What do you remember about our trip to Paris?” I ask Sonia, my wife, as I admire the passing blue, purple, pink, and yellow wildflowers on State Highway 101. We went to France in the fall of 2008 just before I proposed. It was a long weekend of delicious meals and no set plans. She chose a purple scarf when I took her shopping. I bought a baguette to bring back to our hotel room, where she was sleeping off jet lag. She mentions none of this.
“You were tense,” Sonia says.
That’s right, I remember, I did feel tense.
The spontaneous trip to Paris was compensation for insecurities I couldn’t begin to articulate, much less address, back then. I imagined going to Paris for a few days would make the prospect of spending a lifetime with me more attractive.
Now, in advance of what will be 15 years of increasingly happy and self-aware marriage this November, we are headed back to Paris—sort of. I am whisking Sonia away to the 11th Paris, Texas Wine Fest, held annually in April in the small town on the western edge of the Piney Woods. And this time, we’re going to enjoy ourselves.
I don’t know what to expect from Paris, Texas. Is it a tourist town leaning into try-hard Paris-but-not-France jokes or just an ordinary rural Texas town? As it turns out, neither. Paris, Texas, is something much better. Unlike many aspirational names chosen for Texas towns in hopes they would become a New London or a second Athens, this Paris supposedly got its name because it was the furthest thing from the world’s most thriving city at the time. Despite the historically comic misnomer, this Texas town is thriving by embracing the absurdity.
Enjoying this article?We only have a few hours before the VIP reception at the wine festival, so we take in as much of Paris as an afternoon affords. We pop into the modern Paris Bakery, where the menu offers French dip sandwiches, croissants, baguettes, and French wines, but also something called a cowboy cookie. I get one of those, as well as a baguette. Old habits, you know.
An entire wall of the bakery is decorated with an old map of downtown. The city burned down to the bricks in 1916 and then was extravagantly rebuilt in an act of community resilience. The large and impressively lovely Mediterranean and Classic Revival style First United Methodist Church, built in 1922, stops me in my tracks. Elsewhere, the neon marquee of the Grand Theatre, built in 1937, still works, though the rest of the structure is under renovation. Other buildings in downtown Paris recall a gilded era but retain the bones of prewar architecture. Even the vacant storefronts are pretty.
A number of businesses wink at the Paris joke—a bright and cheery ice cream parlor called Sundae in Paris, the Olive Paris store (sound it out). But others play it straight, mostly—like Paris Grocery, which has cheeses and wines from Texas, not France. On the wall hangs the schedule of the local junior college’s baseball team. The only nod toward the joke are stickers for sale that say, “I Love Paris,” but where the heart would normally be there’s the shape of Texas.
Sonia buys one for me. “We’ll always have Paris,” I say, mock-comically.
I get over my preconceptions and notice signs of life. Young moms are hanging out at the well-appointed yet relaxed Paris Coffee Co. Teen girls in prom dresses are having their pictures taken by the Culbertson Fountain in the middle of the plaza. There are even newspaper vending machines filled with copies of The Paris News, published since 1869. We’re too early for the May dedication of a historical marker commemorating the first Coca-Cola sold in Texas, but we do get our photo taken by the Dr Pepper mural honoring the Paris chemist who perfected the formula. Take that, France.
We’re having another picture taken by the Grand Theatre marquee when we run into Julia Trigg Crawford, executive director of Keep Paris Beautiful “and the sign changer-outter at the Grand.” She has just completed the Don’t Mess with Texas Trashoff, where she and about 300 volunteers picked up litter all morning. Crawford says they had already tidied up before the eclipse, when 10,000 people visited to witness totality, including several hundred from France. “Our town really is clean right now,” she says.
Sonia asks Crawford about the dress code for the evening. “Feel free to bling it out if you want,” she says. “It’s see-and-be-seen.”
Sixteen years ago, the first thing we did after landing in France was get a drink at the Ritz and go to the Eiffel Tower. There is no Ritz hotel in Paris, Texas, but there is an Eiffel Tower—a 65-foot-tall replica built in 1993. It’s in the parking lot of the Love Civic Center, which is hosting a pop culture convention featuring actors from Return of the Jedi. It’s hard to confuse the Texas replica with the French original. For one, this one has a giant, red cowboy hat on top.
“I would say it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, but I’ve seen Little Stonehenge,” Sonia says. As we gawk at it, a man walks by dressed as a Jedi with a lightsaber, also a replica. Few close encounters of this kind occur at Little Stonehenge, or in Paris, France, for that matter. Later, Sonia admits the red cowboy hat is “kinda cute.”
Apparently, there is no historical consensus on how Paris, Texas, got its name, but the version I like the best is this: George W. Wright, a wealthy farmer, donated the land for the town in 1844 and chose to name it unseriously after the City of Light. It was “in the spirit of fun,” according to a contemporary account. Paris, Texas, has always been in on the joke.
The VIP reception, called Fête du Vin, is held under pink lights in a shabby-chic prewar storefront. At the first of four serving stations, a vivacious brunette with bright blue eyes soldiers her way through the description of a shallot gougère paired with a 2022 chenin blanc. She’s tripping over the name of the savory pastry, so Sonia and I let her know it’s “goo-ZHERE.”
“Y’all just saved my day,” says Elizabeth Zimmerman, who is co-owner of the wine bar Vin de Paris, a stop on that evening’s wine crawl. Zimmerman lights up when we tell her why we’re visiting and invites us back during Cinco de Mayo for a margarita crawl.
At another station, jolly Walt Reep is serving seared shrimp on toast paired with a French rosé. He’s another co-owner of Vin de Paris as well as Sundae in Paris, but he seems especially proud of his Airbnbs. “People drive hours out of their way to stay there,” Reep says. “We should be the next Fredericksburg.”
He calls the locals Parisites, not Parisians. Reep is definitely in on the joke. So are a crew of wine moms wearing “Sip Happens” T-shirts at an upscale baby boutique called Paris Baby, where we sample some of our favorite wines of the evening from Neighbors Place Winery in Bonham.
We end our night at Vin de Paris with sparkling wine from Rowdy Creek Ranch & Vineyard in Gilmer paired with a terrific bread pudding from High Cotton Kitchen. Sonia and I find stools at the bar. It’s hopping. Sonia chit-chats with Zimmerman while I meet her fiancé, a lanky rock-climbing instructor and historic restorationist named Andrew Turnbo.
They met when she was a student at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and working in a bar owned by his friend. The first time he saw her she dropped a tray of glasses. He was smitten. “That was it,” he says. Turnbo glows when he talks about her. “She was voted Best Bartender in Lamar County in 2024!” he says.
Soon she moved in with him on his restored sailboat. After school, she suggested he move home to Paris with her. “How could I say no? She lived on the sailboat for six months,” Turnbo says.
The real reason he so readily agreed to move to Paris had less to do with the town than with Zimmerman. He’s a bit older and had seen enough of the world that when he met her, he could tell that she was the kind of girl you go to Paris with. I know how he feels.
