Psssst: Cool French people drink boxed wine

Managing the summer drinking season in the land of rosé-all-day

My disappointingly short convalescence from retinal eye surgery coincided with the beginning of Rosé season. In France, the pink wine is synonymous with summer and les grand vacances and serious day drinking. The French begin drinking rosé at lunch, which often eases into apéro time, before sliding into dinner. How they manage this without becoming bloated, drunken Teletubbies has remained a mystery (to me, anyway), until now.

I was sitting at a café with Sylvie, a Parisienne out of central casting: red lipstick, artful bed head hair, white linen dress. We each ordered a glass of rosé. She asked the waiter for something I didn’t understand, and he returned with two small glasses of wine and a tall carafe filled with ice cubes. One by one, Sylvie carefully dropped three cubes into her glass.

Ice cubes in wine? My middle-class American mother was spinning in her grave. She had more wine rules than an eager-for-airtime sommelier on a competive cooking show. White wine needed to be perfectly chilled. Red wine, of course, was never chilled. Rosé was beneath contempt, as it was the official beverage of sorority girls. Ice cubes were for hard liquor, soda pop, sprained ankles, and puffy eyebags.

 “Sylvie,” I said,  “I see you put ice cubes in your glass of rosé. I am finding that very interesting.”

She expounded at length. Rosé with ice is called a piscine (literally: swimming pool.)  The piscine is an ingenious beverage workaround. The ice keeps the wine cool, while also diluting it. This permits you to spend many hours appearing to drink a lot, while not drinking a lot, thereby saving your dignity and sparing both your liver and your waist-line.

The first year we lived in France I dutifully drank white wine, no ice cubes, per my mother’s instruction. At the same time, to show I was gaining some useful French, I trotted out some sassy slang: marée basse.  Marée basse means low tide. If you waggle your empty wine glass in the air and chirp, “Allo! Marée basse!” everyone laughs and the host tops off your glass and the next morning your stupendous hangover is something the French don’t even have a word for, because they rarely get stupidly snozzled in the manner of Americans who aren’t yet hip to the piscine.

My favorite rosé is Bleu de Mer. It’s a beautiful crystalline pink, light and dry, a little citrus-y, a little mineral-y. Unsurprisingly, Bleu de Mer is also the favorite rosé of a lot of other people, and the local supermarkets can’t keep it in stock.

Enter my friend, Peta. Peta is half-English, half South-African and one of those friends who knows everything. Where to get a good haircut. Where to find birthday cake toppers, excellent desserts, humane mouse traps. Where the best flea markets are and how to spot expensive linen. How to talk to a French bureaucrat. How to make friends with waiters.

Peta said that a lot of French people actually buy wine by the box, le cubi, during the semi-annual wine fair held at the various national supermarkets, where the best wines from the super star wine-producing regions are offered at a steep discount. (This should come as no surprise, because the French are smart about saving money, and wine by the cubi is much less expensive than wine by the bottle. Plus, the box is easier to recycle.)

I couldn’t take this. First ice cubes, then boxed wine? All of this new cultural inside baseball caused me to go a little insane. I reasoned that if it was difficult to get my hands on bottles of Bleu de Mer, and all the cool, piscine-drinking French people like Sylvie and Peta bought it by the box, les cubis were probably even more difficult to come by. this proved to be true until, one day, Peta and I were at Lidl -- the love child of Costco and Trader Joe’s, where you go to get giant blocks of toilet paper, and also party food – and Bleu de Mer cubis were on sale! There were only two cubis of Bleu de Mer left. I snatched them up.

We had an idea: if Bleu de Mer cubis were on sale at our local Lidl, that meant they were on sale at all the Lidls in the region! I mapped all the supermarkets within a 30-kilometre radius on my phone, and off we went. At the first Lidl, no luck. At the second, I found only one cubi. At the third Lidl, two. No luck at Lidl four or five. Finally, at the sixth and final Lidl on our map, one that unbeknownst to us serves a large non-drinking, non-Bleu de Mer-loving Muslim population, we found twelve cubis. I whooped, right there in the middle of the booze aisle, like the clueless American I am.

As I write this, there’s a cubi cooling in the fridge. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by for a piscine.