Plan ahead for springtime in Verona Here’s the perfect April treat: Verona, Italy. The medieval city, in the province of the same name, sits in the region of Veneto and is an easy train trip away from Switzerland. The food and wine are wonderful, there’s a wealth of art and architecture and history and the […]
Travels
When I travel, I drink wine. In fact, I usually organize my travels around learning about it because wine isn't a beverage, it's a culture.
Recent wine fun, Best of Swiss Wine Tourism
Prologue: cycling, diplomats, wine in Spain I haven’t been writing here much lately. This summer has been devoted mainly to three things: renovating a garden, building up physical strength following three major orthopaedic surgeries in 15 months and working on a collection of essays and another of short stories. But there has been, happily, time […]
Swiss wine tourism comes of age
This could be a watershed year for Swiss wine, the year when wine tourism comes of age. Lausanne in March became one of the world’s 10 Great Wine Capitals, a network of wine centres that is behind the five-year-old International Best of Wine Tourism awards. Switzerland’s first awards, whose winners compete in the international awards, […]
Armenian and Turkish fine wines
An introduction to wines from the cradle of civilization The Valais Wine Museum in Sierre held a very special conference with wine-tasting 27 May, “L’Orient des vins”, that focused on Armenian and Turkish wines. José Vouillamoz, co-author of Wine Grapes, talked about grape domestication – where, how, why, and Jean-Luc Etievent of the Wine Mosaic […]
Zurich, with wine on the brain
Switzerland has such distinctly different areas that when you live in one you really have to move around and visit others to make sense of the whole. I’m spending a couple of days out of my French comfort zone to stumble and mumble in greater Zürich. With wine on the brain, of course. Thursday evening […]