A 19-year-old English man who was nursing a broken heart left his job as a trainee chef at the Connaught Hotel in London in 1975 and came to Paris. Mark Williamson never dreamed he would still be here 46 years later, the owner of the legendary Willi's Wine Bar in the Rue des Petits-Champs, wedged in between the Palais Royal gardens and the old Bibliothèque Nationale.
Williamson celebrated Willi's 40th anniversary by publishing a book, Immoveable Feast: Forty years of Feeding the French. The cover, from a poster by Anthony Palliser, shows a bare-breasted woman holding aloft a bottle of Bordeaux, like Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.
Twenty-four years ago, Williamson bought the elegant adjacent Mercure Galant restaurant, which he rechristened Macéo, after an African-American saxophonist.
When Willi's and Macéo reopen on August 24th, after a 10-month closure due to the Covid pandemic, it will be a sign that life is returning to normal, for the lunchtime crowd of French office workers and shopkeepers, the tourists who wander over after their afternoons in the Louvre, and for the clients of nearby hotels. The mix of ages and professions, of French and foreign, creates an exotic ambience, not unlike Rick's Place in Casablanca.
Williamson learned his trade from the late British wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who organised the 1976 wine-tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. Spurrier had the best French palates compare French Chardonnays and Bordeaux with California Cabernet Sauvignons, blindfolded. The California wines won. "It caused a phenomenal furore," Williamson laughs. "It was a reformation of what was thought to be possible."
Generic wines
Roy Richards, another British wine merchant, writes that Williamson "changed for ever and irreversibly the profile of the Parisian wine bar". Until Williamson, Parisian wine bars mainly served Beaujolais, which they bought in barrels and rebottled. "The blackboard would say Morgon, Chiroubles ... no vintage, no producer, no terroir. Just generic wines," says Williamson.
Williamson’s love of variety, novelty and wines from all over the world attracted attention. A newspaper food critic was scandalised that an English man should be selling St Joseph wine in Paris.
“He was one of those old crusty French idiots,” Williamson says. “I wrote back and thanked him for his article and said, ‘What would you rather I sold? Coca Cola?’”
The French owner of a wine bar on the left bank told Williamson one couldn't sell Côtes du Rhône in a wine bar. "I said, 'We'll see about that'. A sommelier told me sherry wasn't something you could sell to the French. I said, 'Maybe you can't.' The French create barriers for themselves, and that's where coming from the outside was interesting."
What are his favourite wines? "Malaga, Madeira, Tokai from Hungary, dry sherry ... wines that are slightly off the wall ... sipping things. I love drinking wines that are young and fresh and full of fruit. I love wines that are spicy and have architecture and profile and great energy."
Wine for all seasons
Williamson shops for seasonal food in open air markets and matches menus with the appropriate wine. “In the summer I like wines that are young and fruity and fresh and vibrant, and in the winter I like wines that are opulent and luscious and busty and fragrant and that you lose yourself in, in a totally different way.”
Williamson has noticed that the alcohol content of wine is often 14 degrees, compared with 12.5 degrees 20 years ago. "It's because of global warming. There will be many places where you won't be able to make wine any more," he says. "The wine is going to be too alcoholic to be much fun. California, the south of France and Australia all have this problem." The severe 2003 heatwave produced "horrible" wine, he says, "confituré, jammy".
A report by the French medical research institute Inserm this summer outlined the dramatic public health consequences of alcohol consumption. Williamson thinks alcoholism is more common among drinkers of beer and spirits. “Wine has always been part of European civilisation,” he says. “Wine makes us feel good, relax and communicate.”
Last October, Williamson’s book launch and celebration of the 40th anniversary of Willi’s wine bar was a strange occasion, with widely spaced tables and no crowd milling. He fears it would tempt fate to celebrate the reopening. “The next few months are going to be a bit challenging. We are going to get it going and try and see if we can put Covid under the carpet and get on with life.”
