China’s wine consumption has exploded in recent years. The Chinese are now the biggest foreign investors in Bordeaux, France’s vaunted winemaking region. That’s made some local residents uneasy [ . . . ]
Source: Chinese Lovers Of French Wine Are Snapping Up Bordeaux Vineyards
The vast majority of cheese is mass-produced from milk pooled from mega-dairies. There is just one British producer of traditional farmhouse lancashire and a handful producing cheddar. Can the real deal make a comeback?
Grated. Soft. Cottage. Cheddar. The supermarket dairy aisle just isn’t representative of the whopping 700 varieties of cheese produced in Britain today. But Sharpham Cheese by the River Dart in south Devon is a world away from mass production. Here, a range of 14 “real” cheeses are handmade on a small scale from the milk of goats, Jersey cows and sheep.
“You can taste the richness of each milk,” says managing director Mark Sharman as he cuts into the original Sharpham, first produced in 1981. “This soft, creamy cheese finishes with a lactic acid tang and a chicory-like bitterness.” Then there’s the dense, slightly crumbly, “almost lemony fresh” Ticklemore goat’s cheese; the indulgent triple-cream Elmhirst that smells of fresh grassy pastures; and the award-winning Cremet, goat’s cheese with added cow’s milk cream – divine [ . . . ] More: Raw power! Why we need a campaign for real cheese
The fat of the land is thin on the ground
” …Two big international changes explain the squeeze. Supply of dairy products has been in flux for a while. In 2015 the European Union ended a quota system for milk-producers, part of an effort to reduce subsidies and let a freer market function (draining a notorious “milk lake” and melting a “butter mountain”). Suppliers were hit by a period of low prices: impoverished small producers of milk in France reported monthly take-home income as low as a few hundred euros. No wonder some gave up production [ . . . ] More: Why France is facing a butter squeeze
“Claire Morel leads a double life, she tells me with a playful smile, “like almost all Parisian women”.
She doesn’t mean indulging in the French tradition of “cinq à sept” — a bout of extra-marital hanky-panky between finishing work and going home.
She’s referring to food, and the pain she and many others endure to live up to the myth that French women stay slim effortlessly despite eating three-course meals and drinking wine. A myth only perpetuated by Mireille Guiliano’s 2004 bestseller, French Women Don’t Get Fat and exemplified by actresses Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tautou and Eva Green — even President Macron’s wife Brigitte, still slender and glamorous at 64 . [ . . . ] More at The Telegraph
Isabelle Legeron has big plans for your wine-drinking future. The Frenchwoman from London has highbrow accolades—she was the first woman to receive her Master of Wine in France—but the founder of the RAW Wine Fair, coming to NYC on Sunday and L.A.. the following week, has recently devoted her life to offering up natural wines in low-key spaces. The wines she champions are low-intervention, using grapes from organic or biodynamic farms, natural yeasts in fermentation, and minimal to no additives at bottling. In bringing RAW Wine to both coasts, accompanied by a slew of #rawwineweek events in cities like Austin, Minneapolis, and Durham, Legeron is at the forefront of the natural wine movement that’s now definitively expanded beyond NYC.Legeron launched RAW Natural Wine Fair, a two-day tasting with [ . . . ] More: Isabelle Legeron Is Leading the Natural Wine Revolution | Healthyish | Bon Appetit
There’s a cafe scene in Cédric Klapisch’s cult coming-of-age film Le Péril Jeune where we see five high school friends hunkered around a table, razzing each other. At one point, the bartender shouts that they’d better order something or get out, to which Romain Duris’ character replies, “Give us a coffee with five straws.”“We thought it was the perfect name,” says Egemen Tavsanci, co-founder of 5 Pailles (Five Straws) cafe, which opened in January in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. “One cafe, five friends,” he says, referring to Klapsich’s movie and 5 Pailles’ origin story. He and friends Bengisu Gunes, Can Atalay, Caglar Alpertunga, and Ezgi Senturk, all perched high on corporate ladders, decided to drop everything a year and a half ago to open a cafe. “We hated the coffee in Paris, so [ . . . ] More at: One Cafe, Five Friends: 5 Pailles in Paris 
Pas De Merde 