My liver speaks French now

There are certain events in life where you feel instantly and profoundly out of your depth. Say, walking into a French wine-tasting in Makati while wearing a jacket from Uniqlo and the existential panic of a man who once called Chardonnay “buttery Sprite.”

Tastin’ France Manila, in its 2025 iteration, recently unfolded at the Fairmont like a Dior-clad fever dream for oenophiles.

The tipsy revolution of 15 French merchants, 300 bottles, and not a single bad pour in sight was organized by the French Chamber and Business France.

It was less a tasting and more a full-on invasion of the senses: Bordeaux flirted, Cognac swaggered and someone from Alsace told me I was holding my glass wrong.

The room smelled of quiet wealth and fermented aspirations: All the beautiful regions whose names I can pronounce if I pretend I’m choking slightly on a croissant.

I nodded sagely at bottles I couldn’t afford and pretended to take notes like a man planning a heist in the Loire Valley.

“Just tiny pours,” I told myself, which is what I also said once upon a time before eating an entire camembert beside a lawn mower.

One of the more curious and quietly subversive discoveries came courtesy of Domaine Daurion, a name that sounds like it belongs to either a French vineyard or a Bond villain with a deep respect for terroir.

With them: A non-alcoholic wine, “Sam,” both polite on the nose and surprisingly interesting.

This Languedoc-based estate, which was said to have been fermenting things since 1709 (back when wine was practically prescribed for everything from gout to existential dread) is now nudging tradition toward something greener, cleaner and refreshingly Mediterranean.

They also indulged us with a discreet little peek at their upcoming Cru Rouge Pézenas 2022, along with a trio of red, white and rosé offerings presented in 10cl glass tubes.

Nothing says “We take wine seriously” quite like drinking it from something that looks like it came from the lab of a tipsy pharmacist.

Across the Cognac aisle, which, frankly, felt more like sacred ground, I confronted dynasties older than the French Revolution.

Cognac François Voyer, tucked somewhere between Grande Champagne and Fins Bois, poured a silky little number that didn’t so much go down as glide past your moral failings.

Maison Seguinot completed the trinity of ancestral intoxication.

Fermenting since 1890, its eaux-de-vie warmed the chest; it wrapped your shame in cashmere and whispered, “You’re not a failure, you’re just misunderstood.”

It was less a tasting, really, and more of an existential intervention with oak barrels.

Amid the swirl of accents and tannins, the event was, above all, an ode to diplomacy: The drinkable kind.

FCCI, ever the elegant puppet master of these intercultural interludes, facilitated more than just imports. They orchestrated a symphony of shared histories, clinked glasses and hopeful futures, preferably aged in oak.

I left wine-drunk, horny and convinced the French don’t make mere libation; they stage elegant coups in crystal.