I don't always drink wine, but when I do I prefer....

This is pretty cool. I feel like mentioning Corbett Canyon in a box just to see if I get tossed.

Uh oh. Think me and Eric are both oughtta here.

This sounds great, HJ. I’ll look out for it. I’ve never heard of it. Falanghina. I’m surprised and impressed that it was on offer in Umbria: is Italy becoming more “catholic” in having out-of-region wines available?

I had a really great red Calabrian or Sicilian wine a year ago, in New York, at a wonderful refined Sicilian restaurant called Convivio just behind the United Nations, and has since, alas, disappeared. It was a terrific bargain for lunch, and had a menu I’d never come across before. Outstanding. The wine was deep and rich, which they sold by the glass for about $8 (!). It had a long name, three words maybe, which I’ve forgotten. (Not much use, sorry.) I had them write it down on a card, which I just came across again recently when I was going through my papers, and now can’t find again. I hope I didn’t throw it out. If I come upon it again, I’ll mention the name.

Phil suggests I copy and paste my Michel Guérard story here, not to lose it. So here it is again (with car reference fixed):

I mentioned earlier that I had eaten at a restaurant in France equivalent to the French Laundry. This was many years ago, and the restaurant was the one belonging to Michel Guérard, co-inventor of the so-called "nouvelle cuisine". (That was some 15 or so years earlier. He had by now come around a bit to classical French cuisine, where the "nouvelle" bit was more a style or influence rather than an overdone fad.) I compare it to French Laundry because not only did it have the requisite 3 Michelin stars, but in the even more influential Gault-Millau Guide, which is usually ahead of Michelin by about 2 years, and gives marks out of 20, where 17 = 1 star, 18 = 2 stars, and 19 = 3 stars, this restaurant was one of just two in France at the time, I think, that had the highest grade of 19.5. Unlike many other famous French chefs, Guérard’s restaurant was not in Paris, or Lyons, or even a city at all. It was in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny village in southwest France. For once, it truly required, not just merited, the Michelin definition of a three star restaurant as "worth the detour". That it was. This is how I was able to make a reservation, a month or more before I left for vacation in France, by car. (I lived then in England.) I think this was the vacation where I turned my lumbering, English right-hand drive Renault 16, from a one-way street the wrong way into two-way traffic after my first night in Rheims, and hit someone taking their driving test. But I digress.

Anyway, this restaurant of Guérard’s was sort of all by itself out in the countryside, looking like the sort of magic palace that Disneyland tries to imitate. It also doubled as a hotel but, like your friend [responding to Marty’s story of a friend who ended up staying at a nudist camp by mistake], I was afraid that I was going to be spending so much money on the meal for my girlfriend and myself (I remember that the menu alone cost 50 francs, about $8 then, to take away as a souvenir) that I couldn’t afford to stay in this deluxe hotel. So I booked a tiny hotel in a nearby town about 10 kilometers away. This place was really cheap, in all ways you can think of. But it made the restaurant visit negotiable, so was worth it.

After returning from this fantastic meal in fantasy-land (I still recall that the piece de resistance was Lobster "aux 4 humeurs", 4 different sauces) we wended our way back to the hotel, suitably satisfied and sozzled. The next thing I knew, car horns were blowing their heads off outside my window, somebody was banging with full force on the door of our room, the phone was ringing. I groggily got up to find the hotel desk guy, accompanied by a policeman, outside my door. Apparently the empty parking lot where I had parked at 1 AM the previous night after returning from the meal was in fact the town square where the farmers’ market took place every morning, or that weekday, starting at around 5 AM, and there I was in the way. A rude awakening, to say the least. I scrambled downstairs not fully dressed, I think still in my bathrobe (but NOT nudist, I hasten to add), and if I remember rightly, shoeless, to move the car. Still well worth it.

This one is awfully long – apologies.