Hong Kong compresses an extraordinary range of eating and drinking into a genuinely small footprint. Within a few square kilometers, you can move from a quiet, precision-driven omakase counter to a chaotic, neon-lit outdoor kitchen shouting orders over the noise of a busy street, then finish the night in a speakeasy built inside the cell…
Every other wine region on earth treats barrel evaporation as a problem to be managed. Wine evaporates slowly through oak as it ages; the volume drops, and winemakers top the barrel back up periodically, ouillage in French, specifically to keep oxygen away from the wine and stop it from turning. In the Jura, a small,…
Corsica belongs to France on a map and almost nowhere else. The language spoken in its villages is closer to Italian than French. Its historical loyalty ran to Genoa for over four centuries before a brief, blazing period of independence and then annexation by France in 1768, barely a year before Napoleon Bonaparte was born…
Ask someone what Provence wine tastes like, and you’ll get one answer, and it’s not wrong, exactly. Pale, dry, crisp rosé, the kind that shows up on every restaurant terrace from Saint-Tropez to Antibes, has become such a dominant global category that it’s genuinely easy to forget Provence makes anything else. Around 90% of what…
There’s a decent chance you’ve drunk Languedoc-Roussillon wine without ever noticing the name on the label, and that’s more or less the point of this article. For most of the 20th century, this stretch of French Mediterranean coast, running from the edge of Provence down to the Spanish border, was the source of an ocean…
Few French wine regions ask a traveler to hold two genuinely different ideas in their head at once quite like the Rhône. Drive from Ampuis to Avignon, and you pass through what amounts to two separate wine countries sharing a single river and a single name. The north is narrow, steep, and almost monastic in…
Alsace sits at a genuine crossroads, and its wine reflects that in ways no other French region quite matches. Wedged between the Vosges mountains and the Rhine, having changed hands between France and Germany four times between 1871 and 1945, this is a region that speaks a Germanic dialect at the dinner table, builds half-timbered…
Champagne is the rare wine region whose name became the generic word for its product, which is both a triumph of branding and, in some ways, an obstacle to understanding it properly. Reduce Champagne to “sparkling wine from France” and you lose almost everything that makes it interesting: a specific, narrow band of chalk soil…
Lombardy tends to get reduced to a single wine in most people’s minds: Franciacorta, the region’s celebrated sparkling wine and a worthy subject in its own right, covered elsewhere on this site. But Franciacorta is only one corner of a region that stretches from alpine terraces near the Swiss border down to the flat plains…
No wine region rewards close attention quite like Burgundy, and none punishes inattention quite as thoroughly either. A narrow strip of vineyard running from Chablis in the north to the Mâconnais in the south, barely a few hundred meters wide at its heart, produces wine whose price and reputation can shift dramatically from one specific…