Lavinia

While I wait for Flickr to upload some of the pictures I took today, I'll update about my class on Thursday. I had planned to take pictures here, but when I pulled out my camera to take a picture of the exterior, my battery died. Luckily I plan on going back with my roommates so I'll try to take some pictures next time.

My wine class was held in this incredible store called Lavinia. Lavinia was founded in 1999 with their first store in Madrid, followed by a Barcelona location in 2001, Paris in 2002, and subsequent locations in the Ukraine and Switzerland. The director of the store spoke to us and was so nice. Lavinia was founded with the intention of making wine more accessible to everyone. Their clerks are incredibly well informed, multi-lingual, and super friendly and open to questions. They hold classes and have memberships available.

The Paris location is 1200 square meters! That's almost 4000 square feet! It's three stories, with the lower level housing an enormous wine collection divided by geographic location. There was an entire wall dedicated to my region, Bordeaux. Most of the bottles of Bordeaux were priced between 20€ and 60€ (I bought the second cheapest bottle I could find, which was 9,90€). The shop is kept at exactly 19 degrees Celsius, with controlled humidity levels and a special foundation to keep the rumble of the subway from disturbing the bottles. The more expensive/more fickle bottles of wine are kept in a special "cave" (cellar) that is 14 degrees. Inside the cave I saw the most expensive bottle of wine I've ever encountered: 10 000,00€. That's like a $15,000.00 bottle of wine! AND I saw a bottle of Hennessey that was 30 000,00€! A $45,000 bottle of Hennessey! Insane!

The rez-de-chaussez, or ground floor, has a wall of food and wine pairings. For example there was "tarte aux pommes" (apple tart) and below that they had 3 different wines that would pair well with that dish. Also throughout the store there are little round, colorful tags that denote certain wines that are recommended by the sommeliers, certain "vins bio" (organic wines), and wines that were under 10€ (the yellow tag, which I am a big fan of!). Also on the ground floor they have a tasting area. You buy a prepaid card in denominations ranging from 15€-50€ and you can taste wines! You can taste wines that you may be interested in buying, or you can taste wines you could never afford. For example, a taste (3mm in the glass) of Chateau le Tour will run you 25€, but I saw some you could sample for as little as o,80€.

The first floor (which is the second floor to Americans) housed a collection of spirits. They obviously have far fewer spirits than they had varieties of wine, but I saw things like Glenfidditch, Bacardi, and even Pucker (sick). Also in that area they had several books, every variety of wine glass you could imagine, and a huge collection of carafes. There is also a little cafe-type area on that floor, where you can get food and if you buy a bottle of wine in the store they'll open it for you and you can drink it there free of charge at either their indoor cafe-area or a little terrace outside.

It was a very cool shop, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in wine. I was super intimidated because I don't actually know anything about wine yet, but their entire premise is that they want to be open to everyone and a comfortable environment to ask questions, and it certainly is! It's at metro Madeleine on 3, boulevard de la Madeleine in the 1st.