France Inter listeners know his voice and his verve. Charline Vanhoenacker, Belgian journalist and columnist, 44, wrote a cheeky and funny morning column there for seven years. Replaced since the start of the school year, she keeps a weekly appointment, on Thursdays at 8:55 a.m., and still hosts the daily program “Par Jupiter! », renamed « It’s us again! “. During the International Journalism Festival (FIJ), which took place last July in Couthures (Lot-et-Garonne), organized among others by the Le Monde Group and of which she was the godmother, Charline Vanhoenacker spoke about the wine that she likes… and a little beer.
Before attacking a glass of local Côtes-du-Marmandais, I noticed that you drank a beer to “refresh your palate”. So, are you beer or wine?
Rather wine. I only really enjoy beer when it’s very, very hot. It is she who quenches my thirst the most. I discovered this in Burkina Faso. Every year I spent about a month there with a humanitarian association, Aviation sans frontières, which came to the aid of orphans attending school in a region of the country. She offered school kits, new clothes, a dish of rice for the most neglected children, to encourage their guardians to send them to school rather than leaving them at home or in the fields.
What do you like about beer?
In the bush, under an impossible dodger, with all the dust, it was ideal. This beer, Brakina, is brewed by one of my Belgian friends. I then discovered that this beverage was drunk all over the world and that, in such a setting, it gave me great pleasure.
In Belgium, you didn’t drink it?
I spent my first twenty-two years in La Louvière [le même nom qu’un château prestigieux en pessac-léognan, dans le Bordelais], between Mons and Charleroi, 40 kilometers from the French border. Of course, I knew beer at university. At student parties, which take place in huge rooms, sort of bunkers, you only drink beer, there is no wine. A tradition, in these evenings, is that when there is an inch of drink left in your cup, you throw it into the crowd. You come out soaked, of course. I also remember a beer, the Westmalle, which was drunk while peeling gray shrimps, on the North Sea coast. But I don’t think it’s warm enough in Belgium to enjoy beer. It is a country for drinking wine.
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