When the heavy winds and harsh storms that came through Santa Cruz, CA this winter I got pretty nervous for these petite, delicate flowers; thinking the color of my garden would get swept away and lost forever. Yet I'm happy to say they've withstood
primer on French red wine
I had the good fortune of leading another wine tasting last week focusing on French reds. While it’s pretty impractical (and nearly impossible) to run the gamut of French wine in a single tasting, a “’round the country” on the basics is possible. I didn’t have a map of France handy at the tasting as a visual aid in this circumnavigation, so I went with a geometric example.
France looks roughly like a pentagon pointed upwards. (Work with me here.) Almost all the French red wine you’ll commonly see comes from one of five regions. To get a sense of where these regions are, if you travel clockwise around this shape with the tip of the pentagon at 12 o’clock, Burgundy is at 3 o’clock. Almost in a straight line south from 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock are Beaujolais and the Rhone Valley. Continuing around, Bordeaux is at around 8 o’clock and the Loire Valley runs inward from the coast at around 10.
[In case you’re interested, Paris is straight south of high noon, Champagne is at around 1 o’clock, Alsace is at 2, and Provence and the Languedoc run along the south coast from 5 to 6. Armagnac clocks in at 7 and Cognac is at 9. Put all this together and you have what sounds like a perfectly reasonable drinking schedule.]
