Rogue Vinophile

Yesterday night I got to be a tourist for a second time, this time scaling l'arc de triomphe which has one of the most spectacular views I've ever seen. Unfortunately my camera's battery wasn't charged again so there isn't really any documented evidence, but we got there just as the sun was setting, so we were able to see most of the metropolis switch from daylight to nighttime. The best part, I must say, was watching the eiffel tower light up in the not so distant distance, creating a perfect parisian landscape. There was something picturesque about the whole thing... I felt like I was in some sort of postcard moment, and maybe I was. Who knows?

Today started out in a state of panic. The last few days I thought I was doing alright with the whole jet lag thing, but it turned out that I'm over it now... nice and acclimated. The problem was that I went to bed at a reasonable time (12:30) and set my alarm for a different reasonable time (7:30) but ended up waking up when class starts (9:30), so the morning scramble was a little hectic. I had to make quick decisions as to what to do in the morning while minimizing the impact of the 45 minute commute to class. Needless to say, I got to lecture not disheveled and very noticeably late out of my extremely large class of 5 people. Fortunately the teacher seemed OK with it after I apologized profusely, but my knowledge of the definition of randomness and bernoulli measure suffered significantly.

Afterwards I had a relatively uneventful french class in which we were assigned a significant amount of homework dealing with the explanation of differences between the educational systems of France and the US, but the really interesting part of my day was the wine and cheese tasting that I got to do but wasn't actually supposed to. As it turns out, the wine and cheese tasting for the math and astrophysics kids is tomorrow at 5:00 and I just kind of crashed the other programs' party. It was alright since not a lot of people showed up and there was extra wine/cheese, but I kinda felt bad after I realized that I wasn't actually supposed to be there.

The guy who was hosting the tasting had a strong french accent, and it was clear that he knew about as much english as we knew french, so it was really endearing to hear him explain the differences in wine, most of which I don't remember. Not only that, but both the wine and cheese selections were large and very good (5 of each). It was very cool to see what kind of wine went with what kind of cheese, and to learn the different ways to inspect wine to see if it was good. The first thing you're supposed to do is let it slosh against the side of the glass to see if any residue sticks. The French call this residue the "tears" of the wine, and that's what determines the sweetness. Apparently if there's more sugar, the alcohol binds to it better and creates a thicker wine which will stick to the sides of the glass more readily. The second method of testing is to smell the wine while sloshing it around to let the smell permeate and extrude from the simple sitting wine. This also makes it smell a lot stronger and better than usual. For someone like me, all wines were before this more or less the same. This time, however, there was a significant difference between the wines with just the smell even, which I was surprised to discover. The third and most important method of determining the quality of wine is to take a sip and then slosh it around in your mouth to get the taste out of it. Needless to say, all of the wines were French, and hence very good. I was very impressed and I realized why people drink wine when they want to be classy.

On top of the wine tasting, the guy who was teaching us how to find the quality of wine also owns a wine shop about a block away from the U of C Paris Center, and he said that he'd give us a 10% discount as U of C kids. Needless to say, he made 30 new customers that day and I myself found a new place to buy all my Pinot Noir.

Cheers.

-Pavel