In the spirit of the holidays and all the drinking that is likely to be done,
MSNBC offers a piece on wine tours in the Rhone. Traveling up the
river’s wending backbone, the author drives north from Aix-en-Provence through pleasant (notice I did not use the
world “quaint”) Rhone villages before finishing the tour in the northern town of Ampuis. The tour takes you
through little places with names like Gigondas, Mauves, Vacqueyras and Beaumes de Venise, where one, persumably not
while driving, can sample the delicious wares of some famous and not-so-famous French wineries. Along the way, helpful
vintners explain the process by which they wring potent potables from innocuous-looking globular fruit. Education and
innebriation have never gone together so well.