RIP House Wine

[A lament, context explained below, to be sung to the tune of Don McLean’s “American Pie”]
Bye, bye, our beloved house wine
I dragged my suitcase to the wine place
But ‘twas gone, I yelled “Fie!”
Seems a euro doesn’t buy what it did at one time
At least our livers are breathing a sigh
Our livers are breathing a sigh…


Far be it from anyone to suggest that Sara and I are anything but goal-oriented. Soon after our arrival in Paris, we focused with a white-hot laser intensity and thoughtful, rigorous process on our number one priority. Not finding Sara a job, not getting us health insurance, and lord knows, not getting our phone hooked up.

Our real first goal—locating and selecting a wine that we both enjoyed and could afford to drink on a daily basis despite our limited budget.

I was our designated wine buyer, and I would return from frequent trips to the local Franprix market with a selection of red wines chosen mainly based on price. After a couple less-than-successful sorties, Sara suggested that my two euro ($2.70) price ceiling was a failure, and that in the future, I should plan on staying about three euros ($4.05).

On my next trip, I dutifully bought two bottles in the new price range, but I also mischievously bought a 1.8 euro ($2.35) bottle of a variety of wine (Saint Chinian) we’d previously enjoyed, but closer to the three euro price point. If I had a better poker face, I would have tried to pass the 1.8 euro bottle off as a three euro bottle. But instead, I just explained my rationale to Sara: “We like the three euro Saint Chinian, maybe we’ll like the 1.8 euro kind…)

The rest is history (figuratively), until sadly this week the rest was history (literally). The 1.8 euro Saint Chinian (and later the same winery’s Corbieres wine) became what Sara and I called “the House Wine,” imbibed daily with our solo meals and shared liberally with dinner guests. Even French dinner guests were impressed by the quality of the wine and its low price point. (The attached photo from months back was meant to show the chaos of laundry day but instead additionally captured an impromptu shot of a house wine bottle at dead center, demonstrating its ubiquity…)

Subsequently, we found the House Wine at Leader Price, a mini-Shoppers’ Food Warehouse-type store for just 1.25 euros. Given that this year we have plenty of free time but not much spare cash, it became a roughly monthly ritual for me to drag my wheeled carry-on suitcase the fifteen minutes to this store, load up with a dozen or so bottles of House Wine, then drag it home and we’d be stocked for a month.

After a couple of months of doing this, in a disconcerting portent, Sara and I noticed that the House Wine had disappeared from the shelves of the nearby Franprix market (where the House Wine was first discovered). We hoped for the best, but when I arrived at Leader Price for this month’s pilgrimage, the House Wine was gone.
Given the thousands of French wine producers, the dozens of wines they each produce, and the fact that production changes each year, it’s not that surprising that this wine seemingly vanished. It’s almost more surprising that we were able to keep finding it for nearly five months.

But the House Wine didn’t die in vain. We have since found out that Saint Chinian, Corbieres, and the other wines of Southwest France are currently some of the best values on the wine market. Known for decades as producing high quantities of low quality wine, the Southwest is now straightening up its act and trying to win back its good name. We learned this “back story” to our House Wine at a wine tasting class, and have since put it to work in buying good but inexpensive bottles of wine at the store and in restaurants. Our discovery was reinforced when, in a recent radio interview (http://www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-info/chroniques/expat/index.php?chro_diff_id=295000112&m=3), Bernard Portet, a French winemaker who was one of the first to see the potential of the Napa Valley in the 1960s, said, “The Languedoc [a southwestern French region] is the California of tomorrow.”

We can’t buy our exact bottle of House Wine any more, but what it taught us was how to pick similar wines from the same region that provide us with the same price/quality benefit of our old friend.

Whenever a French king would die, it would be proclaimed “Le roi est mort; vive le roi!” (The king is dead; long live the king!). This meant that the death of the one king triggered the debut of the reign of his successor, and that both were worth commemorating. So, all I can say now is “The House Wine is dead; long live the House Wine!” The King is dead, but we know where the royal family lives…