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hey welcome back everybody this is episode 107 at streets and eats and today on the podcast we are taking you to France where one of our favorite pastimes is wine tasting and buying and drinking yeah and yeah so more tasting and just looking at the fields and yeah yeah everything to do with wine that’s right welcome to streets and meats the travel and food podcast dedicated to taking our listeners to the sights sounds and flavors of fascinating places near and far both on and off the beaten path we’re Jim and Ken Vale and we’ve been traveling internationally and domestically together for decades visiting more than 90 countries and all 50 states in the USA we’ll share all of the local knowledge and food expertise we’ve gathered through Years of Living as expats in Asia and Europe as well as traveling with families spanning multiple Generations around the world join us each week for a new adventure so today Jim is going to ask me a trivia question and I’m here tell you I am not that knowledgeable about wine so this is going to be fun well yeah that’s a caveat for this whole episode neither one of us are wine experts we’re not con we are connoisseurs in that we love it we know what we like but we don’t really I mean like we’re wear we have had a lesson in tasting but we’ll talk about that we’ll talk about that let’s get to the question okay so I try to stay away from these questions that are just like easy numbers but for this one I thought it was kind of appropriate it’s a two-parter a two-parter so we go with the first one first of course all right how many bottles of wine are produced in France in a year I don’t know how many are are produced in France but I do know it’s the largest exporter of wines h maybe that didn’t come up in my search came up in one of my searches um I I’m going to say it’s got to be in the millions it’s got to be in the millions so I’m going to say one two three four five six seven eight n 10 24 million you would be off you need to add three zeros three zeros billion yeah but not 24 billion more like 2.4 billion 4 to8 4 to8 billion bottles of wine well anyway they measure in hecto lers do you know what a hecto is a lot a hect is that the second part of the question no well hecta means eight no hecta means 20 100 oh Hector means 100 so they measure it in heers which threw me for a loop at first but a hecto is 100 liters of wine oh in case you’re wondering just want you to know pairing we’re pairing our wine with our podcast you should too go for your choice smooth creamy finish anyway creamy finish I don’t know what that means I don’t never heard that before all right well part two okay so first of all six to eight billion bottles of wine are produced each year how many bottles of wine are exported each year well tell ,000 bottles whoa 10 million bottles I guess what I’m getting into is how many bottles are drank each year but so you can do the export subtract that I don’t even really know what the question is are exported and it’s about two billion so they keep billion that leaves four to six billion bottles of wine just for those fren drink now they don’t drink every bottle that they produce every year so is to sit on a shelf for a while but for everyone they put on a shelf to age you know one’s being taken off the shelf to be drank from a previous year so I think it’s pretty safe to a safe bet that at least three billion bottles of wine are being Drank in France each year I mean you can tell that just by walking down the streets of Paris um well that brings me to an idiom that I just read and I don’t remember remember the French is should excuse that’s okay I don’t speak French but basically it says when you draw the wine you must drink it mean because it it hearkens back to before bottles and um you know if you’re going to actually pour the wine out of a barrel then um of course you’re going to drink it you’re not going to waste it that makes sense but did you know that in Roman times couple of facts about that because the Romans brought uh grapes to everybody Europe um except Georgians including France and Germany and um according to Roman trimes you were only supposed to drink wine to quench your thirst oh not to get drunk not to get drunk and women weren’t allowed to drink wine now that’s not fair but that’s supposedly what the Romans said well and part of the main points of wine they in Roman times was it was a safe way to drink water so they would mix water with the wine and you could drink it and it was safer to drink another fun fact how much water is in wine oh without adding it just from the juice no I mean a glass you know a bottle wine wine any how much water is in this wine how much wine it how much how much percentage how much have you drink right I’m making this stuff up no I’m not um what percentage of wine is water water I mean think about the human body we always ask that question 8% or something like that but that’s not necessarily the same I’m it’s a question I mean it’s most it’s all liquid of course it’s liquid that’s a start so but it’s not 100% because there’s alcohol in it there’s fruits in it fruit the juice um 98% 85 to 90% oh wow so was pretty CL a lot a lot of it is just water tasty water but water all the same well that’s enough of our trivia SL fact SL slash fun well hopefully not fun we’ll have a lot more fun okay where do we start okay so we started already by telling you that we are not by any stretch of anyone’s imagination a wine expert we’re certainly not French wine experts and we’re not even close so if you’re coming here for expertise in actual like the how to deter the different flavors and the wi the different notes and that sort of thing yeah that helpful but if you are planning on a trip to France and you’d like to do some wine tasting while you’re there we have done that quite a bit we do have experience with that and because that can be kind of like intimidating at first just to walk into a place off the street and say I’d like to taste your wine um so yeah that’s really what we’re going to be talking about exactly process of walking off the street and tasting wine and the experience all around because it is an experience um I think that French wine wine in general is synomous with France because it is so integrated it is so integral to their society to their culture um you it is it’s just wine is France France is wine it just is well for instance we were talking to the ventner in one of the places where we were doing it tasting and one of the stories he was telling us was that he had his first glass of wine at 5 years old he said four or five four or five but and that was just sitting around with the family talking telling stories and that sort of thing so I mean that gives you an idea about how integral wine is to the French culture and Society yes I agree okay so how do you start you’re coming to France you’re taking a trip maybe you just live next door in Germany like we do but it doesn’t really matter you’re going to France and you know you want to try some French wine because that’s what you do France but it can be a little intimidating because you don’t I mean you’re not going to walk into a store and just say I want you know um that bottle because we don’t know anything about it and as Jim mentioned they only make billions of bottles which in that are uh didn’t even look at the number of different varieties everything I mean it it can be mindboggling so what you can do is you can taste the wines and so the word for that in French is Deion and you will see that word all over all over any wine region any I mean we were in the lir we were in you know burgundy we were in you name it you will see it and it’s exactly what it is is you can just stop in and taste the wines now now nowadays we have this wonderful thing called Google Maps where you can look on it and you can see what the hours are and maybe more information what it looks like inside it may or may not be accurate it because in many cases these are small farmers that are producing their wine and just because there’s ours in Google doesn’t mean that that matches up with what they’re doing currently during the growing season or the harvesting season or the wine making season because it is yeah I mean it’s very depending on what their job is for the day varies at any rate it doesn’t really matter if you have that or not we’ve been wine tasting long before Google so yeah it’s not a it’s not a big deal and anyway how do you get started so let’s say that you go to the lir valley for example um like what does a typical like that’s probably where we really started tasting wine is the lir valley ourselves yeah I think you’re right I mean we we before but we never really did wine tasting at a a winery other than you know you take a tour and they give you a glass at the end or something like that well we definitely when we were in Lair we rented a sheet a basically an Airbnb for the week it was the cutest thing little white cottage beautiful fireplace beautiful just gorgeous area in general and it was in spring so all the flowers were BL it’s just gorgeous um and we discovered on that trip something that we’ve done forever more and that’s how we like to figure out where we want to go yeah well you know when you go out to lunch you’re very likely to have wine with lunch and a French lunch we’re not talking like stopping at McDonald’s on the road and get a burger and then hit the road again and we’re not even really talking about stopping at a restaurant ordering a dish eating it and leaving that is not a French lunch a French lch lunch is multi-course maybe one or two different wine pairings with it and you’re going to be there for 2 hours maybe a little bit less maybe a little bit longer just depending um but during those lunches you have a great opportunity to taste wine now you can’t do a wine tasting in most places where they’re going to bring you small sips to try of in the restaurants you mean right but what you can do is as you’re ordering your food you ask your waiter can they recommend a wine to go with what you’re eating and I personally recommend that way of doing it unless you know a lot more about wine than we do they’re going to have the wines from that region from right close by those towns that are nearby so that’s how you know that they’re going to be fresh and local but you don’t know what they are there’s too many to know them all they’re really are and so you ask the waiter which one do you like which one do you prefer and and what would go best with what we’re eating and they’ll always I don’t can’t think of any situation where they would not uh in our case anyway make a recommendation and go oh by the way maybe we have gray hair now but we’ve been doing this for a while for a long time so we didn’t have gray hair we didn’t look like this mature Travelers back in the day we were young we were in our 20s and our 30s so you could tell that we might be new novices now you might think we know more about it we don’t but we might look like in some regions we have a pretty good idea what to order um but for the idea of wine tasting that’s a good way to start in a restaurant get a recommendation try it now what we do if we like that wine which almost invariably we do we’ll take a picture of the label and they’re ready for that they they will gladly hold up the bottle they will even give you directions to the know for sure we’ve had that we’ve had that happen a couple of times you get a picture of the label and and it’s got the venner and on the back it usually has an address so you get that picture as well cuz you’re not going to remember after having some wine at at lunch and if you’re the driver you only get like one small glass and maybe a sips of the other different wines that come just so you can taste them because you don’t want to drink and drive then after lunch around 2 2:30 because 3:00 most things are not open in France between 11: and 2:30 except for the restaurants so a little bit later in the afternoon you go out you drive around The Vineyards you find that ventner and you pop on in now it may be there’s a a doorbell you have to ring or a door you need to knock on or you might just be walking right into the wine producing room where there’s a little table a little kiosk and someone will be there to greet you or they might not so you just sort of hang out until someone shows up because they’re there and they’ll probably have noticed your car pulling in but that doesn’t mean they can necessarily drop what they’re doing right then so I can remember one time we pulled into this beautiful estate I mean I was I was taking pictures left and right it was just stunningly gorgeous and I think we were there a good 20 minutes and we were probably on the brink of leaving because we were like maybe you know it’s just not a good time but before we could leave I mean it was like magic they knew we were just about to get in the car um they came running out and said oh yeah let’s try some wines and then we were there of course for another you know 30 45 minutes or whatever and everywhere we’ve gone where that where was that situation where we asked during lunch we found a wine that we liked we went out to the vendor everywhere we’ve gone when we relate that story to them they love it they love hearing that their wine was in the restaurant and that someone ordered it and that you loved it so much that you came out there so it’s like a a really good segue like ice breaker ice breaker get them talking uh and just to have a really good time and they’ll pour some wine let you taste it we we’ll talk a little bit about uh different wines and the order you should taste wines and things like that but but they’re there to help you so that’s the first way go to the restaurant get a recommendation go to that winery that’s a really good way to do it that is it’s not the way you’re going to always do it sometimes well I mean you’re not going to perhaps have that big a lunch every you’re going to be out doing other things and it depends on where you are and where your goal is for the day and everything um we as you know we just came back from the alasce region and there it is just ventner after ventner after V as you walk through any Village you will see I I mean I don’t even know a minimum of six minimum of 10 um they’re just everywhere I mean and you know you can look around the alley and there’s a door and almost always they’ll have a sign that says um who they are what the what the company’s name is and deason and sometimes they’ll have um hours posted and sometimes they don’t and you just sort of wander in the doors open and sometimes is not but there’s a bell to ring and don’t be afraid to ring that Bell and that’s really what I like about alassian wine tasting is you go into these Villages and you don’t have to like drive out into the countryside to find the winery they’re all centered in a village well most of them are I was gonna say some are out in the vineyard still other areas it definitely like when we were in um when we were in L and what’s the one that we were in down at the bottom oh yeah ldo yeah long R right when we were down there long name that’s what I remember we we pretty much had to go out into The Vineyards each time to find the domain and and they were there and they were waiting you know it was still even though it wasn’t in the town they were still ready to receive you pretty much everywhere you were yeah so you can find them that way but that’s what I was saying about OAS I really like it that you can walk through like kinheim for instance small village most of that Village is devoted to making wine and there’s I think three or four different wine makers in the village itself and so what you’re doing is you’re walking into like their tractor garage where they will drive their tractor out to the fields and work in the fields all day and then come back that’s also where they’ll do their wine tasting and there’ll be a little counter in there and you so you kind of get to see not just the wine but a little bit of like what daily life is for for the farmers in that area which is I think is really cool it’s all very cool another option you have is just to go into a store that has wine tasting when we were and a lot of the stores will have wine tastings and then some don’t so don’t expect them to have it yeah they’ll say on the outside if they have wine tasting yeah and some of them are just stores for wine tasting from a particular Winery where it’s not attached to the winery at all it’s just a store on the road and you go in they have all the wine that they produce there you’re not going to get like a tour of the of the caves or anything like that because they’re not there and you’re not going to get a whole lot of personal story it’s more of which for me is like of course of the main reasons I love doing it more of a retail operation type thing but it is a good way to taste wine if you want a particular wine and that Winery doesn’t have an onsite tasting room so sometimes it’s the only way you can taste some people’s wine well we were just in time and they’ll always almost always charge until you buy a certain amount and then the wine tasting was free and some of the venters actually do that nowadays too true because I think that they they’ve been taken advantage of that people will come in and they just just taste wine and they don’t buy anything so I think kind of a rule of thumb is if you’re going to go in and you want a free wine tasting know that you should buy three bottles of wine to sort of pay your dues kind of thing otherwise I mean it’s not a big deal to pay for it it’s usually like eight8 for 68 whatever that’s not that much and that’s fine and get plenty of wine out of that 68 I mean not like you’re going there to get drunk or anything but definitely taste a lot of wine for that yeah yeah so so used to be I mean I think I just saw them charging starting to charge maybe a few years ago um but I but I think it’s more popular I think there’s more tourists I think covid made a difference um just everything has changed as we know in the last what five years of traveling yeah and that’s one of the changes is that a lot of the venters now will charge you if you don’t buy however I am here to tell you I have never I think I’m not lying I’ve never walked into a French viter tried the wines and not wanted to buy some it’s true that’s true I’ve never done that they always it’s hard to not find something you like yeah they always have I mean they usually have I don’t know anywhere from six to 12 different varieties and they and again they’ll tell you the story about each wine and the history and their and of their Winery and this particular wine and some something about their family I mean they’re just so personable of course that’s all dependent on how busy they are what the season is and how much English they speak how much English they speak although I’ve never went out to someone who doesn’t speak English I’m here to tell you that whole even the the last place we went tasting uh we found this really interesting grape variety I can’t remember the name of it right now yes I can it’s the CLA Claver yeah uh which we really liked during lunch so we went to the the winery and the lady there says oh I’m sorry I don’t speak very much English but she still had a great time we still had a great time talking talk to us a lot in German in all yeah so that’s true between French and German and a little bit of English that she had we were able to really have a good time even even though at first she was a little reluctant to engage I think yeah it’s just interesting um okay so so you might have to pay but you’re more than welcome to basically walk into just about any domain any vitner um and try the wines and you don’t have to have reservations and you don’t have to even really know what you like much before you get there they’re very patient they’re very good atali they are the experts they will tell you what each and every wine is made up from how long ago it was picked how long it was fermented what kind of Cask was it with a regular Cask was it an oaking cask I mean as well as like is it a dry sweet medium dry medium sweet what to eat with it that sort of thing they’ll know all of that they’ll know everything and they don’t mind sharing at all right they like to talk about their wine okay so we did say that you’re going to go in not necessarily with the idea of just drinking wine and and getting a good buzz on which you will do that too you will if you’re not careful and if you’re the driver then don’t you can still taste as a driver but you have to be very careful and really just do sips um and all the areas that have Vineyards have very small roads so if you’re doing that you really want yeah you don’t want to drive for sure imp so they’ll guide you through as you go in uh so you don’t really need to worry too much and we’ve never been treated like anything but friendly welcomed none of the snoody that you might associate with wine I mean I did I’ve always that’s why I was intimidated at first I really feel like I don’t know anything about it and I kind of get that feeling a little bit each time a new when I go into a place I’m like oh you know going to ask me even though we’ve learned quite a b even though we know they’re going to be friendly even though we know that they’re going to explain it and they have seen all kinds of people and even the French are asking the same questions we were there with a couple the other day that’s true and they were asking just as many questions as we were so I felt a little bit Justified yeah so they’ll guide you through the whole process of trying their wines uh if you’re the vener you’re only going to try their wines you’re not going to try other wines that’s right if you’re at a store you might have an option to try different wines so you might try a couple of different reings or a couple of different um Sylvers from different wine makers but the general idea is you’re going to be try trying their wines and they’ll guide you through the best way to do that which is generally speaking the driest wine to the sweetest wine with the whites and then if they have Reds switching to the Reds and the same thing driest to sweetest well and it depends on the area that you’re at like the lair and the alsas are more known for white wines that’s for sure whereas burgundy and um what’s the name of that place again longor ran those are all more Reds um so you’re going to know that because when you look at their menu of of offers they’re going to have one or two whites maybe and then 10 Reds or some rosé in there probably mixed in um which they will call like a CET you can always read CET on there which is a mixture usually red and white wine um with some exceptions we found out you always find out something new it’s amazing always um and and they’ll and they’re very good it’s not like they’re pushing one type of wine in fact we went in to this Claver place that Jim was talking about with the idea that we wanted the wine we drank cuz we liked it well guess what they run out of that wine they sold out they had sold out since I mean they had sold it some to the restaurant and that was it um so we didn’t get to buy that wine and that was a little disappointing but of course they had eight other wines for us to try and yes we walked home with a case of wine which in France half case three bottles in France the smallest case is three bottles and then you have six bottles and I mean they’ll sell you as much as you want and the other thing is if you’re traveling from the States or other countries they will ship yeah you’ll have to pay tax on it yeah but you can still get it it’s not like you have to worry about transporting it yourself if you’re real really into it which we’ve become more and more into it um you can get your wine and you don’t have to worry about it you can bring it home in your in your checked bagage uh I think I don’t know what the current limits are but I’ll just give you a barp I believe it’s two liters or three bottles of wine I think you can do three bottles wine per person it it doesn’t really matter you don’t have put in the notes the thing is you can’t put it in your carry-on you used to be able to put it in your carry can’t put it on your carry on so that means you have to worry about breakage but you can do it we’ve done it they’re pretty sturdy bottles um okay so you’re tasting driest to sweetest maybe you don’t want to try every single one of their white wines for instance what you should do is ask the person that’s helping you what is your Winery known for what is your what is the wine that people really want from your what your signature wine yeah your signature wine and they’ll be happy to share that information with you and tell you all about it you definitely want to give that one a try but then also another question just like in a restaurant what is your favorite wine from the winery because it may not be the same one and that way that’ll give you at least two different wines to to taste and try and most people will have like in the El Sauce region you really like the reings and you know other people might really like the the cron so you’re gonna want to try those specifically that’s okay too well and if you don’t really even have a clue at all they’re going to ask you do you think you like sweet do you like Fruity do you like dry when do you want to drink your wine are you having it with dinner will it be an a Paar of teeth will it be a dessert wine will you have it with cheese after a quick jog we ran into that one time um no I’m never drinking my wine after a quick jog mainly because hey I don’t jog maybe during the podcast maybe during the podcast maybe anyway they will lead you through it I’ve never never had to worry about it I sometimes I’ve just walked in kind of like and they and they still they do all the hard work they do and it and it it’s always been fun okay now I a little bit more about the process right I always thought and I don’t know where I got this from that you don’t really drink the wine you take it in your mouth you switch it around and then you spit it out somewhere and and I think you do like in the States you do that and maybe some other places not so much in France no uh they’ll pour you I guess about about a finger of wine in a glass maybe a little bit more they’re usually pretty generous pores but you’re not going to get a full glass but it’s usually more than a sip now as the driver I would just have a sip you’re not expected to drink at all for sure they don’t bat an eye at all when you you take the excess wine to get ready for your next tasting and pour it into there’ll be a little container somewhere for collecting the wine that doesn’t get drink they also won’t care if you drink the whole little glass that they pour you so that’s I think that’s one of the intimidating factors is well what do you do do you spit it out what right and sometimes they’ll just give you a new glass I sorry for the people washing all those glasses usually if you’re going whites and then Reds that’s that’s dry to Sweet you’ll keep one glass for the whites and then switch to a different glass for the Reds it it really has vared literally from ventner to ventner to ventner every experience we’ve ever done we’ve done a few um completely different yeah completely different all fun but they’ve all had a place where you could dumb the excess wine you never expected to drink at all okay so we’ve talked a lot about you know how to do it what where and how where and how and one last thing I want to say about that is you know we we just came back from all sauce which we’ve been too many times but I always do more research when I go someplace and one of the ones things I wanted to research was on this last trip you know where there so domains that they suggest that you go to they meaning like tourist people or whatever okay wrong rabbit hole no everybody’s got one they’re going to recommend well no not one that was problem 50 it’s like you there’s no way that it was overwhelming just reading the website so don’t do that so don’t try to figure it out go to the restaurant decide if you like the wine go there walk down the street look at this cute little place walk in and try them drive down the road oh look they have Deion they have a tast team hey let’s stop try there I’m here to tell you you will enjoy that so much you can also ask don’t do a whole lot of research you can also ask the the hotelier at your hotel for ideas on where to go and they’ll give you some good ideas too because everybody has their their wine that they like the thing you have to be careful of and I think that in some of the more popular towns especially or cities that are known for wine um what you need to really be careful of is not getting trapped into a very commercial oh you have to go to blah blah blah because that’s what all Americans like well you don’t necessarily want to do what agree blah blah blah is you want to find your own small that’s where I think the experience really plays into it I think so of course my favorite one is trying it in the restaurant and then finding that Winery my second favorite way to do it a wine tasting is you’re in a hotel in a small town like Keim for instance we keep talking about one of our favorite little villes all of these little Villages and you just wander through the town and find the venters that are in that town and do wine tastings in the town you don’t have to worry about driving that way because you can walk back to your hotel you don’t have to worry about whether you have to spit out the wine or dump the wine you can taste as much as you like I will say here’s a kind of 180 degree turn to how we would find restaurants when we’re looking for restaurants we want to find a restaurant that’s busy you want High turnover you want to see lots of locals in there when I’m looking for Wineries and venters I kind of want almost the more obscure the more less visited the possible if it’s going to be right smack dab in the middle of town it’s got a big sign and you know all kinds of like like playground or I don’t even know what else they’d put out there but but one where you know you’re going to constantly have tour buses and things I I want to go there they they probably have great wine don’t get me wrong and you probably would enjoy the wine so you can go there but for me I always find that I’m going to have a better experience when it’s just me or maybe one other couple or maybe two other couples but a very small group of people versus you know a bus load CU obviously they don’t have the time to chat with you when they’ve got 30 people waiting and those places do exist exactly so we tend to avoid them like that’s what I’m saying for restaurants it’s a little opposite it is to venders because you you don’t have to worry about turnover yeah okay so I just thought of one more opportunity or one more way you can do a wine tasting in France um besides the ones we’ve talked about already you can do a festival yes where the venors will all come to one place and you can try it at the festival that’s a really good way to do it too U one of the best ones is in strawberg and it is a festival of independent wine Growers so they’re not the big Factory Growers they’re all independent farmers and they bring some of their samples to this like a big Hall and everyone is set up in this big Hall there are hundreds of them and you get a little wine glass at the beginning that you pay for and you can keep or you can turn it back in and get your money back um and you just go around to different ones and talk to them and chat to them charge you there yeah to get in I think I think well I think they charge you to get in but don’t they also charge you at the venors at the Stalls no some do I think some do and some don’t yeah maybe the ones that have a lot more to try I mean it’s just very different and if you are paying for it remember you’re you’re getting your money’s worth regardless so I don’t think that that’s a problem at a wine festival they’ve got Booth set up and they’re selling glasses of wine um you can ask for a taste of wine and oftentimes get it but you may or may not but the idea is there you’re trying the different wines by the glass if you’re going to a wine region in France especially in late spring to Summer all up into fall probably um look for this is kind of a new trend is they do these hikes Through The Vineyards with a tasting um tents along the way oh my gosh a great way to do wine tasting and really there’s not usually a whole lot of tourists there it’s usually people from the area or you know other French people that have come in from different regions or something or other Germans or whatever um but that’s a fun thing to do so you might want to ask your hotel when you’re there is there any kind of event wine March like a Wine Walk happening in in any of The Vineyards and they’ll know about it if there is and that would be well worth your time yeah that’s a lot of fun okay so we figured we’d finish the podcast this it’s a little bit different I know than what you know what to do here and what to do there but is some of the stories that we’ve run into some of our favorite kind of memories as we’ve been wine tasting that kind of give you a little bit more of a taste okay one of my first memories from wine tasting was probably my early 20s and we were on a trip with a group of other people uh in orang France a work kind of a work trip type thing and one of the things we did outside of work was we took a tour to some different sites and we stopped did wiy on the way back because you’re always going to stop at wiy we’re all a bunch of 20s somethings none of us knew anything about wine we got this great tour of the the whole Winery and then we and they took us down into like these tunnels of caves like way underground Cav when they call them caves often times they really are caves right and the tasting was well the tasting quickly turned into a bunch of 20 something year olds just drinking wine which was not a pretty sight later but that’s one of the funniest ones I remember and we all came away from that completely buzzed and one of the things we noticed there was locals were coming in with plastic jugs and just buying wine straight from the barrel that they would put in a one liter jug or a two liter jug to take home so we’re like well we could do that so we’re like dumping out Coke bottles and water bottles and we’re filling those up for the bus ride home that was kind of a messy bus ride home I will admit so it was fun was fun and it was a group thing versus a personal thing so that was fun what is your favorite wine tasting story my favorite wine tasting story okay so Jim was just telling me about going to strawberg to The Vig uh festival and we did that with some friends of ours who we’ve traveled extensively with Well to Well over 25 countries with so we’ve really we really sort of gel with these people yeah and they like wine I’m going to say much more than we do we like it and they love it when we’re at this festival and one of the things you could do at this Festival was take a wine tasting class oh yeah learn how to learn how to taste your wine so they so you had your glass and they they put some in it put in it this was red wine so you could see it better and they’re like now when the guy’s up there talking he’s just talking and talking and he’s swirling and he’s swirling swirl the wine in Your Glass to release the the bouquet and he’s talking and he’s giving the history and then he puts it down and then he’s talking and then he pulls it up and he he swirls some more it bre he puts it down meantime my friend Lisa she’s been drink three glasses of wine already you try to look at the legs oh there’s legs on there she just explain the whole thing and three minutes later he says okay now take a sip and it talks about the process of what you do when you sip but yeah Le’s wine down and she’s like what take a sip my Wine’s been gone for minutes it was the they come and they pour the next wine to do the exact same Lisa you’re supposed to swirl she couldn’t do it she couldn’t do it she could never I think we tasted three different wines through that whole lesson and each time she was like I can’t make it I just can’t make it so that’s a good memory of mine um another one was um when we went to the ventner Who had who was in the restaurant business and he was a sellier and he worked for Gordon Ramsay at one of his restaurants and he spoke excellent English of course sure and so we we just happened into his little place as we do and the first thing he tells us that he used to be a sellia for Gordon Ramsay and that yes all the rumors are true he’s just as mean as you think he is everything you’ve seen on TV plus but we didn’t talk about that for long because then he gets into his own wine story which was just hilarious the way he decided that he was going to buy a Vineyard and what he was going to do and the terar that’s where we learned a little bit more about what a terar was which is basically the micro culture and the soil that you know that it’s grown in a lot of limestone a lot of you know what sh who knows sh whatever yeah anyway so he’s going on and on and he’s talking and we’re having a good old time and we’re just tasting wines tasting wines and he goes and this one this one this one right here it’s my favorite wine to drink you know after I’ve gone for a little jog I’ll never forget that line I mean who the hell who drinks one after a jog well we know now yeah he does we there might be others no now we just walk in Vineyards and drink lots of wine and maybe stumble home but that’s an that’s yeah like I said do that so one of the last wine tastings we did I think was a really good story as well we end up spending a good hour hour and a half there talking telling stories having fun with the other customers that had come in who lived down the street basically in the next town over so they were French they were from the area they had a bottle of wine at lunch from this vendor and they said oh that we really like this let’s go buy some just like what we would do and we were like hey we do that but that was a really good experience it started out a little strange at first we weren’t planning on doing a wine tasting had no in just driving the uh rout Devon in Alas and our goal was to drive the whole thing over the course of a couple of days well we got to the first Village at the start of the route totally sidetracked at this wine tasting we went to take a picture of this beautiful wooden uh wine Wagon Wine harvesting wagon that was parked in front of what we thought was the domain it turned out it was just the house of the the family that owned the domain and the one of the I guess the daughter drove by while we’re taking the picture and so we’re like well maybe we should go in so we walk in to see if we could do a wine tasting and she says you do you can but not here this is our house you have to go and she gives us very perfect directions on how to get to the winery where we can taste wine and at this point we’re like well we weren’t really planning on doing that so maybe we’ll just hit the road but no she stood there and watched us as we drove out and made all the turns to get to the winery so we went right to the winery had the followed us there to make sure we made she did later yeah had the best time talking to her brother Kristoff who is now the manager and the and the head ventner I guess 14th generation 14th generation place it’s been there amazing all kinds of great stories uh I think we talked about this during another podcast one of the things they have there is a bottle of wine that was taken from the winery during World War World War I and ended up in a Berlin basement grandson later finds it brings the bottle back to them and now they’ve got it on display in their cave so cool super cool story super cool but but I mean he was full of stories he told us about his great great grandfather and how he started this one um varietal that they that they are famous for and that was a rosé which Jim and I are not really big into Ros P Noir and Ros um not a blend not a blend a Pino Noir and it was just really fascinating stuff so everything he did from his upbringing to how he runs the business now to you know just cute little things that happened throughout their history as a winery it was just fascinating he took us for for a real good tour of his cave and we learned about what a clay is a key um and basically the door on it it’s a it’s the key that holds the barrel door on and the ones that he had in his cave were beautiful handcarved wooden really amazing gorgeous he like yes those AR not that old they’re only 50 or 60 years old we bought those when we were millionaires yeah when the wine business was really good apparently I don’t think it’s bad now but apparently they had quite the Heyday in the 60s but that was really fun another one um I other times we’ve just walked in and we’ve always had cute little conversations with people um very few times I mean of course we we’ve run it’s run the gamut because every single experience is different but sometimes you walk in and they’re a little busy and they don’t really have time for you and they still want to serve to you and they’re still nice but they’re and they do the whole process with you and explain the why and they will never they will never short the time on talking about the wine but you may or may not depending on how busy they are get like personal stories family stories stories about the winery itself things like that um but no matter what even the really busy ones they’ve been Pleasant and friendly and welcoming and I think that’s like the thing to take away from it is as intimidating as it may seem to walk in blind was no one there there’s no one there anybody there and ring a button or most of the time you don’t ring a bell you just walk around and they find you yeah yeah you just show up there it’s deserted and it’s not deserted all of a sudden someone’s there and they’re coming to help you and that’s going to turn into like one of the coolest experiences yeah that you can have and it doesn’t really matter where you are in France as long as it’s a wine growing region you can have that experience so um I say do it I say do it Asante enjoy drink and drivey responsibly enjoy the wine all right thanks for listening to this episode of streets and eats if you liked what you heard please show us some love hit the like button and leave us a review maybe 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