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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Whenever helium gets in a fix, whenever neon is at risk, whenever argon and krypton and xenon and radon are ganged up on by the other 110 chemical elements … and we know they are pretty much inert … “Nobleman” is ready to shed his civilian dress and come to the rescue. Those six elements […]

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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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This is an issue for Yanks in France. How many kisses to give to someone you are meeting again … or meeting for the first time? Outsiders can’t be expected to get it right, but they risk being judged by locals for their performance on the bisous (French for “kisses”) front. It’s at least as […]

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This was the idea: We would try to live three months in each of four Mediterranean-oriented European countries, places where they enjoy at least 300 days of sunshine per year, and when we were done we would choose, presumably from those four stops, a place we would want to live for at least a year. […]

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The New York Times has an interesting piece about three smart-alecks who cooperated on a newspaper hoax in 1941, convincing several newspapers (including The Times) to run the weekly scores of a make-believe college football team and its make-believe opponents. What the hoaxers did was simple: They called in the made-up score to the sports […]

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It dawned on me, finally, that three of the most prestigious/expensive beach communities on the Mediterranean Sea are located within 20 miles of each other, here on the Cote d’Azur. From east to west … Monaco, Nice, Cannes. Beach property. It is where people who can afford the expense want to be, in the summer, […]

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A benefit of staying pretty much in the middle of the Cote d’Azur … is the ability to visit the famous resorts of the area, up and down the coast. Among them? Saint Tropez, last week. This week, Monaco. It is a jewel of a little city-state, all 0.87-square-miles of it, with 38,000 people jammed […]

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If we have (almost) learned anything in sports over the past three or four decades, it is this: Don’t get too cozy with your professional sports heroes or your sports teams. And that pertains particularly to the National Football League — which today committed to sending the Rams to Greater Los Angeles in time for […]

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