“Good wine is a necessity of life for me.” – Thomas Jefferson

Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Land of Desire. Thanks for your patience while I spent some quality time with family at Thanksgiving and celebrating my birthday in NYC. This week we’ll continue our miniseries: “A Tour de France”: What kind of France exists outside the boundaries of Paris? What kind of France exists in the middle of the countryside? What does someone in Paris have in common with someone in the Pyrenées? How many kinds of French people are there? What makes someone truly “French” anyway? For the next six episodes, we’ll be tracing the route of the original Tour de France, traveling through the “in between places” – the vast countryside which traditionally held most of the French population. Beginning in the tiny village of Montgeron, then passing through Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and finally returning to Paris, we’ll be eating, drinking and exploring our way through the nation. On y va!

Episode 37: “A Tour de France – Bordeaux”

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Sources:

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography – Graham Robb, 2008.

The Food of France – Waverly Root

The Food and Wine of France: Eating and Drinking from Champagne to Provence – Edward Behr

“A New York Wine Merchant Turns a 1787 Chateau Margaux into the World’s Most Expensive Puddle” – Alan Richman, People, May 15, 1989.

“The Jefferson Bottles” – Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, September 3, 2007.

“Hedonism and claret” – The Economist, December 17th, 2009.

Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures – Paul Lukacs

“American Bugs Almost Wiped Out France’s Wine Industry” – Laura Clark, Smithsonian, March 19, 2015.

 

Further Reading:

I’m loving Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography.

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