Kudos to Jean-Claude Vrinat for not only hiring charming American sommelier Alison Vollenweider to mind the new Caves de Taillevant wine stand at the Printemps department store, in Paris, but for also having the imagination to link Vollenweider’s terrific blog about being a new gal in town to the main Taillevant website. Vollenweider, a native New Yorker, discovered her interest in wine after ditching work on an M.A. in photography at Hunter College. “A friend suggested I take Andrea Immer’s wine course at Windows on the World, the famous restaurant that was in the World Trade Center, and I discovered my passion for wine very quickly,” says Vollenweider, 35, who then went to work for Ritz-Carlton in L.A. and the very prestigious Cordeillan Bages hotel, near Bordeaux, before coming to Paris. “We carry wines from Argentina, Chile, California and other places, but the French don’t buy them,” says Vollenweider. And what’s it like to be an American woman selling vin in Paris? “Most people don’t seem to have a problem with the fact that I’m a woman, but unfortunately sometimes I have to explain that I worked in Bordeaux for two years to establish my credibility. Most French people assume that Americans couldn’t possibly know anything about wine,” Vollenweider explains. She says that she loves Paris, too, and that she and her Swiss husband, a massage therapist at the Four Seasons George V, have just bought an apartment and are planning to stay put.
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