Cross-cultural communication （10）　

14）Cross-cultural communication in everyday life in Paris, Part 4
　 Next to food, when it comes to French food culture, you can't leave out wine. I myself am quite fond of alcohol. I choose alcohol to match my meal, such as sake with sushi or beer with grilled meat. Of course, with French food, it's wine. When I was living in Paris, I was drinking wine overwhelmingly more often than anything else. I always had a few bottles of wine in my apartment. In the fridge, I always had a bottle of champagne chilled for guests.

When I returned to Japan from France, I was asked to choose the wine for dinner parties where wine was served, because I had lived in the home of wine for two and a half years. But to be honest, I don't really have the knowledge that the so-called 'wine experts' in Japan have, who boastfully talk about which red wine from which region has a heavy, robust flavor that goes well with filet mignon, or which year's Burgundy has the best flavor. Or rather, whether you know about these things or not, you can tell a good wine from a bad one. After all, I've tasted a wide variety of wines in Paris over the past two and a half years, and I've learned to recognize the flavors with my tongue, so I'm confident in my ability to judge the quality of wine.

When I was in Paris, I once expressed my opinion to a Frenchman who liked wine. He agreed with me completely, saying, “For real wine lovers, there are only two kinds of wine: good wine and bad wine. All the other knowledge is just a bunch of nonsense.”

This stance seems to be fairly common in France, and when I later raised the topic with several French people, I got the same kind of response.

From this experience, I learned that the opinion that “there are only two kinds of wine...” seems to be a kind of French proverb or saying.

If that's the case, then I guess I'm a real wine lover in the French sense of the word. So, when I go to a French restaurant in Japan, I leave the choice of wine entirely up to the restaurant staff after telling them my budget. When I tell them my preferences, I use normal Japanese, not technical terms. If you do the same, you'll feel a lot more relaxed.

Since taste is the most important thing, in Japan we don't insist on French wine because of the price. Chilean and Australian wines are also quite tasty, even if they are around 1000 yen. As for sparkling wine, Spanish Cava is just as delicious as Dom Perignon. At 1300 yen a bottle, it is a whole order of magnitude cheaper than Dom Perignon.

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