At the airport, I was struggling.

Afraid of flying, overwhelmed by crowds after 18 months of lockdowns and social distancing, I chose the wrong queues and entered the wrong doors over and over again. In an empty area of baggage claim under Terminal 1 at Paris Charles De Gaulle two armed policemen walked towards me and my vision started to pixelate, but I was invisible to them on their way to deal with something real. I exited onto the terminal taxi rank, took some steadying breaths of fume-rich air and started the maze again.

On the train from the airport to Montparnasse, I listened to Anima by Thom Yorke and watched concrete scrubland blend like pencil sketches into suburbs. It was surreal to see thousands of lives compartmentalised into this space after spending so long sequestered in my own tiny world in rural Lancashire. Ivy crept over forgotten factories. Streaks of cloud streamed across the luminous holiday-blue sky, reminders of aeroplanes.

My white FFP2 mask made it hard for my glasses to stay anchored to my face and sent them flying down the carriage—a sweet tout-petit picked them up for me, trying them on, getting the arms caught in her braids. For the first of many times on this trip, I wished I could speak French.

“Trés jolie!” I said, nodding like a tourist, and her dad smiled.

My friend Susan, whom I was meeting later, told me on the phone before I set off that she’d never seen the city so spacious; that Aoûtiens were on their Summer holidays and that because of lockdown restrictions in different countries, tourists weren’t arriving.

“Paris is a friendly place when it’s half-full,” she’d said. At that moment, I decided she was right.

***

I’d chosen my hotel in Montparnasse because of its cheapness and its closeness to the catacombs and the cemetery, both of which I failed to visit on any of the days I was there. The closest I got to Simone de Beauvoir’s grave was the perimeter wall, which I walked alongside four or five times a day, meeting my friend for food that turned into night-long drinks, getting to the Latin Quarter to work (which makes me sound glamorous and I did that on purpose) and to Isle de Cité to look at Notre Dame.

““It seemed as tired as I was, of holding itself up, of being under so much of its own weight.””

I ended up at Notre Dame every day I was in Paris. The resilient aura of a burnt-out cathedral was something I hadn’t been prepared for. I stared, making excuses to pass by, marvelling at the Medieval-like wooden supports bolstering the flying buttresses just like when they were new, wrong-footed by the stained glass rose window I had first seen in a Disney film, now blackened with soot.

A dark emblem of survival—or perhaps a reminder of how close it has been to ruin, of being rescued, and still being rescued, and maintaining that iconic but now fragile facade. I was unwell, and I found a hand to grasp in the sight of this building. It seemed as tired as I was, of holding itself up, of being under so much of its own weight.

Across the Pont Saint-Louis, a short walk around Notre Dame and down a cobbled street strung with a banner advertising a flea market I’d just managed to miss, is L’Etiquette, with its shopfront painted in cheerful seaside blue and seats scattered about the pavement. A sign reads: “Organic wine tasting in English with a French accent (sorry.)”

I’m guided to a chair by my friend, who after visiting twice already is an old hand at navigating the vibe, and within five minutes a glass of gleaming wine the colour of burnished amber is swirling in my fingers, catching the last of the setting sun in its ripples. On my glass is printed: “Du bon, du brut et du vivant” (The good, the raw and the living—a play on “The Good The Bad and the Ugly”)— the name of a wine tasting event that took place in Buttes-Chaumont park in October 2019. Proof of life before Covid.

Hervé Lethielleux, who owns L’Etiquette alongside his wife Elaine, had chosen the wine for me in an act of supreme mediumship. As I sipped he bobbed in and out of tables, bottle in hand, chatting philosophically and cracking jokes. He is immensely likeable, making it easy to approach his wines which, to many, seem quite frightening.

Whenever he was needed elsewhere, a call of “Mon amour!” would send him back inside his shop, a sanctuary lined with record sleeves, original art, drawings by previous visitors and torn-out magazine pages. In the bathroom, a mag portrait of Thom Yorke watches over you above a gig poster for 1980s grebo band The Milk Monitors. He seemed to be following me everywhere.

***

Hervé only sells natural wine. It’s the only wine he’s remotely interested in.

“I love snakes and spiders,” he says, pausing to stifle a laugh. “I wanted to be a vet when I was young. I love nature, you know, we took four days holiday in August 2020 for the first time in two years and I saw a cow! I never see cows these days, it brings a tear to my eye.”

To Hervé, natural wine is low-intervention wine that’s made by winemakers who respect the environment as much as they respect the grapes they grow, the wines they produce. They also, at L’Etiquette, have zero added sulphur. Hervé is very happy to explain why.

“Ten years ago, I went to Bordeaux and stayed with a friend. We had a tasting in his cellar of wines made by his grandfather, and beside the bottles was a jerry can full of liquid sulphite left over from when he made them.”

“I put my head in it, and when I took my head back, my friend put it back in again. It was a very violent reaction. He said to me: ‘Now you’ve had your vaccine.’ I can now smell and taste sulphur straight away. I call it violence.”

This “vaccine” has affected his enjoyment of all conventional wines, he tells me. Even the most prestigious wines don’t get a look-in.

“The last time I had a bottle of Hermitage—sorry to be vulgar but it was €89 and 90c (about £77)—I had it on a blind taste,” he tells me. “I had to rush outside because the spitoon was downstairs and going in the cellar was too far. I just spat the wine on the pavement.”

“The truth about a bottle of wine is when it’s empty,” Hervé says, tipping the last of a barely-pink pét-nat called Petit Origami by Domaine de la Tourlaudiere into my glass. A loosely-sparkling Melon de Bourgogne, it jangled with boiled sweets and frozen raspberries, fresh with a curt acidity, perfect for the humid late summer evening it had become.

I asked him what the best reactions are to his wines when he serves them to visiting tasters.

“It’s never too late to wake up. It’s like all their lives they have been sleeping, and this wine, it wakes them up. It’s alive.”

Hervé’s own natural wine awakening happened in 2000, meeting a winemaker who described wine in a language he’d never heard before.

“I call this man my mentor, he doesn’t like it, or my spiritual father; he doesn’t like that either. When I met him, he didn’t say ‘this is the best wine in the world.’ He said ‘I’m biodynamic, I don’t put poison in my vineyard. If you taste my wine and you like it, great, if you don’t, no big deal.’”

“You can see the difference between his organic vineyards and his neighbours’ non-organic fields. Theirs are dry and ugly, and on the other side, you have a lot of flowers and grass growing, like a jungle. I prefer the jungle to the concrete,” Hervé tells me.

Despite this preference for wild, wandering biodiversity, Hervé was born and raised in Paris—except for five years spent in England in the late 80s and early 90s, where he picked up his predilection for live music and a passion for the arts.

“Music is part of the English culture in a very different way to French culture. Music in England is everywhere. I used to go to gigs, even if the band was crap because I could at least drink a beer and play pool.”

He ended up working in restaurants in England after a chance job opportunity in Paris took him into the hospitality sector.

“I did my National Service, and I didn’t know what to do afterwards, I wasn’t even thinking about it,” Hervé says. “My Father was fixing Joël Robuchon’s car [renowned chef and mentor of Éric Ripert] and he asked ‘What is your son doing after he finishes National Service?’”

“I wasn’t going back to school because my parents had no money, so I took a job at his big restaurant at the end of the Champs Elysee [L'Atelier Etoile.] I hated it because it was like being back in the army. After a few weeks, I realised it would be better to move my butt and start being professional, but I got fed up of Paris. I said, your life is a misery, you work 6 days a week, you never see your friends. Go to London, learn the language, see something different. So that was it.”

““Kids are not stupid, when they taste something and it tastes good, they don’t want to go back to drinking something that’s bad. That’s it.””

— Hervé Lethielleux

When he returned to Paris he found a job in a wine shop in 1994.

“It changed my life completely. I had a social life! And then I started taking my car around the South of France and visiting winemakers and trying to understand what wine was all about.”

***

“I always ask people, do you prefer the apple tart from grand-mère or the apple tart from the supermarket,” says Hervé, immediately making me crave a Tarte Tatin.

“Of course, they think the question is very stupid, they all want the apple tart from grandma. My answer, of course, is then to ask why they drink wine from the supermarket? It’s the same principle.”

Hervé isn’t only furious about the quality of wine in the supermarket, however. He truly believes some of the world’s most prestigious châteaux are capable of selling bad wine too, for prices he cannot understand. He told me a story about a rich man with “a watch the size of the millennium falcon” who showed him a spreadsheet of his wine cellar on a visit to the shop.

“The first page was Petrus, Petrus, Petrus, all wines at thousands of Euros a bottle,” he says. “I’d seen enough, I knew the rest of the pages would be like this. Boring.”

“The last time I had classified Bordeaux it was a couple of years ago, a friend brought 89, 90, 91 Chateaux Batailley, which I hadn’t tried for 20 years since I was in England. They were really ugly. When you have three bottles from three different years and they taste the same, it means what it means. Just like a frozen pizza, it’s the same,” Hervé tells me.

Prestige champagne? “The last time I took an aspirin was the morning after a conventional Champagne tasting four years ago.”

Dom Perignon 1985? “I had to spit it.”

This unimpressed attitude to collectable wine is unexpected, especially in his corner of Paris. A bougie neighbourhood on an island in the Seine, L’Etiquette is itself an island, surrounded by the choppy waters of tourist-trap cafés and expensive boutiques. He admits that it’s been tough to tie in their strong beliefs here, and that even now with an ever-growing natural wine scene in Paris, people can be cruel about the wines he chooses to champion.

“People have said that I’m a fascist, that I’m a lunatic. I think it’s pretty violent to say that someone who’s giving you something that’s natural, healthy, and good for you is as bad as a killer [editors note: Pellicle makes no claim that wine is good for you.] It’s not fair, but we have to deal with that all the time, so we ask ourselves: Why, why, why are those people saying that? Because they’re stuck in their ways. They have to find some sort of comment to make you feel uncomfortable, but I’m not. I’m not,” Hervé says.

“At the beginning of course I get a bit upset, but it doesn’t hurt me the way it used to. When you have someone in front of you who’s been drinking wine all their life, and suddenly they realise they’ve been drinking poison—well, you’ve upset them. They’re rich, maybe they’re important, and they don’t like the way you talk about their cellar. You have to deal with ego.”

Things are changing, though. Hervé tells me when he started in organic wine 20 years ago, you could count the shops and bars selling natural wine in Paris on one hand. When he opened the shop, that had doubled to 10.

“Now it’s everywhere!” he says, “And that’s good! The more the better! It’s good for us, as consumers, and for the sake of the planet as well. When you get conventional wine, you are giving money to people killing the planet, and I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

On top of the ethical benefits of natural wine, there is another obvious reason people like me keep returning to his bar—and I do, twice more on my short trip to Paris. The wine he sells is delicious.

“Kids are not stupid, when they taste something and it tastes good, they don’t want to go back to drinking something that’s bad. That’s it.”

““Dom Perignon 1985? I had to spit it.””

— Hervé Lethielleux

Later, Hervé tells me he’s looking forward to retiring. In the not-too-distant future, he’ll pack his car and he and Elaine will travel south to visit his winemaker friends for a whole spring and summer. I ask if he thinks his new apprentice, Arthur, will have time to absorb a lifetime’s love for natural wine in time for the trip.

“The thing is,” Hervé says, in his most serious voice, “Running a wine shop is not about telling which wine goes best with your salmon. The point is—can you change the lightbulb? Changing the lightbulb is much more important. It’s high up, and you need it to see. The whole thing is a lot of responsibility.”

I walk away from the bar at closing time with a bottle in hand, borrowing cups to take back the next day, and Susan and I drink it on the dark banks of the Seine. I think about The Legend of the Holy Drinker. I think about swimming, about getting into the water and letting it carry me to the sparkling Eiffel Tower. The light wobbles on black ripples and as a new bar owner myself, and in this moment, the lightbulb philosophy makes total sense to me. Settle the foundations first. Focus on what’s real. Fix what’s broken. Strengthen and improve. The rest will come.

Or maybe he simply means that changing lightbulbs is vitally important. I suppose it is.