Getting schooled by free wine in the city of lights

There are few things more exciting for a college student on a budget than school-sponsored drinking.

At Reid Hall, Columbia’s campus in Paris, the options are both far classier and far more educational than Lerner Pub.

It didn’t take long to discover that cocktails in Paris, particularly in the more centrally located (read: touristy) neighborhoods, are a relatively unaffordable extravagance. After a few drinks, it’s tempting to ignore the exchange rate and convince oneself that spending 10 euros on a mojito isn’t that different from spending $10. The unfortunate truth, however, is that it is, and that $10 is too much to spend on a cocktail anyway.

But, fortunately for me and many other strapped-for-cash students, Reid Hall has incorporated enough booze into its free extracurricular activities to satisfy even the thirstiest of foreigners.

Indeed, three out of four of the program activities I’ve participated in have involved multiple glasses of wine or champagne. The Reid Hall sponsored wine tasting—complete with rosé champagne, chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and accompanying cheese pairings—was perhaps the most obvious way to gain access to free drinks.

But our day trip to Reims, a small city two hours outside of Paris that is home to the medieval Cathedral of Reims, also concluded with a tour of and champagne tasting at the Pommery Winery.

At the end of our atelier cuisine­—French for “cooking class”—we indulged not only in a homemade zucchini and goat cheese tart, Basque chicken, and crème brulée, but also had a bottle of wine with dinner and boxed sangria while we waited for the chicken to cook.

(The fourth activity, a conversation exchange between French students from the Sorbonne and Reid Hall students, could have incorporated alcohol as well, I suppose, but seeing as it took place at one in the afternoon in between classes, Coke and chips were probably a better choice than wine and cheese.)

As these are school-sponsored activities, Reid Hall made an effort to make the drinking educational. We learned about the long and complicated process of making champagne in the caves at Pommery Winery, and I came out of the dégustation du vin with various fun facts that actually make shopping for a bottle of wine at the grocery store a bit easier.

School-sponsored drinking seems somehow illicit, because in the United States many Reid Hall students are not old enough to drink. In France, however, the de jure drinking age is 18, while the de facto drinking age is “If you’re old enough to really enjoy it in a sophisticated way, you’re old enough to drink it.”

Wine or champagne is considered as critical to a meal as bread, and as critical to French culture as literature and art. To be sure, hard alcohol has its own, less highbrow associations here, and I have felt like kind of a creep for buying it. (At many grocery stores, you have to ask an attendant to select the bottle for you and are forbidden to buy any after 10:30 p.m.)

But the act of purchasing wine at the grocery store doesn’t feel different from buying juice, and the experience of visiting a wine store makes me feel like I’ve become part of some large but exclusive, cultured, French club.

For a student on a budget, signing up for all of Reid Hall’s activities is certainly a good strategy to drink for free. But the fact that Reid Hall incorporates wine into so many of its activities is also a testament to the central role wine plays in French culture at large.

So, really, how could I possibly turn down that third glass of wine? I’m just trying to learn about my host culture.

Tags: Arts & Entertainment, Julia Halperin