My friend Bacchus

Le Repaire de Bacchus wine shop on Rue St CharlesA couple weeks after I had settled into my apartment, I had my friend Max over for dinner. Max is a student and intern in Paris, and he lives in a foyer, or French student housing, with a small shared kitchen and not even his own refrigerator, so I invited him to my clean, personal kitchen to cook and eat with me. We bought fresh ravioli, tomato sauce, and lettuce for salad, then went into Le Repaire de Bacchus, a wine shop up the street from my apartment. It’s a chain—all of the Repaires de Bacchus in Paris have a green exterior and a little hanging sign with cursive letters—but it’s not a supermarket or the much more common (and less sophisticated-looking) Nicolas.

Surrounded by two walls of bottles and baskets of specials, we were immediately overwhelmed. Then the man working, who had been sitting behind the cashier’s desk in the back, asked us if we needed help: were we drinking the wine with a meal? what were we cooking? and what were we looking to pay? and pointed us to an appropriate red for about 7 euros. We kept talking, and as Max and I were paying he asked where my accent was from—was I Danish? I think I probably made a very strange face as I explained to him that no, I’m not but my ex-boyfriend (we had broken up maybe a week before) is Danish, and Max joked that Denmark wasn’t too far from New York.

I don’t go back to Le Repaire de Bacchus very often, but he’s been my wine guy ever since. He’s tall and thin, maybe in his thirties, usually wearing black, incredibly knowledgeable about wine (in a sense, a pretty stereotypical Frenchman) but also incredibly friendly. Once, when I asked for a not too expensive bottle of wine, he replied, “So around sixty, seventy euros?” (It took me a few seconds to get the joke.) He’s asked what I study, and we’ve talked briefly about German cinema; I still don’t know his name though. But even just walking past on my way to the metro or to school, I’ve never seen anyone working at that Repaire de Bacchus other than my wine guy. And I think I owe him another visit soon.

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