A 23 ans, l’artiste défend en tournée « Les Failles », son enthousiasmant deuxième opus, en lice pour un prix dans la catégorie « Album révélation » aux Victoires de la musique, vendredi .
The early bird woke up at noon. The day before, Monday, January 27, the well-deserved celebration continued late after the first triumph of three Apple concerts in the Parisian hall of La Cigale (before February 28 and April 9, all sold out), accompanied by his news instrumentalists, Clémence Lasme (bass and keyboards) and Caroline Geryl (drums and percussion). Little excess – Claire Pommet, 23, does not drink alcohol – but a lot of friends and laughs to prolong emotions “so strong that I have the impression that a truck drove me on the head ” , laughs the singer, seated at the Edith Piaf bar, close to her little two-room apartment, in the 20 th arrondissement of Paris.
The truck is not ready to stop. Nearly a hundred other concerts should punctuate 2020, in the wake of an exciting second opus, Les Failles , published in November 2019 (and recently reissued, supplemented by five unreleased, under the name Les Failles cachées ), including l shivering acoustics will perhaps win him a Victoire de la musique, Friday, February 14, in the category “Revelation album”. [ . . . ]
For forty years, the songs of Rita Mitsouko have accompanied us. Today, Catherine Ringer is named as female artist of the year at the Victoires de la Musique for her tour. Catherine Ringer sings Les Rita Mitsouko , which brings together sentimental crowds. Interview with a great secret.
She shakes hands, firmly. Rehearsals have just ended at Studio Bleu, adjoining the New Morning, in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis district, in Paris. She asks where we are going, the Napoleon? All right, let’s go. But first, she shows us the dancers’ changing rooms, because she loves dancing, firmly there too. We feel assured and fierce, shy and brave. We were warned here and there that Catherine Ringer was no small task. But there was no doubt, from the broken tooth, the strapless dress marked Jean Paul Gaultier in the clip by Marcia Baïla , the unstructured haircuts, the explosive voice, the shimmering clothes, the gesture mixing flamenco with jerky expressions. and robotics, the clash with Gainsbourg on the sofa, the past X.
The Rita Mitsouko, this clever mix of genres, duo of whimsical lovers and pranksters born in 1979, evoking Sailor and Lula as much as Gomez and Morticia Addams, Almodóvar’s movida than the punk of dirty caves, their heads constantly immersed in a vast musical well, without censorship or constraint, digging up sounds to better hack new, creating immense tubes like Marcia Baïla , Andy and C’est comme ça , stacking the levels of readings, seizing the clip format from the start with Philippe Gautier and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, falling in love with free figuration with Robert Combas and Di Rosa, appearing in Soigne ta droite(1987) de Godard, taking care of the funny face and the zinzin, the irony and the mockery, solid because riveted to each other, with some crashes all the same here and there.
Forty years after their formation, thirteen years after the death of Fred Chichin, Catherine Ringer publishes the complete reissue of the Rita Mitsouko, nine albums with new releases and two legendary films shot by Roland Allard in Moscow ( Breakdown in the Cold War, 1989) and in Bombay ( La Vie du rail, 1990). And is named to the Victoires de la musique 2020 in the female artist of the year category. She does not like to tell herself very much, out of a taste for mystery and a certain posture, perhaps also because it is hard to describe the atypism of their tandem in the French rock landscape, from India and halo of success, poetic and stupid of scenes, cartoonesque and follower of the autopastiche. The Rita, quite simply.
You are nominated for the Victoires de la Musique in the female artist of the year category. Do prices matter to you?
Catherine Ringer – Yes and no. It’s nice to know that we are thinking of you, at the same time it is not fundamental. I wonder especially why Aya Nakamura is not there since it is she who has done everything for two years. She has fantastic life energy. His work on language and rhythm is very beautiful. And then I also said to myself: “Well, I am named as a female artist, but I would have liked to be named also for the best album of the year!”
It’s surprising that there are only men in this category, right?
Maybe it’s because they made the best albums of the year. We are not going to make the par everywhere everywhere anyway!
Does it swell you?
These are endless discussions. My first reaction is to say “Where does it end? How about half the young and half the old too ?! ”But I also know that there are glass ceilings to break. I have no definite answer.
French Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume tells Catherine Nicholson why he believes a transition to lower-chemical farming is essential and how he thinks it can be achieved.
Meanwhile, Green MEP – and organic farmer himself – Benoît Biteau tells us why what he learnt converting his father’s farm to greener practices can be replicated.
In our reports, we meet some of the mayors who have banned pesticides around their towns and find out more about the conflict with the farming community. We also meet French farmers who are testing how to reduce their dependence on chemical pesticides
Brasserie might mean brewery, but only recently are Parisian establishments getting back to ale.
In Paris, you’re never far from a glass of wine. Step into a classic bistro and there will be good-value reds from the valleys of Rhone and Loire. Higher-end restaurants will inevitably point you in the direction of first-growth Bordeaux. New-wave wine bars are bursting with biodynamic Beaujolais. And a glass of Alsace riesling is de rigueur at a brasserie.
For a drinker interested in quality and value, wine can sometimes seem like the only option in this city. Every street, it seems, has its own cave à vin, complete with regional focus and invariably helpful staff, if you speak French. My favorites include Les Caves Saint-Martin on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, where I once bought two bottles of an excellent grower champagne on the recommendation of the shop owner, and Trois Fois Vin on Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth.
The great food halls devote huge amounts of space to France’s most famous wine regions. I remember wandering into the recently reopened Galeries Lafayette food hall (“Lafayette Gourmet”) in 2014 to find acre upon acre of wine, the vast majority of it French (including 1,200 options from Bordeaux alone!). There were a few desultory shelves of beer.
It hasn’t always been like this: Brasserie, after all, means brewery. When Alsatians founded these palaces of gustatory gratification in the late 19th century, there was often brewing on-site. There still is at Brasserie Georges, which reinstalled a brewery in 2004, but that’s in Lyon. Paris’s mightiest brasseries long ago gave up grain for grape.
Beer is flowing in establishments with a young, energetic vibe
But things are changing. Breweries and bars are popping up throughout the city. It’s a young, energetic scene, exemplified by the annual Paris Beer Festival (formerly Paris Beer Week). That the name is in English rather than French is telling; much of Paris’s modern beer culture has more than a hint of Anglo-Saxon influence. That said, there’s a definite Gallic edge to places such as La Fine Mousse, an elegant bar and restaurant in the Marais, or breweries such as La Goutte d’Or, which uses ingredients reflecting the rich diversity of the local neighborhood.
The heart of this nascent Beervana can be found in northeast Paris, where rents are lower and the population younger. Around the Bassin de la Villette, a half-mile-long artificial lake in the 19th arrondissement, you’ll find Paname Brewing, a brewpub where the New England IPA is called Brexiteer (an example of how the French occasionally conflate “Anglo-Saxon” countries), and L’Atalante, with a huge outdoor terrace that fills up with young Parisians on summer evenings.
One of the most interesting breweries is Gallia: Originally founded in 1890, it was reestablished as a brand at the end of 2009. At first, the resurrected brand’s founders, Guillaume Roy and Jacques Ferté, focused on conservative pale lagers — but under head brewer Rémy Maurin, the range has expanded to encompass an impressive variety of flavors and styles.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed; in September, Heineken bought a minority share. Most bars in this city are tied to big brands such as Heineken or Kronenbourg. If they start offering customers the likes of Gallia, it’ll be a genuine game-changer.
It’s about time. Paris sits on the dividing line between northern Europe, where beer has traditionally held sway, and the wine-drinking south. Only Champagne, of France’s great wine regions, is further north, and it has (or had, until global warming) a fairly marginal grape-growing climate. This is natural beer country; it’s only right that Beaujolais, Bordeaux and the rest make room for la bière artisanale.
Will Hawkes is a freelance travel and drinks writer based in London.
Don’t get too attached to that pinot noir. New research suggests swapping out grapes to avoid climate catastrophe
January 31, 2020 at 7:00 AM EST
The prospect of hotter summers, warmer winters, drought and violent weather events have caused experts to warn of coming wine shortages and price increases, changing varietal character and, in some dire predictions, the extinction of some wines altogether.
Maybe there’s a fix, says a research paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists’ computer models show that if we do nothing, global warming of 2 degrees Celsius would wipe out 56 percent of current wine-growing land; increase that to 4 degrees and an estimated 85 percent of grapes won’t be viable.
This team of researchers investigated whether using more heat-tolerant grapes would allow vineyards to adapt. They found that by reshuffling where certain grape varieties are grown, potential losses at 2 degrees of warming could be halved, and cut by a third if warming reached 4 degrees.
The researchers, led by Ignacio Morales-Castilla at the University of Alcalá in Spain and Elizabeth Wolkovich at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, focused on 11 varieties of wine grapes including cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot, pinot noir, riesling, sauvignon blanc and syrah, as well as lesser-known varieties chasselas, grenache, monastrell (also known as mourvedre) and ugni blanc. Together, these account for a third of the total area planted to wine grapes and represent important parts of the wine industry in France, Australia, New Zealand and Chile.
The team used vintner and researcher archives to build a model for when each would bud, flower and ripen in wine-growing regions around the world under three different warming scenarios. Then it used climate change projections to see where those varieties would be viable in the future.
“Each variety has a different sensitivity to the climate,” says Ben Cook, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Basically, replacing varieties with more climatically suitable varieties, called cultivar turnover, increases resilience to climate change. It’s a story of mitigation and adaptation.”
The researchers, led by Ignacio Morales-Castilla at the University of Alcalá in Spain and Elizabeth Wolkovich at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, focused on 11 varieties of wine grapes including cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot, pinot noir, riesling, sauvignon blanc and syrah, as well as lesser-known varieties chasselas, grenache, monastrell (also known as mourvedre) and ugni blanc. Together, these account for a third of the total area planted to wine grapes and represent important parts of the wine industry in France, Australia, New Zealand and Chile.
The team used vintner and researcher archives to build a model for when each would bud, flower and ripen in wine-growing regions around the world under three different warming scenarios. Then it used climate change projections to see where those varieties would be viable in the future.
“Each variety has a different sensitivity to the climate,” says Ben Cook, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Basically, replacing varieties with more climatically suitable varieties, called cultivar turnover, increases resilience to climate change. It’s a story of mitigation and adaptation.”
Cook says that changing out grape varieties isn’t the only solution to pushing back against the effects of climate change. Many vineyards are topographically complex and will allow microclimates, especially if vineyards move to higher ground. Moving vineyards to north-facing slopes might also slow the effects. And in France, Cook says, where irrigation is not utilized, watering could be employed.
“We wanted to give a different perspective on all those apocalyptic takes,” Cook says. “Winemakers are becoming more interested and aware of climate change and a lot of them are really concerned. They are seeing things they haven’t seen before, with storms and heat waves. But what you do about it is a complicated thing.”
Geoff Kruth, the president of GuildSomm, an international organization for sommeliers, says wineries are understandably concerned about the uncertainties of climate change, “but it’s important to remember that there are dozens human decisions — rootstocks, trellising, timing of vineyard work, etc. — that have significant impacts on how a vine reacts to a climate.”
Many wine industry experts have pointed to increased ripeness in grapes and higher alcohol levels as indications of climate change.
“The real reason wines got riper is that people wanted them to get riper. Generally, if you look at wines from the 2000s, you see more sugar in the grapes and more alcohol in the wines,” Kruth says. “People have been quick to associate this with climate change, when in reality it was conscious human decisions. Now you see the alcohols are dropping. It’s a consumer trend. The grower and winemaker have a strong hand in all of these things.”
Mike Heny, a longtime Virginia winemaker who makes wine for 15 vineyards in the state, points to steps that already have been taken around the world to address climate change.
“It’s a multipronged approach,” Henry says. “In Napa, people are removing the primary grape cluster so the secondary one is the one that gets turned into wine so you can push off ripening, which allows for lower potential alcohol and greater physiological maturity so you get greater flavors. People are leaving a bit more canopy, carrying a bigger fruit crop to delay ripening, picking earlier.”
Champagne is looking at England as a new venue for high-quality sparkling wines. In July, Bordeaux allowed a number of new grapes to be planted, he says. It was previously illegal to plant anything but the five main historic grapes. And in Italy, a new VCR program is working to breed traditional vinifera grapes like merlot with hybrids that are hardier and exhibit more resistance.
The question for Heny and other winemakers is whether consumers will be amenable to these changes.
“A mutt is better than a purebred when the going gets tough,” Heny says. “But people aren’t into drinking the mutt wines as much. At the end of the day, we have to make wines that people love.”
Pas De Merde 