Paris Natural Wine Guide
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In order to accompany our dining list, we needed to present a Paris drinking guide, which in Paris is entirely devoted to wine. Some of these places entirely deserve to be on the restaurant list too, but all of the places here provide an enviable drinking environment. The body of knowledge here is massive, and this guide can only scratch the surface. But most important to all of this is a tiny restaurant called Le Verre Volé.
Le Verre Volé
I first attended in 2013 when I had no knowledge or interest in wine. I bought a bottle they recommended, then brought the half drunken bottle to a party afterward. I did not know of its vaulted reputation. Since there is no wine list, a lot of what this place can offer is dependent on what you ask for. I suspect many patrons who come here have an experience similar to mine. Its greatness needs to be discovered. It’s ingenious. In late 2016, I was turned away as I did not have a reservation and instead ate a cote de boeuf across the street. It was only in 2017 that I began to appreciate Le Verre Volé. At the start it was hardly about natural wines. The restaurant still acted like a wine shop, as it always has been, selling bottles at a measly 7 euro markup to retail, as it always had. The wine I had was a 1999 Saint Anne Bandol. I was asking for older wine (I squeezed out a few words “vielle” and “terre” in French) as I had recently discovered the beauty of aged wines. This Saint Anne, though a natural wine, is entirely conventional tasting, and has a following outside the natural world.
A defining moment in the Paris natural wine scene was a wine called “Le Trouble Fait” which I had at Pierre Sang on a Sunday lunch (which like Le Verre Volé, is one of the only restaurants open at that time). This wine had the natural wine quality of being eminently chuggable and therefore a prime candidate for solo-brunching. By Apr 2017, natural wines was materially the only wine being drunk in Paris. Over the course of 2017 at Le Verre Volé, I delved into Le Verre Volé’s natural wine list, and had the 2003 Duchene Val Pompo, aged Courault and 2001 La Souterrone. Le Verre Volé was deeply engrained as the ideal natural wine restaurant, with vintages going back and nothing over 100 euros. It was fairly early in this interaction that I met Thomas, who can be seen in a popular video in Munchies. He had laughed that nothing in the cellar is more than 100 euros, when I set that as the price limit. Early 18, I had 1998 Dard and Ribo white, which almost broke that rule. Of course for what it is, it was entirely worth it. At some point in early 2018, Le Verre Volé began printing a wine list. The Dard and Ribo is now on the list for 160 euros (which is still a steal). The 7 euro “droit de boire” went away, and in its stead, a transparent list was presented. That was great because when I went in March of 2018, at the top, there were two versions of Cantillon, selling for 24 euros. In some parts of the world, that could be considered the deal of the century. The only issue with the list at the time was that despite being a tourist, I had drunk most of the aged bottles. At that point, still being a natural wine amateur, I had no idea how deep the list was. Over 2018, and through travels to Tokyo, Montreal and Copenhagen, I became aware of wines that would otherwise be just proper nouns on the list. This time, looking at the list once again, I was amazed. The list has no blanks, and reads like the attendees of an exclusive French natural wine party.
So this restaurant which I first sat down on exchange to eat boudin noir is in fact the natural wine mecca. It’s probably the only example of a restaurant that grew with me, never showing its hand until I was ready. Now I might surmise that I have fully discovered the secrets of this restaurant (and perhaps that is, yet again, wrong). I went to the Tokyo offspring opened by a former employee “Un Jour”. I went to a natural wine bar in Buenos Aires by an ex-employee “Los Divinos”. It seems like Le Verre Volé is the center of the the natural wine world. This one restaurant is a perfect lens to reflect on my interest in wine. Excluded in this story is the second dimension, which has restaurants and experiences that number in orders of magnitude larger across different cities. Together they form the complete picture. If Le Verre Volé, on the Canal St. Martin in the 10th, is the most influential restaurant in natural wine, and now that natural wine is proliferating at a voracious speed, would that make Le Verre Volé one of the most influential restaurants in the world?
Other places like Le Verre Volé
The restaurants like Le Verre Volé appear so frequently in Paris. At times it is hard to tell them apart from one another. The style of food is similar to that of Le Verre Volé - simple and expressive, with a modern twist. Our list includes 14, some of which we recommend mostly for the wine (e.g. Repaire de Cartouche) and others for the food (e.g. Clown Bar at least before the chef left). We also included three higher-flying restaurants (Chateaubriand, Septime, Frenchie) that serve natural wine, and one that serves conventional wine (Tour d’Argent). For wine shops where one can drink we included Vin au Vert for natural wine and Legrand Filles et Fils for conventional. Finally, we recommend three “bars”: Septime le Cave, Cave à Michel and Frenchie Wine Bar.