“Say-bas-tee-YON! Come with me.” He grabbed his keys and marched toward his truck, custom-made to be the biggest in the Southern states. I checked to make sure his new shotgun wasn’t anywhere in evidence. “Honey,” he called to his wife Annette, “we’re going to get some wine.”

“Shall I come along?” I asked nervously.

“No, you’ll only start talking French again. We’ll do just fine.”

They arrived back in an hour, Sébastien grinning from ear to ear, both arms wrapped around a paperbag chock-full of wine bottles. My redneck brother was similarly loaded. “I thought we should stock up while we had an expert around,” he said. “Now, Say-bas-tee-YON, explain to us why these are good wines.”

11:00 A.M., the day after Christmas, and the kitchen island was soon sporting half a dozen bottles as Sébastien gave a short lesson in tasting.

“Hmm.” After various tastes, David looked thoughtful. Even pricked by suspicion. “You know, Annette, I wonder if that wine we picked up from Alabama is actually any good? And that jug of wine that guy at the liquor store told me was as fine as all that fancy stuff? Let’s see what Say-bas-tee-YON thinks of it.”

The appalled look on my poor Parisian’s face when he saw that jug of “as fine as the fancy stuff” wine was priceless. He nevertheless summoned up the courage to taste it. “It tastes, ah, very similar to glue,” he said as politely as he could. “Glue? Isn’t that the right word in English, Laura?” he checked, as laughter erupted around him.

“Don’t worry, we understood ‘glue,’ ” my sister-in-law said.

The Alabama wine came next. After he sipped it there was a lengthy and puzzled pause. “It is meant to be wine?”

That brought another explosion of hilarity.

“I’m serious!” Sébastien protested. “I was just checking.” He tried to explain the technical reasons for which he had genuinely thought it might not be meant to be wine, but no one would stop laughing long enough to listen.

My big brother David had adopted a look of outrage at these aspersions on his wine cellar, but his lips were crinkling at the corners. He burst out laughing, too. “I just got a new shotgun, Say-bas-tee-YON,” he said, clapping Sébastien on the shoulder. “Why don’t you come out and shoot it with us?”

I’m pretty sure the emphasis on the “with” is why a Frenchman should never leave civilization without a corkscrew and some wine. But I think Sébastien’s acceptance was really sealed—accent, sharp clothes, earrings, and all—when he out-shot my biggest brother with his own shotgun the whole afternoon. “I guess I was just made to be a redneck,” he said with a grin. He seemed to be having the time of his life.