Wine Trips to France & Other Ways to Learn

The French Wine Society (FWS) is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, founded in 2005 and dedicated to French wine education. They offer self-paced learning online....and webinar certificate programs...and classes in various US cities...and more.  This year, they're also offering a number of splendid week-long Wine Immersion Study Trips in France. These are new trips, providing an intensive, professional-level educational program, coupled with certification through the FWS’s industry-endorsed Masters-Level programs. 

The trips are led by well-known experts who reside in the visited regions, such as Dewey Markham Jr. (Bordeaux), Matthew Stubbs (Languedoc-Roussillon), Kelly McAuliffe (Rhône Valley) and Jean-Pierre Renard (Burgundy).

The trips include extensive high-caliber tastings at some of the best estates. They're nearly all-inclusive, including the FWS Master-Level Course, ''full comfort'' hotels, gourmet meals with great wines (bien sur!), all winery tours and tastings and ground transportation. Prices range from $3,495 to $3,895 per person, double occupancy, and each trip is limited to just 18 guests. (Single rates are available or you can ask to be paired up with another single traveler.)

The 2013 schedule included seven trips, three of which have already sold out. Trips still available are: 

Languedoc-Roussillon - June 2-7, 2013 (4 spots left)
Bordeaux  - September 1-7, 2013
Rhône Valley - Oct. 13-19, 2013
Bourgogne - Oct. 20-26, 2013
 

To learn more about the trips, click here. 

And what if you can't run off to France and drink wine for a week? Then check out the wide range of local learning opportunities the FWS offers in various US cities. For more info, click here.

Then, there are self-guided learning opportunities (study at your own pace) and online webinar based classes, such as the Provence Master Level online Study and Certificate Course which begins January 28. For general info on these programs, click here. For specific info on the Provence class, click here.

FWS director Julien Camus tells me he's happy to answer any questions you might have. Contact him: jcamus@frenchwinesociety.org or call 1-202-640-5466.

Like this story? Subscribe to Provence Post here.

If You Live in the UK and Love France...

The France Show is coming up again, January 18 to 20 at Earls Court in London, bringing a taste of France to the heart of London. And once again, the organizers of this large lifestyle expo are offering the readers of Provence Post reduced ticket prices. Until December 31st, you'll pay just £6 per ticket instead of the normal advance-purchase price of £10 and the at-the-door price of £13. From January 1st onward, you'll pay £7 per ticket, rather than £13. Children under 16 accompanied by a paying adult are free.  

This year's schedule includes cooking demos, bestselling authors (Kate Mosse and Carol Drinkwater); wines and Champagne you can sample at tutored tastings, petanque games, can can dancers, a French market, lots of info on relocation and property buying...and thousands of properties for sale in the French Property Exhibition. You can also enter to win a week-long holiday for four in a Mongolian yurt in the Auvergne, a three-day, self-drive Morgan experience in Southwest France, a Burgundy river cruise for two, a weekend break in the Champagne region and a Brittany Ferries crossing, among other prizes.

For full info, opening hours, a map, a list of exhibitors and more, click here or visit thefranceshow.com. To get the special £6 ticket price, use the promotional code TPP33 before December 31st. From January 1st onward, use TPP41 to pay £7 per ticket. You can also get tickets by calling +44 (0)1242 264777.

Like this story? Subscribe to Provence Post here.

Gourmet French Mustard Giveaway

So what's a nice boy from Chicago doing producing Dijon mustard in Burgundy?  Jeff Goto, an avid cook, decided to do just that when he wasn't able to find a traditional Dijon mustard that delighted him as much as those he had tasted and cooked with in France. "Dijon is one of my favorite ingredients and it's so important in so many recipes," he says. It took Jeff a couple years of research and planning (during which he traveled extensively throughout the famous French wine and gastronomy region, meeting with growers and suppliers), but finally he was ready to launch his new business and brand, Ameline Gourmet Mustards. Made with Burgundy wine and locally grown seeds, his two mustards--white wine and whole grain--have been available in the States for just about a year. He is working on expanding into the EU and Japan.  

The organizers of the Napa Valley Mustard Festival described Ameline as "hauntingly beautiful" and top Chicago-based chef Charlie Trotter is selling them in his popular boutique food shop--a fine endorsement indeed. 

These days, Jeff spends a lot of time on planes: he's in Beaune when it's production time and then back in the U.S. focusing on distribution and buzz-building. The mustards are available online (from the National Mustard Museum or CityOlive.com or PastoralArtisan.com) and in fine food shops nationwide. 

To introduce the readers of Provence Post to his product, Jeff wants to give away five sets of gourmet mustard (a set is one jar of each). To enter, simply share a favorite recipe with us...any recipe at all, as long as it contains mustard. Just click "comments" below and type or paste in your recipe. (Make sure to leave us your email address as well.) If you prefer, you can simply email your recipe, in English or French, to: recipes@amelinegourmet.com. If your recipe is not original, please credit the source. This giveaway is open to residents of North America and Europe only, please. The five winning recipes will be posted on the Ameline Facebook page. 

If you're a U.S. chef, food retailer or other industry professional, Jeff is happy to send you a sample. Email him at: jeff@amelinegourmet.com.

Wine's French Foreign Legion

My friend Jim Gullo is a journalist and author based in McMinnville, Oregon, in the heart of the Oregon wine country. Jim's new blog on wine, food and travel is called b/t/w and he is about to re-launch the OregonWine website as editor and publisher. One day Jim was telling me about four French women he knows who are making amazing wines in Oregon. I thought, what the heck? It has nothing to do with Provence but it's a great story--and I asked him to tell us about it. I’ve always felt fairly strongly that if a place claimed to be “the France of…” (take your pick: New Zealand, Hoboken, northwest Wisconsin), it should at least have a few French women living there. French women just add an irresistible…Frenchness…to a destination that can not be faked, not even by French men. And that is why I’m pleased to report that in a recent story that I wrote for Portland, Oregon-based MIX Magazine, I managed to find four Frenchwomen who are making wine professionally in Oregon, most of whom reside or work in the Willamette Valley (i.e. “The Burgundy of the U.S.”). Two other women who make wine in the area – and very good wine at that – are so elegant in their manners and bearing that everyone thinks they’re French, which is almost as good as the real thing. I put them into the story anyway. [As a professional aside here, a free tip for student journalists, the way that one finds French women working in Oregon wineries is to hang out in cheese shops until one ambles by, or call several wineries and announce, “Hello? I’m looking for a French woman. Got any there?” and get past many stunned silences until someone says, “I think you need to talk with Isabelle.”] These women, all Burgundians, were drawn to Oregon by pinot noir. Alexandrine Roy, for example, now splits her time between Domaine Marc Roy, her family’s winery in Gevrey-Chambertin, and Phelps Creek Vineyards in Hood River, Oregon, where she makes a special pinot noir cuvee every year that bears her name. Veronique Drouhin-Boss is the fourth-generation of Drouhins in the wine business; she also splits her time between Maison Joseph Drouhin in Beaune and little Dundee, Oregon, where Domaine Drouhin Oregon was the first Burgundian house to stake a claim in Oregon when father Robert Drouhin bought property here in 1988. Just down the street from DDO is DePonte Cellars, which lured longtime Drouhin associate Isabelle Dutartre to become its head winemaker in 2001. She liked it so much that she moved her three children to McMinnville, Oregon, and recently began her own label, 1789 Wines, to commemorate her personal revolution. And not far from DDO, Delphine Gladhart, who was born in Lyons and fell for wine while attending boarding school in Beaujolais, handles the winemaking duties at family-owned Winter's Hill Vineyards while husband Russell mans the tasting room. Now we all sleep more soundly, knowing that there are French women in our midst. We hope they can say the same in the Burgundy of northwest Wisconsin. Photos top to bottom: Veronique Drouhin-Boss, Alexandrine Roy in Burgundy (photo by Jean-Luc Petit) and Isabelle Dutartre. To reach Jim Gullo: jim@jimgullo.com