Salon Des Vins

This past week-end was also the event of the Salon des Vins, or the wine exposition in Strasbourg. Picture this in your mind: You have a convention hall with over 600 booths. Each booth has one winemaker with 5 to 10 varieties of wine. Do the math. That means there are 3000 to 6000 different types of wine. Every region of France is represented. Champagne, Burgundy, Bourdeaux, Rhone, etc.. On top of this, you have distilled liquors such as schnapps, and armagnac, and cognac.

Now, picture this: To enter, you fill out a little slip of paper. No money, just a little slip of paper with your address on it. (This is so they can send you a little slip of paper next year.) For this, they give you a wine glass. (Glass, not plastic) With this wine glass, you can taste any one of the 3000 to 6000 different wines that are represented in the exposition. You just walk up with your glass and say "I'd like to taste your 1996 Monbazillac". And they pour you some. You can talk about the grapes and the sun and the soil and the weather in 1996. If you want to, you can buy. But if you don't want to buy, you just say "merci" and head to the next booth.

Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

Chris and Jill Hagan kindly gave me the all-important little slip of paper that gets you in the door. When I was going in on Sunday evening, they were coming out for the final trip to load up their car. On their faces was the look of rapture.

This is an annual event in Strasbourg. A lot of people evidently come here to stock their wine-cellars for the year. It is not uncommon to see people pushing carts through the convention hall with 10 to 20 cases stacked on them.

Also, a serious wine-lover would come with a strategy. You would go to the official web-site and research your favorite vintners to generate your own personal map. This is so you can maximize your effort and spend time only at those vinters that interest you.

Of course, a non-serious wine drinker would just show up and start sampling. This is a big mistake. Even if you only take a sip from each booth, you would be absolutely hammered before you finished one of the aisles. You'd be falling-down-drunk.

Each booth has a little black bucket in front of it for a reason. This is so you can spit your sample after tasting - rather than swallow it. Picture a convention hall with 20,000 people spitting into buckets. The more polished wine drinkers actually look elegant when they spit. Hard to believe, but true. The less polished folks spit like they are chewing tobacco for the first time.

The picture above is the listing of participating vintners. Just to prove there's no hyperbole here you can judge for yourself. Essentially, you see that to list them all it takes three sheets of plywood filled with really small lettering. And these are only a handful of the "independent" wine producers in France. It boggles the mind to think of how many more there are out there.