A Guide to Wine Tasting in Paris

There are quite a few options for wine tasting tours in Paris, but what really made our experience unique was the fact that this “tour” felt more like being invited into a relative’s home than being chauffeured around the city streets by a guide.

A Paris native, Catherine, our first host, was as friendly as she is fashionable.

To begin our experience, she graced us with a quick history of the Latin Quarter and, truly, the entire city, combining architectural facts with food recommendations. She lives near the Mouffetard market in the Latin Quarter and within seconds of meeting her, you are able to innately sense her passion for the city.

After satiating your historical needs for the day with a quick walk down Rue Mouffetard, Catherine prepares you for the onus of learning how to properly carry a baguette. No, you do not carry it in one hand, as one would assume, like an uncivilized brute. Like a true Parisian, you must carry it under your armpit, so as to leave your two hands free to hold the prerequisite cheese and wine supplies for the night. If you’re worried about hygiene here, don’t worry – most of the time they provide the baguette wrapped within a sturdy paper bag.

Once you’ve morphed into an authentic Parisian (and are now sporting a beret and a black-and-white long sleeved shirt), you are welcome to enter the wine tasting room in a Parisian cellar. Alex, the sommelier, ushers everyone in with a smile. Before you lies a marvelous sight: a fully set wooden table, complete with plates of soft and hard cheeses alike, framed by various fruits, nuts, and now, the freshly baked baguettes that we were all just sporting as shoulder bags.

If you dislike a familial feel and becoming cozy with your neighbors, I can say that this is probably not the tasting experience for you.

The tasting room is small and intimate, allowing for a maximum of ten to eleven people at a time. We had the opportunity to chat with a few lovely folks hailing from Norway, Australia, Portugal, California – and, of course, our own little group of New Yorkers.

Regaling us with stories of his childhood in Normandy, Alex began the first course with a generous pour of the first red wine of the night. Alex immediately instructed us to swirl the wine.

I had previously thought that the wine swirl was a technique only done to in order to look knowledgeable and pretentious upon one’s return from a Napa Valley trip. However, there is an actual art to the swirl, as I soon learned.

Allow me to channel Bill Nye for a second: the purpose of the swirling process appears to be to allow more of the wine to come into contact with oxygen. This process agitates the wine, which ultimately increases the amount of odor released.

After utilizing your olfactory senses, it’s time to tilt your glass to assess the color. I, like a rube, assumed that only red and white (sorry, rosé) existed in the world of wine production, but Alex explained that there are actually dozens of shades. These determine different flavors, such as body and the age of the wine. After determining the color and flavor, we were cleared for the main event: finally being able to chug take a sip of the wine.

Although Alex explained that a wine and cheese pairing night is typically supposed to begin with a glass of white wine paired with soft cheese, no one objected to the idea of being served an extra glass of red wine to start.

As with wine tasting, cheese tasting involves a few unique steps.

The process begins again by using all senses other than taste: Alex advised us to not only smell the cheeses as he served them to us, but also to touch them and evaluate the texture – for qualities beyond just “hard” and “soft.” We began with comté, a cheese made from unpasteurized cow’s milk in the Franche-Comté traditional province of eastern France. I’m going to be honest when I say that this is the only cheese whose history I can actually remember because the rest that came afterwards were so delicious I essentially lost my train of thought for the next hour and a half.

Alex did mention that a proper tasting event should include a total of five cheeses from two different animals, i.e. cow and goat. Furthermore, you should be sure to include exactly two cooked and three uncooked cheeses (don’t ask me where these numbers came from, I will always encourage the decision to add more cheese if you so desire). To clarify, “cooked” cheese is made from smaller-cut curds that are heated to a higher temperature to affect the texture of the cheese. Heating curds helps expel moisture, hence why many types of cooked cheeses tend to retain a more firm texture.

After savoring the taste of the comté melting into the still warm baguettes, we were served the next cheese: a traditional Brie.

This is a PSA to all Americans: you need to go home and immediately toss that Président Brie you got from Whole Foods out the kitchen window.

The Brie we were served had been aged for several weeks and was not only the softest cheese I’ve ever tasted, but also possessed more complexity than the well-renowned hipsters of Brooklyn.

It was at this point that Alex almost read my mind and set out a variety of jams and marmalades for the table. I tell ya, my last meal request would be that Brie smeared onto a freshly baked baguette, with a heaping spoonful of blackberry marmalade to top it all off. Although the Brie was an experience, the Camembert served next offered an entirely new level of flavor. The Brie I could eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the Camembert was truly a delicacy.

Aged to perfection (so much so that we were able to smell it before we saw it appear on the table), this Camembert had us hooked before we even tasted it.

Although similar to Brie, Camembert has a deeper, more intense flavor and aroma. Alex’s recommendation for such an intense cheese was to slather it onto a baguette with butter in order to tone down the intensity of the cheese. Actually, let me take a break from this Camembert diatribe to note that butter, marmalade, and apples should all be paired with more intense cheeses to tone down their flavors; conversely, if you try a milder cheese (like comté, for instance) and realize that it needs a little extra flavor, you should pair this with nuts, black pepper, and grapes. Baguettes, however, go well with everything.

After we savored the bold, salty bitterness of the Camembert and washed it down with the white wine Alex had paired with the softer cheeses (namely the Brie and Camembert), our tasting experience was regrettably coming to an end. Before parting, however, Catherine made sure to remind us of the reason we were at the table in the first place. I know wine and cheese sounds like more of an indulgence than anything else, but the people who you sit down to eat with truly are there to share love at the table. And if you don’t believe that now, you just might after five glasses of wine.

If you would like to book this experience, which I would highly recommend, you can book it here through Airbnb experiences. And before anyone asks, this was absolutely not a sponsored post, but genuinely just one of the most enjoyable experiences I have tried throughout all my travels.

Make sure to check out my travel page here for more travel recommendations.