The elderly gentleman on the left had chosen an awkward place to sit, since there was a bit of a drip there, and the waiters finally convinced him to move indoors. The lady on the right had met a younger lady (her daughter, perhaps?) for an aperitif and dessert. We had salads and ice cream. One doesn't want to go to a wine and cheese class on an empty stomach!
A couple of hours later we retraced our steps to the same place where we had taken our cooking class a couple of weeks ago. Our instructor, Preston, is a 10-year resident of Paris, an American from Minnesota, and had recently received his "diploma" in wine and cheese. He took us through a bit of a tour through France, using wine and cheese as the vehicles; he himself was a superb guide.
At the end of the two hours we had sampled five cheeses and four wines from all over the country. The glass on the left below is water, followed by a champagne, a white wine, a dry red, and a dessert red. The wines tended to come from the same regions as the cheeses they were paired with. One very interesting thing about the wines is that when you buy wine in France, there is no label on the back of the bottle, and only the name of the vineyard and year on the front. It is assumed that knowing the vineyard tells you all you need to know, and in fact carries more information than just the type of grape that the wine came from. The same type of grape grown in different places will produce very different wines.
The class scheduler had told us that we would not need to make dinner plans. I was surprised to learn that a few slices of bread and cheese, accompanied by some nice wines would suffice very nicely for a comfortable, well-fed feeling.
Tomorrow we are off to champagne country. Not so much for the champagne, but for the cathedral at Reims, which is the French equivalent of Westminster Abby in London: if you want to be king, this is where you want to be crowned.
