FETE DES VENDAGES

By Friday, the Montmartre wine festival was well underway.  I think this thing translates loosely as:  “Festival of the grape harvest.  Montmartre salutes the islands.  The route of taste.”  Well, that’s the best I can do.

The festival takes place over four days and nights, in venues all around Montmartre, but the principal action was all within a couple of blocks of our apartment.  I didn’t know of this when we booked, so it was just dumb luck that we stumbled into this on our first weekend.  Up by Sacre Coeur, they set up hundreds of tents that housed vendors selling foodstuffs and wine.  We went up on Friday night, along with a few tens of thousands of our closest friends.

Gosh, Parisians turning out for wine and food.  Whoda thunk?  Bands were playing, and individual and duo musicians were doing their thing.  The vendors were selling all manner of stuff, including foie gras sandwiches (!), cheeses, sausages of all sorts.  You could stuff and drink yourself silly.

Foolishly, we had already eaten, so we didn’t partake this night.  Instead we found a good spot and settled in to listen to the free concert being performed from a stage down the steps and hill from the cathedral.  Of all things, it was a gospel troupe singing traditional and pop stuff.  Very good.  We were overlooking it with all of Paris behind.

The next day there was to be a parade that would wind from the local mayor’s office, down Rue Caulaincourt, which is the next street over from us, and then around the small streets until the finish at the cathedral.  We were walking around before the start and found this group looking for a way to get their wagon down the hill.  The guy with the red sleeve is gesturing for them to turn around and go down a side street.  I have no idea what guild they purported to represent.  Court jesters?

These were the steps right behind me as I was taking the picture that they didn’t want to go down.  They needed to get w-a-y down there to that green square in the distant bottom.  All of Montmartre is filled with hills like this.

We later saw a lot of different groups sporting similar costumes.  Apparently, the parade celebrates guilds and brotherhoods of various food and drinks specialties, and all manner of weird bunches were wandering about.  We went on back up to the main tents area and joined in the gluttony.  Loni’s grinning over a duck sausage sandwich.  That chocolate machine essentially makes hot chocolate by simply melting the real thing.  These folks then added a large dollop of Chantilly cream to the mix.  Oooooh.

 

When it was getting near time for the parade to begin, we wandered down the hill and set up along the Rue Caulaincourt.  Guess the Parisians are advocates of the “just in time” method, because the street was just about deserted with only a half hour before party time.  This is our main shopping street.  There are FOUR boulangeries within three blocks, several grocers, two butchers (across the street from each other), cheese shops, a general dry goods/hardware store, and a gaggle of cafes, bistros, and restaurants.  We don’t think we could have ordered up a better neighborhood.

Once the balloon men moved into place, we knew we were close to the start.  Fortunately, they moved on so that they didn’t block our view.

The parade consisted of band groups and lots and lots of those guild types that were all in costume.  Much was traditional dress (I especially liked the little kids in the revolution costumes),

but, since this year was a salute to “the islands” (Caribbean), there was a lot of exotic and, well, downright bizarre dress as well.  The jumping bananas have big blade springs attached to their calves.  They really launched!

The celebration of the food groups was a little wacky.  I don’t quarrel with honoring the lofty garlic with a satin pillow, but the bunch pulling the frying fish cart was a little strange.  Most of these groups sported banners like you see here.  Best I can tell, the green banner was a brotherhood of Chablis producers.  Another wine group was actually pouring samples in little plastic cups for the crowd as they marched along. 

All in all, it was a very vibrant and mellow parade, and everyone, participants and onlookers, had a fun time.  As the restaurants were jammed from the festival goers, we had dinner in the apartment then headed back up to Sacre Coeur, which is beautiful at night, as was our first glimpse from the hill (with a long digital telephoto) of the Eiffel Tower lit up.

We went back to again sit on the steps below the cathedral with the, by-now, totally lubricated crowd awaiting the fireworks show, which was excellent.

This was a fun festival and, as you can see, a good time was had by all.  We had an easy stroll back down to our apartment afterwards, but people kept draining off the hill well into the night.  Bon soir, indeed!  (The arrow for our apartment should be pointing to the right and up—it’s the first darker building beyond the sign.)