can respect that many people visiting this salon would have to drive home after tasting fifty or so wines). I was impressed with the ease with which they neatly projected the wine into the nearest receptacle. I tried several times to master this precise detail of the tasting process (which our diligent specialist had neglected to explain to us) and ended up leaving the exhibition hall with splatters of red wine down the front of my jumper. I’m going to just stick to swallowing from now on…

Les Français fument, quoi?

After my emotional rediscovery of UHT milk, my first two weeks in Strasbourg have been peppered with occasional flashbacks to childhood memories of France and French culture. I can distinctly remember the first time my mother suggested I pick up an Asterix cartoon book. I suspect I replied with a disinterested grunt that might be expected of someone that age, but I did in fact become a dedicated Asterix fan, collecting every comic book published by Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny (shying away from those that were written and drawn by Uderzo after the death of Goscinny). Most of my Asterix volumes were translated into English, although a handful that were acquired on trips to Europe were in other languages: French being the most common and Slovene being the most unusual language.

In Asterix in Britain, the pint sized hero and his lumbering but super strong sidekick Obelix travel to Britain, and get involved in all sorts of capers, including a rugby match. Numerous jokes and one liners are made at the expense of the poor Brits, who are lampooned by the cartoonists in the same loving way that we mock the French. Whether it was a foible of the translation or a genuine running gag, in the English version most sentences from the British characters are suffixed with the rhetorical yet inquisitive “…what?” (e.g. “I think I might have a drop of tea, what?”) I must have found this observation of this supposedly British trait quite bizarre at the time, since I don’t recall ever meeting an Englishman who ends his sentences in this way.

Coming to Strasbourg, however, I might have discovered an Alsatian trait that translates perfectly. A number of the people I’ve met here, students and staff alike, drizzle their conversations liberally with a rhetorical yet inquisitive “quoi?” (e.g. “C’est pas mal ça, quoi?”).

The loving relationship between the peoples of France and Britain (of mutual respect, distrust and mockery) continues to amuse me. I’m a polite recipient of any jibes and a proud initiator of reciprocal banter. Turning to the opening pages of the British edition of Asterix in Britain, you will find this preface, included by the authors of the book in case any offence might have been taken by British readers:

“As usual, we caricature what we are fond of, and we are fond of the British, in spite of their strange way of putting Nelson on top of their columns instead of Napoleon. However, when it comes to presenting this skit on the British to the British, we feel we owe them a word or two of explanation. Our little cartoon stories do not make fun of the real thing, but the ideas of the real thing that people get into their heads, i.e., clichés.

“We Gauls imagine the British talking in a very refined way, drinking tea at five o’clock and warm beer at the peculiar hours of opening time. The British eat their food boiled, with mint sauce; they are brave, phlegmatic, and always keep a stiff upper lip. Suppose we were British, caricaturing the Gauls, we would say they all wore berets, ate frogs and snails and drank red wine for breakfast. We might add that they all have hopelessly relaxed upper lips, and that phlegm is not their outstanding characteristic. And most of all, we should hope that the Gauls would have as good a sense of humour as the British.”

Goscinny and Uderzo reported that they received no complaints regarding the book.

The headlines tonight…

I’ve been living in my new home, a rented room in a big old Strasbourg apartment, for almost a week and a half now. There’s no television, but there is wireless internet that’s generously shared with me by the neighbours upstairs. Before I moved out here, I clicked around the internet to get up to speed on the current affairs of France, Alsace and Strasbourg. There are plenty of useful websites out there (and even the BBC produces regular television programmes from here) but what is almost more revealing than the actual news that’s being reported is the way in which it is presented. The graphics, sounds and design of television news reporting has interested me for a while now, and moving to a new city and a new country has opened my eyes to some different ways or presenting news on the screen.

And with your internet connection, you can watch these programmes as well. Here are just two newscasts worth watching. Click the links for the most recent broadcast of that programme, and notice just how differently the programmes are presented to what you might be used where you are.

France 3 ‘19 / 20′ France 3 (one of the state-owned channels) produces a hefty volume of regional programming. Click the ‘19 / 20′ logo for the evening news in French, or for something more exotic, scroll down and click on ‘19 / 20 Rund Um’ for the daily news bulletin in the Franco-German language of Alsatian.

M6 ‘Le Six’ - a strikingly presented national newscast without a newsreader or set; the complete opposite of the glitzy North American television news programmes fronted by near-celebrity anchors.

…and if you want to see if you can spot the subtle nuances between French-French and Québec-French, try comparing those programmes with some news clips from the Montréal based TV station TQS (click on a news clip and let the trailer run before the clip loads).