New Yorker journalist A. J. Liebling developed his life-long love of Paris and its restaurants as a student in the late 1920s. His time there, followed by another year at the beginning of the Second World War as a war correspondent and return visits in the 1950s, is recorded in Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1959), a book which recounts numerous wine-soaked, many-coursed meals. His affinity with fine dining, learned in Paris, made Liebling a fastidious eater and drinker, settling for nothing less than the best, although always looking for value.

For Liebling, good food and wine – and lots of the two – were an essential requirement for a long life, and he spends a great part of the book lamenting the move to lighter meals favoured by fashion and medicine. The meals he recalls are layered with sauces, creams, meats, wild birds, trout and turbot, accompanied by wines from Champagne, Burgundy, and Bordeaux, all in one sitting. Such feasts may make a modern reader queasy, but Liebling delights in being one of the last gourmands to eat like a nineteenth-century Parisian: “we began with a truite au bleu—a live trout simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath. It was served doused with enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment of Paul Dudley Whites[1], and accompanied, as was right, by an Alsatian wine ….” That was just the first course. “After the trout, [we] had two meat courses, since we could not decide in advance which we preferred. We had a magnificent daube provençale … and then pintadous—young guinea hens, simply and tenderly roasted—with the first asparagus of the year. … We had clarets with both courses—a Pétrus with the daube, a Cheval Blanc with the guineas.” This still wasn’t enough, as he and his elderly friend continued with three bottles of Krug: “one to our loves, one to our countries, and one for symmetry, the last being on the house” (6).

Liebling saves his grandest eulogies for the wines of the Rhône, both north and south. Damning of the trend across France for pale, easy-drinking rosé (“a semi-aborted red wine … pop[ping] up like measles on the wine map” [64]), Liebling celebrates the full-bodied, robust rosés of Tavel in the southern Rhône. His praise of Tavel has no comparison in the book, and is unlikely ever to be matched:

Tavel has a rose-cerise robe, like a number of well-known racing silks, but its taste is not thin or acidulous, as that of most of its mimics is. The taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate. With the second glass, the enthusiasm gains; with the third, it is overpowering. The effect is generous and calorific, stimulative of cerebration and the social instincts. (64)

Tavel is no longer such a fashionable wine, but Liebling’s description of its great rival Châteauneuf-du-Pape still rings true: “Châteauneuf often seems to be a wine there is too much of to be true, and it varies damnably in all respects save alcoholic content, which is high” (68). Instead, Liebling’s choice of a Rhône red was Côte Rôtie: “Drinking it, I fancied I could see that literally roasting but miraculously green hillside, popping with goodness, like the skin of a roasting duck, while little wine-colored devils chased little nymphs along its simmering rivulets” (68).

For Liebling, France was a country that when it “classified the vineyards of Médoc in 1855, it furnished French culture with a factor of stability, such as it furnished Paris when it made a park of the Bois de Boulougne” (143). That stability was being eroded through war, a growing middle class, and the pace of modernity, changes which Liebling, an American still in love with the old Europe, lamented. Both wine and food, however, kept France connected to its past, and Liebling draws on his love of horse racing to acknowledge the diversity of wine that continues to attract so many people in so many different ways: “Wine drinking is more subjective than horse racing and nearly as subjective as love, but the gamble is less; you get something for your money no matter what you pick” (143).

[1] A leading American cardiologist of the time and proponent of healthy diets and exercise.