No Place Like Home: From Paris to Brighton
No Place Like Home: From Paris to Brighton
There’s a strange clarity that travel gives you. When you find yourself in new places, the unfamiliar streets start to reveal something you already knew. Paris hums under soft rain. New York glows under streetlights. And somewhere between those two cities, home begins to take shape in your memory before you ever return.
For us, that home is Brighton and Hove - Sea air, guitars on the promenade, posters curling on lamp posts. But before you arrive, you walk, you listen, you taste.
Paris | Les Marchés des Enfants Rouges
It’s a slow morning near the Marais. The cobbles are slick with rain. We wander through Les Marchés des Enfants Rouges, the city’s oldest covered market. Butchers call across their counters while the Boucher de Paris lifts a cut to the light. There’s Clovis, always there, laughing with friends over small glasses of wine. Someone smokes, someone debates philosophy, someone hums along to the street accordion outside.
You could stay here forever, surrounded by the scent of roasted peppers, fresh bread, and young wine poured straight from the bottle. Paris isn’t loud. It murmurs. Culture is everywhere, not curated or staged just quietly lived.
Wine memory: a chilled ELIZABETH, Maison TERRAL, Paysans par Amour 2024, shared on a crate table, tasting faintly of iron and fruit skins, the colour of late morning light.
New York | Pet Nat and Jazz on the Lawn
We cross the bridge and chase the hum downtown. First stop: The Wine Hut, a narrow glowing space lined with pet-nats and chilled reds sweating in the fridge. We pick a bottle, cold to the touch, and keep walking. A few blocks later, the smell of pizza finds us — a quick slice, folded in half, bottle tucked under arm.
By dusk we’re in Washington Square Park, jazz floating through the trees. Students stretch out on blankets, tourists wander past, artist's sketch, strangers laugh. Life plays out in front of us like a film you’ve seen before but never really watched. The cork pops, bubbles rise, and the music wraps around the skyline. You remember why people fall in love with this city because for a moment, you feel part of it.
Wine memory: a chilled Lammidia Rosh, lightly fizzy and bright, cutting through New York humidity with notes of green apple and summer berries.
Brighton and Hove | The Return
Sea spray on the promenade. Chalk cliffs in the distance. Buskers at dusk and gallery lights still glowing.
Brighton has a heartbeat. You can hear it in the waves breaking against the pier and the laughter spilling out of pubs into the street. Here, we pour slower. Every glass finds its rhythm again salt in the air, warmth in the wood, music through open doors.
La Cave Noire lives in that rhythm. It’s where travel ends and belonging begins. Where the stories from Paris and New York come home, re-poured in Brighton light.
The Echo of Elsewhere
Travel changes how you taste. A Loire bottle recalls Clovis’s laughter. A wild pet-nat brings back that night in Washington Square. Every glass carries geography, not drawn on a map but held in memory.
Next week, we’ll talk about The Taste of Elsewhere how terroir and travel overlap, and why some wines feel like déjà vu. Until then, drink something that reminds you of where you’ve been and where you’ll return.
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