Written with Giorgio de Maria Fun Wines
Last week the rumbling began. As the ancient, battered tractors ambled their way down the highway the dissent also snuck its way into conversations at every bar, over every pastis. They fanned out around Paris (and indeed Marseille, Lyon and many other cities of France, Germany, Belgium and beyond), and with “military precision” organised shifts for the farmers - spit-roasting sanglier, drinking red wine, sleeping in giant hay beds - all the while protesting their right to make a living.
They’re calling it operation “Siège de Paris”, evoking previous efforts of the infamous (Atilla the Hun, the Vikings, Jeanne d’Arc, Henri IV all laid siege to Paris at one point or another). And yet the French have a very romantic view of their paysans - a word that literally translates to peasants but is probably more closely tied to paysage (landscape). It is estimated only 1-2% of the population are working paysans, however the French are very keen to assure you their father or grandfather was a paysan. It is true that industrialisation came late and proceeded slowly in France, but the number of active paysans has diminished rapidly these past decades.
This is not their first rodeo. That connection to the land is a great sense of national pride and the affection for the paysans has been seen in the warm reaction of the public this past week, but also of the politicians: less of the water cannons we see for those pesky environmentalists and more politicians stopping by to boire un canon.
For once I don’t feel like this is just the French putting up a protest for the sport. The issues are complex, serious and timely: a growing gap between the price paid at the farm gate and the price demanded at the supermarket; the pressures of rising inflation and the war in Ukraine, leading to reduced ag subsidies; all the while ratcheting up demands on these paysans to make changes to meet quite lofty (and important) climate goals. Add in the EU’s desire to keep borders open, thus flooding the local market with products that are not necessarily required to comply to the same environmental standards (hello Spain) and voila, a beautiful melange of antique tractors rumbling down the freeway.
The world is paying attention, shining a spotlight on our broken agricultural systems. The rising global temperature and increased natural disasters are brightening that spotlight. Changes need to be made and maybe ag is a good place to start?
Economies of scale have been the enemy of clean farming. Many farmers find themselves on a treadmill – more chickens for smaller profits, more fertiliser to get the same yields, more antibiotics to protect against new disease. Making a living is not easy, income is low even if capital may be high (cue the temptation to sell up and sell out). Throw in unpredictable seasons and exacerbated natural disasters and you have this cataclysm (high farmer suicide a horrid testament to this).
Changes need to be made, but I don’t think it’s as simple as demanding an immediate return to organics. The soil is dead. It is going to take years of tiny yields, labour, unprofitable crop rotation, healthy inputs etc to build up life in those soils again. It is work that has to be done – for the land, for biodiversity, for our health – and in many ways we are all complicit in the problems. We will need to be part of the solution.
Solidarity and support, patience and empathy. These paysans are not the enemy, even if their farming does not yet conform to our ideals. (It’s important to keep in mind that their great-grand-parents’ probably did. This is but a 70/80-odd year glitch of hectic fertiliser, antibiotic and pesticide use. A blip, if we help support those that are willing in the transition back.)
Now, more than ever, eating is a political act, but I’m not so sure about throwing soup on the Mona Lisa. We need bread for all, and roses too.
Producers:
Holy Goat, Australia’s most influential (and wonderful) cheese makers, have announced the end of their cheese production. When we talk about best practice in land regeneration, animal husbandry and the incredible effects that can have on the flavour and quality, you would be hard-pressed to find a better example than the work of these two women. Their goats’ milk cheeses reflected the seasons and the grasses well before any raw-milk cheeses were allowed to be produced in Australia. They showed us what was possible, even within Australia’s administrative straightjacket. They taught us so much, provided so much joy at the table. They will be sorely missed.
South Australia’s Inkwell Wines are offering a tonne of their A-grade shiraz grapes to handful of winemakers, with the view to hack the future of shiraz. The idea is to see what would happen in the hands of five different early career winemakers, who were all provided the same grapes and the same mission – to make something new and interesting (minimal intervention, of course) with Australia’s most grown grape variety. A judging panel headed up by Mike Bennie will help analyse the results.
Over the weekend winemakers and drinkers converged in the Loire for La Dive Bouteille. ‘Tis the season for the natural wine salons over here, dredging up the traditional discourse as to what should or should not be included. Sylvie Augereau, journalist/author/winemaker/organiser of La Dive, set the cat among the pigeons when she wrote to invitees:
“Merci encore de garder vos cuvées un peu trop barrées à la maison, pour ceux qui croient que les vins vivants c’est forcément déviants… On est vraiment pas là pour alimenter ce discours dangereux. Il y a des intrants qu’on préfère à certains intrus !”
“A reminder to please keep your overtly crazy cuvées at home, for those who believe that natural wines are by nature deviant… We’re not here to fuel this dangerous discourse. There are some additives that are preferable to certain intruders!”
(This is my translation, a bit of a deviation from Aaron’s. It’s a tricky translation/interpretation, but important, as it the words that created the melodrama! NB from Sylivie, the word “additives” was to imply minimal sulfitage and the addition of yeast nutrients during fermentation, while “intruders” was used to take in brettanomyces, mousiness, and spikes in volatile acidity etc.)
Cue winemakers giving up their slot, others talking on the condition of anonymity etc etc. Aaron Ayscough has the full story, which is always a cracker wherever you sit. In fact, I’m quite sure without the constant re-hashing of this philosophical argument they’d all get a little bored.
Restaurants:
Mads Refslund’s new restaurant Ilis was reviewed in The New Yorker by Helen Rosner. It all felt like a bit of a piss take, hard to fault the food, but hard to love it also? “There’s a bit of Noma’s DNA at Ilis, in the audacity of its creative ambition, and the reverence it has for cooking as a form of art. But where Noma, at least in those early years, was all about anchoring the ephemerality of food in concrete notions of place and time, Ilis seems to be committed, body and soul, to abstraction. “Mads loves the idea of using part of an animal as the tool to eat it,” a chef-cum-server said as she laid down a mousse of giant whelk with chive oil and a buttery foam. The mixture had been piped into the whelk’s own shell, and was presented with a spoon whose bowl was made from the whelk’s dried foot. Are there giant whelks swimming around New York? Is there something profound about making a whelk taste, quite pleasingly, like sour-cream-and-onion chips?”
At the other end of the spectrum, one of Australia’s nicest food journos, Max Veenhuizen, has taken the reins for Good Food in WA. His first review gave 15/20 (and a hat) to Big Don’s Smoked Meat – an American barbecue restaurant in a former auto-wreckers opened one day a week. This tiny restaurant vibe is growing in Oz (). A space to watch.
Brico has opened in Melbourne. The restaurant/wine bar is situated in the building that once housed Tansy’s, one of Melbourne’s cult restaurants of the 80s and 90s. This is the kind of place I want to eat. The two couples at the helm (Josh Begbie and Robyn Nethercote along with Phil Bracey and Tegan Ella Hendel) met while working in some of London’s favourites: P.Franco! Bright! Brawn! Simon Ball-Smith, formerly of Public Wine Shop is heading up the kitchen. "We have a similar menu to a lot of the restaurants we would go to around the world, and it’s a representation of [any] one of those wine bars," says Bracey. “We’re not necessarily interested in trying to create wild and new flavours. [Brico] very much sticks to the classics.”
Words:
Are you reading Ruth Reichl’s substack La Briffe? Beautifully written, thought-provoking, rich in historical and cultural context, often delicious. Just this past month there was offal and April (Bloomfield) – both excellent. It’s one of few that religiously get opened here.
Another worth reading, Canadian-born, Jura-residing, winemaker Katie Worobeck wrote about the culture of conviviality at the table in France: “It becomes less about the actual eating and more about the luxury of spending so much time around a table with the same people. The art of hospitality is really about caring for others: accepting them, nurturing them, listening to them. It feels like a uniquely human experience that the sharing of food can be imbued with so much meaning.” It was a simple concept that gave me pause to think – she’s right, why rush away? You can hear Katie in conversation with Aaron Ayscough here, or read some thoughts we penned in our last Il Mensile.
My lovely friend Harriet (and a treasured editor of Recipes for a Lifetime of Beautiful Cooking) has been writing of her experiences in France in A Journal. Recently she wrote a romantic ode to returning home, the perfumes and personalities that are bathed in new light after a year away. I recognised so much in those words.
Finally, I read this passage in Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed the other day. It’s a good reminder of the swings and round-abouts, of the old ideas becoming new ideas:
“Some growers … announce the sale of the wine they drink themselves by hanging a bushel of bay leaves above the door. This is the most direct way of getting a demijohn of unadulterated wine; having nevertheless taken the trouble beforehand to discuss its trustworthiness in the piazza. The surplus grapes of the vineyards in our neighbourhood have in recent years been booked some months ahead by individual buyers who want to make sure of un vino sincere; ‘sincere’ being understood as not watered down or chemically preserved from turning into vinegar … The distinction of the wine receiving such praise is that it was made with good health and conviviality in mind, rather than sales. Its production is not maximised and consequently its preservation and amiability need no deceit. For adulteration always came in the train of overmuch acumen …”
The debate has raged for decades, long live the debate!