How could 10 million bottles of cheap Spanish rosé be passed off as French? Blame America

Our insatiable love for pink wine created a booming market that helped lay the groundwork for fraud.

Lovers of French wine are suddenly seeing red. Earlier this year, they feared they wouldn’t have enough of their beloved rosé to get them through the summer, because Americans are buying it all. Now it seems much of the vaunted French pink they’ve been consuming the past two years has in fact been cheap Spanish rosado.

France’s consumer fraud authority confirmed July 9 that over the past two years, unscrupulous wine merchants have passed off as many as 70,000 hectoliters — the equivalent of 10 million bottles — of cheap Spanish wine as more-expensive French rosé. That’s shocking news in a country where protesters have been known to stop tanker trucks with imported wines and empty their contents on the road near the border.

That giant sucking sound over the past few years was U.S. consumers discovering they love rosé and buying and drinking as much as they could. Demand soared, and the rosé market boomed, with many more labels appearing on U.S. shelves, and earlier in the year than ever before as brands competed for shelf space. Prices rose, and shippers tried to send as much as they could to take advantage

This kind of story plays well in the media, because it reinforces two popular stereotypes: Those crafty French, and the snooty wine snobs who can’t tell the difference between plonk and the good stuff. Snickering aside, it also highlights basic economics and current trends in the production and marketing of wine [ . . . ]

Continue reading at THE WASHINGTON POST: How could 10 million bottles of cheap Spanish rosé be passed off as French? Blame America. – The Washington Post

Why Bistro Owners in Paris are Demanding UNESCO Status 

Bistro
Belly of the Bistro

Alain Fontaine leans on the bar at his central Paris bistro, Le Mesturet, dodging trays as waiters weave around him to deliver lunchtime service. “A bistro isn’t just some place for a quick bite to eat,” he says, turning to avoid a glass of red wine colliding with his white chef’s coat. “It’s the home of the Parisian art de vivre—that’s what we’re losing if these places die out: our way of life.

”A distinctive kind of bar-cum-eatery, the bistro offers more substantial meals than a café, but in a more relaxed setting than a restaurant. In some parts of town, they seem to be everywhere, the small zinc-topped tables of their terraces spilling onto street corners. But they’re rapidly disappearing. From 2014 to 2018, nearly a quarter of Paris bistros—at least 300 of them—closed, according to France’s National Statistics Office.

That’s why Fontaine, 60, who worked in bistros all his life before opening Le Mesturet in 2003, is leading about 30 fellow owners in a campaign this year. They want UNESCO, the U.N.’s culture agency, to give bistros and terraces “intangible cultural heritage” status. In September, they will hand their proposal to France’s Minister for Culture, who will then decide whether or not to recommend it to UNESCO. The status would raise awareness and give owners an opportunity for promotion, as well as a way to justify future planning protection from the city council. They might also be able to access some funds: every two years UNESCO hands out cash from a shared pot to put toward practices or events with the classification [ . . . ]

Continue at TIME: Why Bistro Owners in Paris are Demanding UNESCO Status | Time

3 Underrated French Cheeses to Eat on Bastille Day 

fromage
Pas De Merde – we love fromage!

Camembert is always a good choice, but why not try some less famous—but equally transcendent—cheeses? 

One of the biggest holidays in France has become an important day for Americans to eat French food. Restaurants around the States offer Bastille Day specials, featuring classic French dishes like steak frites and canard à l’orange, to celebrate the July 14 holdiay, which commemorates the Storming of the Bastille in 1789, a major turning point in the French Revolution.

We can’t think of a better way to celebrate Frenchness than with a dreamy board of cheese. We tapped cheesemonger Carol Johnson, of Monger’s Palate in Brooklyn, to help us choose beautiful, unique fromages for a French-inflected spread, and she offered three varietals that more cheese-loving Americans should know about.

So before July 14, take a stroll to your local fromagèrie and try to get your hands on these exquisite, but lesser-known, French cheeses for the ultimate Bastille Day spread [ . . . ]

Continue at FOOD & WINE: 3 Underrated French Cheeses to Eat on Bastille Day | Food & Wine

Gauguin Review

The conceptual dullness of the new French biopic Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti hit me especially hard, since I was fired up to see those Tahitian pictures after a June trip to Paris and the Musee D’Orsay, where many of them reside. Have you been to a highly-touristed art museum lately? It used to be that if you wanted to get close to study the brush strokes it was a guard who’d ask you to step back. Now, it’s people who yell at you for blocking their iPhone photos. The museum’s Postimpressionist area would be a great place to get lost, but, like Paul Gauguin, it ends up making you want to flee civilization for shady pandanus glades halfway around the world — preferably without Gauguin’s raging syphilis.

The syphilis isn’t mentioned by name in Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti, although Gauguin has an unspecified cough that will obviously be fatal, because in biopics there is no such thing as an inconsequential cough. But as played by the febrile Vincent Cassel, this Gauguin seems too tightly wound for sex. The image of Gauguin the voluptuary eating and screwing and painting naked Tahitian women might be a cliché, but the director, Edouard Deluc, has gone to the other extreme. Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.

The movie opens in France, where Gauguin is stricken that his oh-so-proper wife won’t come to Tahiti with the kids — though I imagine she’d have put a crimp in his lifestyle if she had. He does need her family money, since rich people are finding his latest works a mite unruly. He’s also dismayed that none of his fellow painters or acolytes will abandon Paris for distant French Colonial paradises. What Deluc gets right is that Gauguin, like most great artists but few in great-artist biopics, spends most of his time not carousing but sitting in front of canvases. What doesn’t come through is how entwined in Tahiti Gauguin’s various impulses were. The artist tells a doctor friend, “I paint and draw all day long and live in harmony with everything around me,” but you don’t see Buddhist oneness in Cassel’s face, especially as he ages into someone resembling Fagin. Non-transcendental, too, are composer Warren Ellis’s somber cellos and violins [. . . ]

Continue at THE VULTURE: Gauguin Review

Innovative pop singer Jain mesmerises Montreal Jazz Festival audience

Jain
Jain

“Ooouuu”, chant eager fans as they await Jain at MTelus. It’s the first of two shows she’ll be playing at the historic Montreal International Jazz Festival. For a French singer, the city is one of the few markets outside of Europe that she can truly thrive in.“Most of her U.S. tour actually had a lot of people from France attending”, explains a publicist from Sony (Jain is signed to the label’s RCA Records) division. After all, this is the singer’s fourth time playing in the city, with her last appearance less than a year ago.Jain makes her to the stage sporting a blue jumpsuit, with Nike Air Max`s the colours of her country’s flag to match the fit. Her stage setup is sparse, with the only thing with her onstage being a loop station on a podium, and an accompanying arm controller.

This is the indoor Jazz Festival performances that attracted the most children. Not only does Jain’s music transcend language barriers but also helps bring generations of listeners together for a night of sweat and dance.On the cusp of releasing a new album, Souldier, next month, fans were treated to a handful of new tracks. The songs seem to pick up exactly where 2015’s Zanaka left off, abundant in bounce and swagger. Many people in attendance are already quite familiar with its lead single, `Alright`, and those who weren’t were happy to hum or sing along when given instructions to.

The new song with the most flare to it was undeniably `Inspecta`, which samples the Inspector Gadget theme song over a menacing trap beat. It is more influenced by hip-hop than any other track she plays, showing her strives to continue evolving as an artist. For an artist full of surprises, recording a song inspired by an unprecedented animated hero only makes sense.Of course, there was only one logical tune to close the night with. `Makeba` crossed over to the North American market with a bang after being featured in a commercial for Levi’s Jeans last summer. While the advertisement currently sits at 25 million hits on YouTube, the song itself has gained double this amount.Crossing over to North America is no easy feat for French artists. While Jain has some ways to go with the rest of the continent, it is safe to say she has found something of a second home in Montreal.

Source: Innovative pop singer Jain mesmerises Montreal Jazz Festival audience | Gigwise | Gigwise