If you had to introduce yourself to a Martian?
I am a journalist and food critic, for radio and television; I write books on gastronomy, and I am interested in gastronomy in the broad sense, also trying to explore other territories as my adventures and professional projects take me. I was also the curator of an exhibition at the Conciergerie for the Centre des Monuments nationaux in 2023, called “Paris, Capital of Gastronomy”, and we are also creating a show, in which Jérôme Gagnez will in fact take part, a show about cooking for the Théâtre du Rond-Point, which will run on 1st, 2 and 3 April next, in this Paris public theatre, so there you go. But if I had to sum up, it could be gastronome in the broad sense.
What are you going to do at the Théâtre du Rond-Point?
The new team at the Rond-Point, in a stated wish to demystify theatre, got in touch with us, because we had already had a first experience on stage in 2023 at the Théâtre national de l’Orient which went very well. On the strength of that success, they offered us the chance to rework our show a little and present it to the public. The box office is open and the public is already there! The idea is perhaps to consider a tour of France. Well, there you are, we don’t want to put the cart before the horse, that’s more or less the idea, we’ll see.
Going back to “On va Déguster”, how did the programme come about, and with what desire?
In fact, it was born 15 years ago and exists thanks to a proposal from the management of France Inter. At the time, Philippe Val and Laurence Bloch, who were the pair at the head of France Inter, and who knew my writing as a food critic in L’Express, came to find me. Philippe Val phoned me and said, “are you interested in imagining a cookery programme for the summer?” You probably know that on public radio, the summer has long served as a sort of laboratory for trying out new voices and new talent, and that is how I found myself in front of the Inter microphone without really having sought it. That summer, in 2010, we did 10 programmes that went well. In the wake of that, they put us on air every Sunday. We are about to begin our fifteenth season.
Has wine always been part of the programme?
Yes, wine was envisaged right away. At the start we were a bit monotone in the sense that we had a starting trio made up of me at the microphone and two columnists: Elvira Masson, an all-terrain columnist who is still on the team, and Dominique Huttin, less present today. After a few years, we widened the gang. And that is how “On va Déguster” opened up to other voices that embodied wine in different ways.
There was Antoine Gerbelle and then Jérôme Gagnez, who of course occupies an important place in this programme. There is also Justine Knapp, who talks about wine a bit differently with a style all her own. It’s true that Jérôme Gagnez is very prominent. He comes to speak with a certain plain-spokenness about what he likes or doesn’t like. He does, as you know, a lot to promote the Bordeaux region because he is in the front row of this vineyard, even though he did not fail, a few years ago, to take part in Bordeaux bashing. At the same time, there were reasons for doing so, as a spurned lover. We now have a more polyphonic programme with different personalities and singular voices. It is up to me as captain of the ship to try to keep the vessel balanced, with people who embody tradition more, others commitment, even though overall we don’t make a campaigning programme. We have no vocation to be one and it is not our role, even though we are committed to eating well and drinking well, with of course a certain ecological awareness. One can’t do otherwise today. Besides, some of us are very proudly “franchouillard” (unashamedly French), and claim it, since we are lucky enough to live in a country with traditions that continue to move me every day and to trigger pleasure. We remain open to all the cuisines of the world because that is also my editorial range. In the end that makes a programme that aims to be the showcase of today’s cooking without of course forgetting all its historical, heritage or societal dimension. We have in fact a renowned historian, Loïc Bienassis, who has joined us and who, as it happens, has the virtue of reminding us of the history of cooking. This cultural perspective interests me greatly.
“On va Déguster” has evolved; what was your initial ambition?
To be very honest, France Inter’s brief was to make a programme that stirs joy and good humour and makes your mouth water. In fact, France Inter was coming out of a long tunnel, even though I greatly enjoyed the programmes that came before us. We had to distinguish ourselves from some ten years of our friend Coffe’s “Ça se bouffe pas, ça se mange”. He had imprinted a form of indignation or controversy where we wished to offer news that was a little less anxiety-inducing, a bubble of good humour. Which doesn’t mean we are Care Bears. Our intention from the start was to offer a positive view of gastronomy, to invite to our microphone people who embodied the right word, the positive example. So we invite winegrowers who carry a new or iconoclastic vision of wine, or market gardeners who have things to tell us about the diversity of vegetable plants. I make my honey from all these interlocutors who have knowledge to share from every background. This is botanical, scientific, historical, geographical and cultural knowledge. To tell the truth, I try to widen the spectrum as much as possible because otherwise I would be a little bored. I keep doing this programme to learn things. As the programmes have gone by, I have become less and less a dupe and I have ended up building myself a culinary culture. But I still keep learning things. That is what excites me. I prepare my programmes myself. They are co-prepared by a production assistant who supplies me with material from Radio France’s documentation. I talk to my guests beforehand, I write my own questions, I look into this or that aspect. It is craftsman’s work that I like to go on doing.
“On Va déguster” is sometimes erudite but never inward-looking.
Over the years, we have fleshed out and dared more specialised subjects. In the summer of 2010, we did a programme on Italian cooking. I devoted a book to it that took me 10 years of work, with 600 pages as a result. You can well imagine that today we no longer do programmes on Italian cooking. We do a programme on Venetian cooking, on risotto or on balsamic vinegar. We have thus managed to make our programme more specialised while remaining accessible and popular, because we do not at all want to be inward-looking. The idea is to bring our audience along… and our ratings show that we have somewhat succeeded in our wager. Nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at a dinner or someone comes up to me in the street or on the metro to tell me they greatly enjoyed a programme on Parmesan or on strawberries. Whereas a priori this person is not necessarily much of a gourmet. We try to make the gastronomic programme for anyone who is a little curious and not necessarily obsessed with food. Obviously the food-obsessed follow us, and we have a hard core of people passionate about the subject, but the idea remains to take this step aside, to address as wide an audience as possible. I repeat myself, but we try to do it through pleasure and good humour. The editorial line of our programme is perhaps to tell serious things about gastronomy but with good humour and conviviality. Jérôme Gagnez contributes greatly to this good humour, with his laughter and his full mouths expressing themselves at the microphone. The aim is also to have a good time together.
15 years is a long time, isn’t it?
For 15 years I have been getting up fairly early on Sundays to finish preparing my programme. I don’t always feel like it, but when I’m in front of the microphone, the pleasure is there. We’re happy to be there together.
Is this on-air chemistry partly the reason for this success?
Yes, I like that word. There is a team spirit, and I have the weakness of thinking that some of the listeners want to be with us. From the start, in the brief, there was the idea of a gang programme.
Let us dwell on the de-consumption of wine: will salvation come through the table?
Cooking in France, but also in the other countries of the Old Continent, is conceived like that, with wine. Yes, I entirely agree, gastronomy can reconcile people with wine. Wine is systematically approached in our programme in connection with the rest of the content, and we do not envisage decontextualising wine from the rest of the programme; it would make no sense. Wine invites itself in precisely to bring fluidity to our remarks and complete the offering, complete the plate. That is a bit our idea, that is how we envisage wine, as a centuries-old tradition that accompanies the celebration of gastronomy in the definition of the French gastronomic meal, as it was inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list in 2010. Wine is explicitly named; it is an integral part of the whole culinary protocol, the arts of the table, the course of a meal. I think that is truly the best way of speaking about it. What shelters us from the criticisms of ARCOM, or the CSA in the past, is precisely approaching wine in this heritage dimension. Wine cannot be suspected of being responsible for excessive alcohol consumption in France and accused of every ill, because one would first have to start by taking on the spirits giants who, more or less covertly, encourage alcohol consumption among young people, alcohols that tell no story, alcohols with much higher alcohol levels than wine. We try to tell the story of wine; it has moreover been proven that when you tell the story of wine as a culture, as a heritage, you do not encourage consumption, or else a reasonable consumption, more or less in line with our health imperatives. We always state that wine should be consumed in moderation; we are a public-service programme, let us not forget, reaching between 1.5 and 2 million listeners every Sunday.
What is your first memory of wine?
I grew up in Lyon, where we had a house with a fitted-out cellar. We had, to be honest, a regional bias. It was when I was able to break open my piggy bank, much later, as a student, to go to the great restaurants that I discovered the great Bordeaux. But my first emotions in terms of wine are to be credited to my father, who was broadly passionate about Mediterranean wines and those of the northern Rhône Valley. My mother was a fan of Syrah. In summer, we often drank white Crozes-Hermitage. My father also liked Bandol wines. As my mother had Corsican origins, I must say that the Patrimonios based on Niellucciu, a cousin of Sangiovese, made a big impression on me, with the barrel-aged wines of Orenga de Gaffory, who offered precisely wines with a slightly Bordeaux profile. They were wines that my father had taken the time to age in his cellar and that had this slightly concentrated side. Lovely wines that my mother would serve with a good bœuf bourguignon or a navarin of lamb. It’s true that I was raised somewhat on the Rhône Valley and I still have an affection for Gigondas and Cornas. Obviously, my taste in wine broadened thanks to my professional discoveries, thanks to my many restaurant experiences and also thanks to “On Va déguster”. I visit more and more estates and I am delighted to do so on the occasion of my filming or my travels in France and abroad.
What is the theme of the last programme of the season?
On 22 June, we will celebrate it as a gang! These last programmes of the year are often programmes for the columnists! Around the table we will have the two cronies Jérôme Gagnez and Laurent Delmas, Zazie Tavitian, Manon Fleury and Alexandra Pierini. Each of them will draw their good tips, their good cuvées, their delicious reading, their summer recipes, and I will do a blind tasting. It’s a bit of an appetiser for summer. I see it as a last day of school… We stop working, we get the games out… it will be a joyful mess, in short!
Coming through Bordeaux soon?
Yes, several times! I am coming to host a talk with Jérôme as part of the Vendanges du Savoir at the Cité du Vin in September, and I am coming to give a small “pizza” training session at Bartolo Calderone’s.
