Wine & Dine

So as part of my Christmas gift from Kimberly she had organised a wine tasting (thoughtful!), we had wanted to try somewhere like this in London but hadn't gotten round to it time wise. So we popped into Wine by One. 

It was so nice there, the staff especially were lovely - that was the big contrast in France. The customer service there in general is pretty poor but every now and then it was even better than the kind we're used to. People would go out of their way to help us or speak to us in English once they noticed how crappy our French was. At Wine by One they really went the extra mile to be helpful and explain how everything worked. When you first go in you put a small deposit down for a card and put money onto it, we each put 10 euros on our cards and this was enough for us. You then put your card into the machine and choose a wine and whether you want a sample, half a glass or a full glass. The prices for each are shown. 

There were also iPads that told you a bit about each wine which was interesting to look at, they were in French but you could pretty much figure out what they were getting at and pick out names of fruit and things. 

You could also purchase a full bottle of any of the wines to take home with you. We started on the whites, moved to the Rose and then went to the dessert wines. Neither of us enjoy red wine so we skipped that out but they had a large selection, over 100 wines every day that change all the time. 

Some of the wines were really cheap but some where crazy expensive and the staff there were telling us how it was a nice way for people to get to try expensive wines without committing to a bottle which is true. I also thought it was a good place to figure out what you do and don't like wine wise if, like me, you know bugger all about wines. Earlier that day we'd browsed around Paris which was lovely, we'd done Versailles in the morning so we had nothing else on the agenda. We found ourselves walking down a bit of a designer street with shops I didn't dare go in in case we broke something hideously expensive. 

But we soon made it back into the normal shops, I particularly enjoyed this sweet/biscuit shop we found. Mainly because they gave out samples... 

And then we decided to go into a diner type restaurant (because we'd been talking about diners that day for some reason). 

It was surprisingly nice there, I got some old fashioned cloudy lemonade. 

And a tasty burger, I thought it was sweet how in France they couldn't resist making fries a little nicer with some herbs. Bless them, they just want their food to be nice, and it really was.