Do you politely decline and pass your hand when offered to taste a wine at the restaurant for fear of not being up to the task? Do you feel like you are being overwhelmed when your connoisseur friends get excited about a grape? The antidote to your neophyte complexes may be tucked away in the cellar of the Toulouse restaurant Les Petits Crus, rue des Couteliers. Recently, the Toulouse establishment specializing in wine-cheese pairings offers
Wine Gaming, an original game halfway between an introduction to oenology and an escape game.
And because at 20 minutes, we have a sense of sacrifice, we set off in the footsteps of a collector descended from the Counts of Toulouse, not hesitating to taste around fifteen wines – even the “bouchonné” for lack of concentration during the preliminary instructions – to come at the end of the five tests.
So already, the codes of the escape game are respected. The decor is neat, there are scrolls, puzzles, codes, traps, and, inevitably, the key to the next test that we find by accident because we are real winners (or desperate people who search everywhere). The essential hourglass is there to remind you that the clock is ticking, that you only have one hour to succeed. But, in fact, no one is looking at it. Because the big difference with an escape game is that there is no stress. No claustrophobia that creeps in either: no need to escape, it is a bottle protected by a cryptx (which the tricksters will be interested in the mechanism) that must be released.
Woody? Notes of Cassis? We learn by tasting
Suddenly we talk, we digress, by uncorking the fifteen test tubes, each filled with 2 cl of wine, which punctuate the game. We pour, we ventilate like the pros or almost, we smell, we “chew” even to reveal tannins. Well, during the debates our certainties crack because we still thought we were modestly capable of recognizing blackcurrant notes.
By creating the game, Bertrand Castaing and Corentin Quemener, the two owners of the Petits Crus, who also offer it in their restaurants in Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, wanted “to make oenology accessible to everyone, without being too schooly or too pompous ”. Mission accomplished. Valentine, our host, filled in our gaps during the debriefing. And when you go out, beyond the satisfaction of having delivered the bottle right at the end of the hourglass and having fun, you have the impression of being able to recognize a woody or tannic wine, just to blow your nose the specialists around us who get drunk by bringing their science to each meal.
Obviously, we advise you to return on foot. If you have not wisely used the spittoon during the tests, you will leave, certainly less stupid, having nevertheless swallowed the equivalent of two and a half glasses of wine.