Aaron Ayscough

It is towards the end of the season already, when, as he stands peeling the butt-ends of
the spears in the kitchen he shares with his companion in Savigny-lès-Beaune, the Swedish chef Svante Forstorp confirms something I’ve come to suspect.
“Boiling or steaming asparagus is practically a crime,” he says, wide-eyed with
amazement that cooks could commit such transgressions. “You’re taking this beautiful
vegetable, removing all the good elements, and just throwing the water away.”

On the bottle labels, websites, and social media profiles of many wine estates, in recent years, has proliferated the curious phrase “vegan wine.” It follows a general boom in vegan claims on new food and beverage products, which rose 257% in the first half of the 2010s, according to the Mintel Global New Products Database. Since grapes themselves are vegan-approved, a claim of vegan wine is, for most estates, just a roundabout way of indicating a wine was not subject to clarification with on...

If you’ve ever left juice in the refrigerator and returned to find it spritzy, you’re acquainted with a key feature of fermentation: carbon dioxide (CO2).
Produced naturally when yeasts convert sugar to alcohol, CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas present in all wines.

For the last half-decade at his biodynamic Provence estate Fondugues-Pradugues in Ramatuelle, Stephen Roberts has made a quixotic effort to produce something almost no one is asking for. He tries to make a pale rosé, but without using any of the enological techniques that have in recent years come to define pale rosé. In 2020, he finally succeeded — or so he thought.

Natural winemakers have long sought attention with risqué wine labels. But where is the border between bawdy fun and outright misogyny on a wine label? Aaron Ayscough asks the winemakers.

Of course I said yes when the Cher valley vigneronne and publisher Marie Rocher asked if I’d translate the works of the wine scientist Jules Chauvet. It’s like asking a film buff to translate Truffaut. For natural wine fans, Chauvet is the figure of legend who conducted experiments in winemaking without added sulfites as far back as the 1950s. In the decade before his death in 1989, Chauvet mentored the Beaujolais vigneron Marcel Lapierre and his collaborator Jacques Néauport, laying the grou...

Efforts to certify natural wine saw progress in early March when French wine authorities officially recognised the label Vin Méthode Nature. The wine world was soon abuzz with commentary on whether certification for natural wine was a good thing...

The first English translation of wine scientist Jules Chauvet's essay collection The Aesthetics of Wine.

Rarely has a name so matched an establishment than at the petite, pastel-tiled, 9th-arrondissement natural wine bar Pompette. Its name in French is an affectionate way to say “tipsy.”

Perhaps no area of the 11th arrondissement is as chock-a-block with natural wine bistrots as that around rue Amelot, which offers a veritable waterslide of unfiltered, low-sulfite wine extending from Bastille to République.

With his passion for simplicity, traditional recipes, and fine ingredients, soft-spoken Amarante proprietor Christophe Philippe is a chef’s chef, adored by restaurant industry peers and a passionate cult of Paris foodies. His spartan Bastille-area bistro is proudly divisive...

Many things are smaller in France: cars, portion sizes during brunch, the workweek. But nothing raises the ire of anglophone wine writers like small wine glasses – the simple ones, of modest volume, which are iconic to the French bistro.

Bedecked with pepper garlands and lined with fine spices and preserves, Adar is an overachiever Mediterranean lunch canteen slotted into the evocative woodwork of the Passage des Panoramas. Here, bespectacled Israeli chef Tamir Nahmias, formerly of Fulgurances, Frenchie, and Yam’Tcha...

Announcing the name of this calm, intimate Left Bank natural wine spot is a glaring red neon sign, of the sort one sees in speakeasies and sex shops. It is an earnestly louche design touch characteristic of the multidisciplinary work of proprietor Emmanuel Giraud, who by turns describes himself as “artist, writer, and journalist,” and, in a 2013 interview with Le Monde, as a “sculptor of culinary subjectivity."

North of Grands Boulevards on rue Bergère, Pastore’s yolk-yellow storefront shines like a beacon for contemporary Franco-Italian cuisine. Unlike their American counterparts, the best Italian restaurants in the City of Light – like Restaurant Giovanni Passerini, or Osteria Ferrara, where Pastore founders Emm...