The Doors of Paris and the Beaujolais Nouveau

I feel happier just looking at these images of 50 doors of Paris. Thanks to Plep, who has just returned from a trip to Nepal, for directing me to it.

If you need some artificial happiness, this year's vintage of Beaujolais Nouveau will be available at midnight (the beginning of the third Thursday of November) in France. (You can buy it in North American stores starting tomorrow morning.) There are midnight tasting parties throughout France, which are a lot of fun, more for the spirit of fun than for the wine, which is usually raw and unspectacular. This year's edition, however, thanks to a frost in the spring and a long summer heatwave, has been called by some advance tasters "une année d'exception [an exceptional year]." Others are not so happy about the rise in price this year, given that this sort of extremely young wine should really be dirt cheap.