I’d heard about this. Vines that suffer and struggle to survive … seem to provide the grapes that make the best wine. If so, it’s amazing the Languedoc wasn’t given more attention earlier for fine wines. The ground here is awful. Rocks everywhere. I doubt a vintner could stick a shovel in the ground […]

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I have noted, more than once, that the French are not crazy about team sports. Paris is by far the least sports-interested major city I have encountered. That partly explains why I have not seen a live sports event — of any sort — since January 3, when I stumbled across the late stages of […]

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Wherever we go in France, I make a hash of the French language. And it’s not just my comprehension, which is probably about 10 on a scale of 100. It’s my pronunciation, which is about a 0.5. I might be able to figure out a topic of conversation around me by identifying a handful of […]

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The mobile ride request company Uber has changed the face of transportation in many cities and perhaps none as radically as Paris. For decades, Paris’s taxi system, and its drivers, had no competition. Uber changed all that, for the better, in the opinion of thousands of Uber customers, and the old guard doesn’t like it […]

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Some travelers, Americans among them, would prefer not to announce their nationality, when overseas. The world is a judgmental place, sometimes a dangerous one, and why should visitors make it clear what sort of passport they are carrying when it hasn’t even come out of their pockets? That famously has led some Americans to wear […]

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  Over the past few decades, most humans came to grips with the reality that in exchange for “progress” we were going to have to breathe bad air. Life in nearly any megalopolis is an invitation to huff ozone and particulates. Conditions are particularly dire in the big cities of rising economies like China’s and […]

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Our little town in the Languedoc has just the one cafe. Across from the church, in the main place of the little town. Le Coin des Aromes. We tried it tonight, and liked it. Quite a bit. We even encountered a local wine that was quite good, ending our losing streak. Cost of dinner for […]

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Right? This is almost impossible. We are in France, not some theme-park version of it, and the notion of several days of bad wine or several consecutive bad baguettes … is incroyable. Wine and baguettes? That is the heart of French cuisine. Yet, there we are. Three bad-to-awful bottles of wine, several awful baguettes, including […]

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Unless our 2013 vintage Syrah tonight was an aberration, it appears Philippe Gallart was a better rugby player than he is vigneron. That was one of the selling points — well, in a peripheral way — as we got down to the business of tasting local wines, here in the Languedoc. “Philippe Gallart played internationally […]

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  It was about noon when the small, white flakes began to drift to the ground. I thought it was ash; maybe a fire somewhere near our little village, or neighbors using their fireplaces. One odd part of it was … the ash didn’t begin to accumulate on the ground. It hit the flag stones in […]

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