We didn't go out of our way to find organic wine to join this month's Wine Pairing Weekend discussion of the topic. In fact, we rarely look for the organic label when buying wine. But most of the low intervention wines we gravitate toward, including those we fly back from our trusty caviste in Toulouse,... Continue Reading →
The oldest wine we've ever had was from the Jura. It was a vin jaune by Michel Tissot, from... 1961! We'd kept it in our basement for a few years and never dared to open it. No occasion seemed to feel special enough. So, in February 2019, at last, we popped the cork for Open... Continue Reading →
This month the French #Winophiles offer suggestions for newcomers to explore French wine. As college professors, and especially since Pierre started teaching a course called The Idea of Wine six years ago at the University of Puget Sound, most wine newbies we meet are college students in their senior year. We’re so lucky! Usually just... Continue Reading →
Our exposure to Texas is, well, remote at best. Weirdly, most of it boils down to Pierre’s French upbringing. Really. There was a lunch at grandma’s house with one of Pierre’s dad’s cousins. Much of the Vietnamese family (dad’s side) left Vietnam throughout the 60s and 70s and landed in various part of the world.... Continue Reading →
We’re fascinated by how wine regions, young and old, develop reputations. As we prepared to open the bottle of Cahors that had been waiting for this month’s #Winophiles event, we browsed through various wine books to see how the image of Cahors wines has evolved, and where it stands.
Back during the year when we lived in Williamstown Massachusetts, we marveled as our neighbor, a fellow economics professor, regularly stood on the porch in the freezing winter to grill steaks. That, with the quaint atmosphere of Williamstown, which felt like the set of the Gilmore Girls, was all part of Pierre’s welcome to the USA. And our dear neighbor didn’t grill just any random piece of meat. He got his Omaha Steaks shipped frozen from Nebraska. They certainly didn’t risk unwanted defrosting on the porch. And sure, even top restaurant chefs don’t hesitate to get the best meat and fish shipped in this way if they’re not locally available. So, what about winemakers?
This month’s wine pairing theme has everything that makes us geek out. Emerging wine region? Check. A new culinary adventure? Check. New ways to think about economic development? Check. When we started research for this post, we knew what everyone knows. Everyone wants to visit Brazil for its beauty, from cultural and ecological diversity to... Continue Reading →
This month the Winophiles group explores the wines of the French Basque country, which really means only one appellation: Irouléguy. This tiny wine region, just 220 hectares total, has experienced quite the revival in the last two decades. In fact, it turned its reputation around big time, and we love that kind of story, which applies to regions and sometimes even entire countries.
About two weeks ago, Wednesday 10pm, it was too late when we remembered the Wine Pairing Weekend tasting group on Twitter (#WinePW) had a New Zealand theme planned in August. A few hours later we were off to France. The odds of us joining the #WinePW fun looked slim. Finding quality New Zealand wine in Toulouse France, we thought, would take far more than a quick trip to supermarkets like Carrefour or Casino. Click on picture to read more.
When the #WinePW group announced the theme of this month, South Africa, the first word that popped in our minds was not a region or grape variety, but “upgrading.” That’s one of the big words we ran into at the beginning of our wine research a few years ago. Why? Because our first instinct was to go to… our university libraries’ databases. Oh, college professors. We can’t be saved. Anyway, this month’s #WinePW theme is a good reminder that we are terribly ignorant about South African wine, and South Africa more generally, and don’t drink enough South African wine!
Traveling Wine Profs 