So, nine anglophones go into a small-town-France bar … Ah, this is not headed for a punchline. Instead, it was the setting for a fine dinner (among folks with a certain amount of life experience) of that French winter staple cassoulet — which you would not want to eat every week but certainly do not […]

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  Eating with American fast-food giant McDonald’s may be a bad idea, in terms of consumption, but I continue to be impressed by their schemes for trying to localize their menu. To wit: The McArabia, in the UAE. The American Winter menu, here in France. This is fairly ingenious.

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It is an unmistakable sound, though it may take a city boy a minute or two to place it. The steady “tinkle ” or “clank” of domesticated animals wearing bells, maybe just the other side of a rise of land, and on the move. A combined herd of sheep and goats is being raised somewhere […]

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Winter weather in this part of France can be fluky, we are learning. Yesterday, we were bundled up (well, by SoCal standards) during a walk to a nearby town — but were quite cold throughout because of powerful winds that took the wind-chill factor to 47 Fahrenheit. Today? Bright sun. Very little wind. Temps cracking […]

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A great thing about staying in the greater Pezenas area, north of Beziers and southwest of Montpellier … are the walks from one little town to another. The town we are in (year-round population of less than 600), is about 45 minutes from another little town in a variety of directions. I have done two […]

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  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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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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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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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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