Street food in Montmartre

     Held each October, the Fête des Vendanges in Montmartre celebrates the very small amount of wine actually produced right here in Paris. The harvest, of course, is just another excuse for a helluva street party. Much of it happens around the base of Sacré Coeur, the white onion-domed church that's one of the city's best-known landmarks. The view from the top is staggering, and so are you after ascending hundreds of stone steps. Rather than climbing on foot (or probably on knees by the time we'd made it there) to the base of Sacré Coeur, we queued with dozens of other party-goers and took the funiculaire, a cable car that, for the price of a metro ticket, whisks you from base camp to summit in about a minute.
    Wine, wine, wine, champagne, champagne, champagne. Sample it, buy it by the glass or by the bottle and ask for it to be opened and supplied with a few plastic glasses. Then go find a convenient spot to enjoy.

Then stack your empties alongside all the others.

      It's not all drinking of course. There's also food, food, food. This year's theme is France's various tropical islands. Spicy smells met us as we climbed towards the main exhibition area.

This stall sold sandwiches filled with foie gras--and your choice of fig chutney of confit of onions--or goose rillettes.

     Bad mistiming. It was too late for lunch, and too early for dinner, so we ruined our appetites about 6 p.m. with a barquette of potatoes and cepes, then funiculaire-d back to ground level, metro-d back to the Marais and, a couple of hours later, still found ourselves too stuffed for anything more than a bowl of Vietnamese noodles.