GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I’ve been following Ta-Nehisi Coates’s rollercoaster ride to speaking perfect French – he writes for The Atlantic, and I’m an old fan of the magazine. I suddenly realized he was going to be spending four days in Montreux, a serious crash course to maitriser la langue even though my sense of Montreux […]
Food & dining
Biodynamic wines, slipping into the mainstream
New guide provides useful tool GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Organic wines, known as “bio” in French, and more particularly biodynamic wines, were long regarded suspiciously by many consumers, conjuring up vague (and not quite right) images of hippy wines made with animal horns and consumed with unpalatable brown rice. Those were the bad old days and […]
French weigh in on Chardonnays, Swiss take 17 medals
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – France leaves us with no doubts: they are the world’s Chardonnay masters, based on 872 wines from 42 countries that were judged at Château des Ravatys, the wine estate of the Pasteur Institute at Saint Lager in Burgundy, France this week. The Chardonnay-du-Monde wine competition‘s top 10 wines included 7 from France. Canada had […]
Learn about Swiss wines, two sessions coming up, presented by Ellen
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Happy news on the wine-tasting front: I’ll be giving two evening sessions in the near future, in English, for those who want to learn more about Swiss wines. The first is at the Arvinis wine fair where I’ll be running an introduction to wine-tasting session with five Swiss wines and one from […]
Pre-drinking: an unhealthy habit among Swiss young people
Saving money is creating another problem, research shows BERN, SWITZERLAND – Young people in Switzerland are doubling their alcohol input by “predrinking” at home before going out, shows new research by Swiss Addition, funded by the National Science Institute. A study of 1,441 people between 20 and 26, designed to draw a clearer picture of […]