Austin

Austin, Texas, one of the richest cities in the USA was pleasant. Its youthfulness and natural wildlife with thousands of birds singing in the center of town, opossums and squirrels running around and fancy hotels like the Four Seasons, restaurants hooked on wine. We visited a wine bar/wine store with a clean and well thought out design, and a selection of more than 100 wines by the glass. We met attentive and curious sommeliers, owners enthusiastic to discover new wines to ad to there already full wine lists, and moments where work didn’t prevent from having a good time! It was far from the idealized image I had about Texas with the TV series Dallas and JR’s ruthless environment.

In any case, I still had a hard time with jetlag. I still didn’t recover from my trip to China.
I must point out to the professionalism of our prospects, who tasted our wines with open minds, able to be part of the Grand Jury Europeen, and chose wine without asking about the classification, the notes from Parker or the Wine Spectator. I even saw in the store of a French person who was a student of Emile Peynaud, an old Ferret and the 2007 and 2008 Hachette guides!
Their only questions: can we get the wines immediately?! When will you be back? Can you help us with our competition for Best Sommelier of Texas (of course we can, again, where are Sopexa and various institutions supposed to promote our wines?).

Another plane to catch to fly to Houston, no time to get bored, nor to spend to much time watching TV, although Sarkozy seemed to address the right issues regarding this crisis (rating agencies, balance sheets, remuneration, etc…).

Unfortunately, between my trip to China and the USA, I didn’t have much time to respond to comments posted on my blog.

I will try to answer to a few:
To Charles Traonouëz ( who is in charge of Château Malromé): indeed, in my opinion, it was wise to use the Tribaie machine this year… while waiting for a new one which will make this one obsolete. This is how it goes for the “latest” equipment, the next one will be better. It is no point to use it on the whites, our traditional way being most likely the best way, but only with red grapes where it works well, indeed.
We will see when we taste this wine compared to others.

To Patrick Essa: All the grapes don’t have this beautiful golden color, many being more “normal”. In any case, too bad that the harvest takes place during the same period… I would have certainly hired you as a consultant for a real-condition test… In addition, people would talk about it ;-)