The epicurean and slayer of junk food spent some lovely drunken evenings with his friend Jean Carmet, to the point, one night, of buying an unusual house. Memories he shared with Thierry Ardisson.
We know this iconic scene from “The wing or the thigh” by Claude Zidi (1976): deprived of taste, Charles Duchemin (Louis de Funès) describes a wine thanks to its color, its movement in the glass and its suspended waste . “Wine is the land”. Twenty years later, in the iconic “Paris Derniere”, Thierry Ardisson’s show – available on INA Arditube -, Jean-Pierre Coffe engaged in a similar exercise, tasting and celebrating wine.
The gastronomic critic and figure of good eating on television, who died in 2016, looks back on his friendship with Jean Carmet. Bon vivant and grape lover, the actor shared drunken evenings with Jean-Pierre Coffe. “What we managed to do with my friend Carmet was that we managed to manage our drunkenness very well. We walked them around, we made them last as long as possible […] Wine is much better than love. You won’t be disappointed with the wine. If you choose well, you won’t be disappointed. Whereas in love, if you choose well, you can still be disappointed,” he explains.
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“Depardieu drinks to forget”
Coffe says they would drink, stop, walk around, start again and have fun. “One evening, we did one where we had bought a brothel in Tours. His wife called me 48 hours later, asking: “What is this note from the notary?” We were so drunk that we signed a paper,” he laughs before admitting that he had never had this type of experience again. Time passed, Jean Carmet died in 1994 and weariness set in. When Thierry Ardisson asks him if he could share a “drunken night” with Gérard Depardieu, another bon vivant, Coffe responds in the negative. “No, Depardieu, he only drinks his wine, first. Then he drinks a lot. You can’t drink when you’re desperate. However, he drinks at such a rate that one has the impression that he is desperate. He drinks to forget […] You can’t explain the reasons why people drink. He’s probably very unhappy to drink stupidly like that. »
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“It’s the difference between being drunk and being drunk,” he adds. Being drunk is vulgar. Whereas a drunk guy, ultimately, there is a dignified side. You can lose your car. You can forget your wife in a place and leave. It’s a real madness, drunkenness, all the same. »
An extract to discover:
