Boozehound - Jason Wilson [87]
Madinier pointed to a bottle of Delamain from 1840 on his shelves. “We once opened a bottle of this.” He sighed. “Only a few hours later, it was bad.” He let that fact silently sink in for a moment.
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, with a shrug. “Maybe it was the keeping. But at the end of the day, it was bad.” With a chuckle he said, “I guess you have to drink it rapidly. I got to taste some before it went bad.”
“How was it different?” I asked.
“There are so many different flavors. Leather …” Then he just clammed up, as if even trying to put words to the taste would be a kind of heresy. “There are flavors you just can’t find in a younger cognac,” he said.
I stared dumbly at him. I hoped he’d go on. “Really?” I said, not knowing what to say,
“Yes,” he said. “It was … amazing.”
“Well,” I said, “it sounds like maybe it’s impossible to describe?” No response.
“So … would you say that it’s impossible to describe?”
He now looked at me as if I were profoundly stupid. “Yes.” And that was all he said.
This, of course, was nothing new. One way or another, I always feel stupid when I’m in Paris. I have a long history of it.
The first time I had a “legal” drink was in Paris, on the French Club’s trip to France during my senior year of high school. I finagled my way onto the trip: I hadn’t taken French and knew not one word of French, but there were open slots and a girl I really liked named V. was going. Her boyfriend, however, was not. This was my very first trip outside of the United States, and it surprises me how little I recall of the travel itself. Of course, it was mostly a forgettable tour-bus hell. I do remember being given seventeen minutes at the Louvre and then over two hours at a department store called Printemps. But the most significant thing about this trip was that, though we all were eighteen, or younger, our parents had signed permission slips stating that, given France’s more liberal liquor laws, we were allowed to drink alcoholic beverages—hard to believe in this age of extreme sensitivity to legal liability, but things were a little different in the 1980s. Anyway, the idea was that we students would enjoy a moderate amount of wine with dinner, and this would enhance our immersion into French culture. That was the theory.
In practice, here’s what happened: On the morning of our arrival, almost as soon as we checked into our hotel, more than two dozen hormone-crazed teenagers marched to the nearest supermarket, loaded up on beer and vodka, and stashed it in our hotel rooms for later. At dinner that first night, in a bland, overpriced restaurant full of other tour-bus groups, we sipped the obligatory table wine. Then, when our teacher-chaperones suggested some kind of moonlight boat ride on the Seine or whatever, the majority of us did a big pretend yawn—Oh, the jet lag … I think I need to go back to the hotel. Luckily, some of the teetotalers agreed to go with the chaperones. The rest of us made a beeline back to the hotel, where a raging party quickly got underway, and within thirty minutes we had the angry hotel manager shouting threats at us.
Our hotel must have been in the Ninth Arrondissement, because it was only a short walk to the notorious nightclub district of Pigalle.