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French Country Travel Life Wine Online

February 17th, 2013 • • 27 comments • Related • Filed Under

 

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 French Country Travel Life Wine Online is becoming an increasing reality. It least for the ordering part of the process. There has yet to be a satisfactory(if any) “virtual tasting.” But, DA BG doesn’t doubt that somewhere, some digital wine nerd is crunching his O’s and 1’s trying to “make it so.”

Yea, verily, although Online French Wine discovery/ordering is picking up steam – it will have to go some before it replaces the sagess (thats like…you know…like..”smartness”) of yer local wine shop nutter, or the prices at the mammoth-gigantic-we-will-never-be-undersold-wine warehouse.

my fellow winophilic Eric Pfanner fills out the “online opus.”

“The Internet accounts for only a tiny fraction of worldwide wine sales. Most people buy their wine at local shops or supermarkets. But online sales have been growing strongly for a few years in Britain, Germany and some other European markets, as well as China and Japan. There are signs of progress in the United States, where regulatory hurdles have been a problem.

At the end of last year, Amazon opened an online wine shop in the United States. Presumably the e-commerce giant hopes to do for Bordeaux or Barolo what it has done for books: Make a previously unimaginable selection available to anyone, anywhere, at any time and at a bargain price.

But Internet wine sales in the United States have been complicated by Byzantine rules. Some states forbid online sales, others restrict cross-border shipments. Others maintain monopolies over distribution. So Amazon is starting with only a handful of states and the District of Columbia.

Europe, so fragmented and divided in other ways, is more coherent and unified in this niche of the economy. From my home in France I can order wine online from almost any other European Union country and expect it to show up at my door in a few days.

The only variable is cost. For some reason, Italian parcel services tend to charge more than €50 to ship a 12-bottle case of wine to France, about $70. German delivery companies often do the job, faster, for less than €20. There you have the euro crisis in a nutshell — or a case of wine. Still, my cellar would be a lot poorer without those occasional deliveries from the sunny south.

The most advanced online wine market is probably Britain. Wine Intelligence, a research firm in London, estimates that up to 15 percent of all retail wine sales in Britain take place online — perhaps five times the U.S. percentage.

Growth in Britain has been led by supermarket chains like Tesco, which have been using wine as a way to promote Internet grocery shopping services. But specialist British wine merchants like  Berry Brothers and Rudd were also early online innovators, opening e-commerce sites well over a decade ago.

“Not only do we like wine, but we also like the Internet,” said Antonia Branston, an analyst at the research firm Euromonitor in London. More and more British online wine specialists, like Laithwaites, Slurp and Nakes Wines, are expanding to other countries in Europe, the United States or Asia. Slurp, for example, opened sites in Germany and France last year. While the prospect of a British Web site trying to sell wine to the French might sound a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle, Slurp insists there is a place for it.

“Basically, France is very focused on French wine,” said Audrey Bouttier, who oversees Slurp’s Continental European sites. “We are trying to do something a little bit different. Especially among young people, it’s becoming very hip to bring something other than the traditional bottle of Bordeaux to a dinner party.”

So Slurp offers a vast selection of what the French call “vins du monde” (wines of the world), or imported wines.

Greater choice is one of the biggest benefits of Internet wine shopping, but beware of exaggerated claims. While I often buy wine via the Internet, I rarely use generalist sites that promise a bit of everything — some Burgundy, some Bordeaux, some Australian shiraz and maybe a bit of Napa Valley cabernet, too.”

 Read more HERE.

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French Country Travel Life Transplant

February 11th, 2013 • • 23 comments • Related • Filed Under

The  French Country Travel Life Transplant   is a weaver from SouthWestern France.  Jan de Luz fell in love with California’s Napa Valley. Because,  logically enough,  it reminded him of the French Wine Country. DA BG can relate on both counts!

So, I thought it time to “turn the tables” as it were (and is) with a tale of a Frenchman who found his “bonheur” in the USA.

Now working his woven wonders from the picturesque hamlet of St. Helena, Jan is wowing the locals with his basque weaving artistry.

Rebecca Yerger has the details:

havng sold all 11 of his European shops before moving to California, Jan de Luz needed an outlet for his creativity and passion for fine fabrics and design. So he opened a shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea as well as a 40,000 square-foot design studio and retail store in Carmel Valley.

The St. Helena store followed.

All three of these businesses reflect his career in textile and fashion design. “It all started 35 years ago when I began weaving fabric.” de Luz said, “I would weave the color into the fabric instead of just printing it on. This makes it more resistant to fading and lasts longer.

“I used miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of colorful fibers when I wove fabric.” This method of weaving is a Basque technique.

Another Basque weaving technique embraced by de Luz is known as leiho. This method creates fabric with wide colorful stripe woven into the textile amidst fields of white damask. These colorful linens are available at the St. Helena boutique.

So impressed and appreciative of Basque artistry, de Luz established a museum honoring the weaving, history and crafts of the Basque culture.

While pursuing these endeavors, de Luz refined his own personal and professional design aesthetics and sensibilities. These philosophies and principles are the subject of his book, “The French Touch,” published by Gibbs-Smith.

These philosophies and principles are evident in the merchandise available at the St. Helena Jan de Luz shop. Also infused into the fine living merchandise of the St. Helena boutique is the design and lifestyle sensibilities of France.

One of his principles relates to the importance of the details. And so, a great deal of attention is given to every detail throughout the St. Helena boutique and all of its merchandise. For example, sets of table napkins are not merely flat-folded and placed in a container. At Jan de Luz, they are each gently rolled up by hand and tied with a ribbon before being placed in an understated wooden box with a lid.

To add another important detail — the customer’s personal touch —  these napkins as well as most of the de Luz textile merchandise can be customized with embroidered monograms or designs.

This service is done on premise using a large, computer operated embroidery machine. “We started providing this custom service 30 years ago in Europe,” de Luz said. “The machine is capable of producing 100,000 different designs.”

Besides offering a full line of table linens suitable for setting a formal holiday table to a casual everyday table, the St. Helena Jan de Luz shop could outfit the entire home.

“We have items for every room in the home from the dining room to the kitchen to the bathroom and more,” said de Luz. For the kitchen, some of these items are aprons, towels and pepper mills. “The pepper mills are hand-crafted in Greece of various metals,” de Luz said.

For the bathroom, of course, there is a line of luxurious towels. “We also have linen shower curtains. We were the first to offer them,” de Luz added.

For the more personal type of merchandise, the St. Helena boutique offers a bit of self-indulgence in the form of beautiful, yet comfortable, robes or enveloping sumptuous bed linens. To keep all of these linens fresh while stored in drawers and closets, the St. Helena shop has sachet covers adorned with embroidered embellishments.

Another item for the olfactory center is the Jan de Luz jasmine and lavender soaps. Milled in France, these soaps have become popular. “They were featured on Oprah’s ‘Favorite Things’ list,” de Luz said. “Not being from the United States, at first, we did not understand the significance of Oprah and her list.” However, they quickly learned to appreciate that beneficial listing.

The St. Helena boutique is well-stocked with an array of fine living merchandise for the home. This stock continues to expand and change as de Luz strives to find and create new items.

Read more HERE.

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French Country Travel Life Blarney Stone Connection

February 5th, 2013 • • 19 comments • Related • Filed Under

 

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French Country Travel Life Blarney Stone Connection. Gotcha with that headline, right? Well the “blarney stone connection” is a tip o’ the shamrock to my wineophile colleague John Wilson, who here waxes on the wonders of French Wine….(a change, I hope, from me doing it all the time!)

“Wandering around a French trade tasting recently, I found myself once more in awe of French wine. It struck me that the most astonishing thing is not its quality, although they do make great wines, but its sheer variety.

The country offers an amazing array of wines in every conceivable style. I tasted crisp dry Rieslings and luscious Gewürztraminers from Alsace, light rosés from Provence, refined sparkling wines, elegant reds and sherry-like whites from the Jura, and warming reds from the Languedoc. And that was all at one table.

The French “sherry” from the Jura was in fact more like a Manzanilla, as a Spanish importer remarked.

In Jura, producers use Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, as in nearby Burgundy, but also three indigenous grapes, Savagnin, Poulsard and Trousseau. Local specialities include Vins Jaune, the wine not dissimilar to sherry, and Vins de Paille, a sweet wine made from grapes dried on straw mats.

They also produce good sparkling wines, dry whites, the occasional rosé, and red wines too. And that is all in one small, unfamiliar region.

France has a varied climate that provides an environment for virtually every kind of wine. It has the right soils, minutely studied and defined by experts and then classified according to quality and style.

It is a crucial part of French culture  and the French economy. Many regions would simply fall apart without their vines and the inflow of money they provide annually.

We tend to think of the grand chateaux of Bordeaux when we think of French wine. In fact, most producers are farmers with small plots of land and a modest income. An excess of wine is a problem in many areas, primarily in the Languedoc, but elsewhere too.

French people are drinking less wine each year, partly a result of strict antialcohol laws. The export market is interested primarily in quality wine, but small producers do not always have the ability to sell their wines in a multitude of markets around the world.

At times, reading the press or talking to producers, you get the impression that the whole edifice that is French wine is about to collapse. Yet somehow it continues, adapts and evolves to satisfy the demands of the world market without losing its solid roots in the local cultures and traditions of France.

It can be difficult to learn all the names, appellations and grapes that comprise French wine. But it can also be fascinating and rewarding. We cannot think about France without thinking about wine.

I also believe that you cannot love wine without loving French wine. France’s greatest gifts to the wine world are surely the well-known grape varieties used in almost every other producer country. Without these, many of us would be lost in the aisles of supermarkets or looking at a restaurant wine list.

Today we celebrate three of the most popular grape varieties and a few other familiar names. Sauvignon Blanc, so popular in New Zealand and Chile, is a French grape, used in every bottle of Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé and many others in the Loire, Bordeaux and south-west France. Chardonnay, which comes from Burgundy, is still one of the most popular grapes despite recent bad press, and seems poised to return to fashionable status.

On these winter nights, where would we be without the warming tones of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre? The first and last are Spanish in origin, but it is the French who adopted and exported them. Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot may be ubiquitous, but there is a good reason for that; they make some of the world’s finest red wines.”

Read more HERE.

THROW ME A BONE HERE, PEOPLE!

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