The perfect wine: interview with the sommelier

Wines from France have long been considered the best for several reasons, but mostly because they have been making wine for so long! The different iconic regions of France – Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, Provence – have mastered their craft and understand the soils and grapes that grow best in their particular region. They learned long ago that you can’t grow Cabernet in Champagne and that making rosé wine right on the Mediterranean coast in Provence is the perfect place. That experience lends itself to creating such incredible wines. As for the pricing, there are so many economic reasons that French wines are perceived as more expensive and some of those things are true and caused by the cost of the land, the relatively low quantities produced versus the global demand, and things of high quality generally will cost more! The fun part for me is to seek out producers and areas in France that are less “iconic” and generally have similar profiles to the well-known and hard to get wines and that are a fraction of the price of the bigger names.