In wine regions like Bordeaux, where the harvesting of grapes for white wine is already under way and where harvesting for red wine will start at the end of this month, the impact of the long warm, dry spell has worked wonders. When the grapes are turned into wine, the end result should be a near perfect combination of acidity and sugars that will make the 2014 vintage a record quality one for France. This year’s vintage is likely to go into the record books in terms of both quality and quantity. It’s all a big contrast with last year’s vintage, when hail storms did so much damage.
This year, it has been Italy’s turn for bad weather, so much so that it will be ousted this year as the world’s biggest wine producer, by France. This year’s wine production in France will also be a record in terms of quantity, with 45 million hectolitres being produced, up from 42 million last year. Despite a big drop in exports of wine to China this year, French producers and merchants will be raising plenty of glasses to this year’s harvest. All the extra wine won’t be drunk solely by Gérard Depardieu, the film actor! He’s been saying recently that he drinks so much that it’s the equivalent of up to 14 bottles of wine a day. But on medical grounds alone, I’m very sceptical about this story; methinks the great actor has been spoofing a little on this one.
There’s also more encouraging news on the drinks front, this time from the beer industry. France is enjoying a boom in small craft breweries, up from 334 in 2010 to around 600 now. In Paris, a growing number of microbrewery bars are reflecting this change. Traditionally, only two other EU countries drink less beer per head of population than the French, but now, they are making up for lost time. The big breweries, too, are joining in the fray by brewing a lot more specialised beers. It just shows;30 years ago, microbreweries were on the verge of extinction.
But to go with all these drink stories, there’s a nice food story from St Aygulf on the French Riviera. Last weekend, it broke its own record, in the 28th annual Giant Omelette contest. This year, it made its biggest ever omelette, with over 14,500 eggs, 15 litres of cooking oil, 10kg of mixed herbs and three kg of butter, all fried together in a three metre wide pan, then served up to 2,500 people!
The news isn’t so good however for the olive harvest in the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes. Many of their olive trees have lost up to 70 per cent of their olives, while olive fly infestation is also reducing the yield. The story is much worse in Corsica, where a deadly and very virulent disease that’s hit the Italian olive crop this year has caused even more damage and just about wiped out this year’s Corsican olive harvest.
Even the government in France has managed to come up with a good news story, managing to survive a confidence motion in the Assemblée Nationale yesterday with 25 votes to spare, despite close to 60 abstentions. Whether this gives the government the will and the ability to put all its planned reforms of the economy into practice remains to be seen. But at least it’s better news that the latest poll results for President Hollande, which found that two thirds of French voters wanted him to step down.
Two ministers who were dumped during the recent government reshuffle have found the right antidote. Arnaud Montebourg was the outspoken economy minister who blames much of France’s economic woes on unbending German austerity, while Aurelie Filipetti was the culture minister. The two former ministers are now an item and were last seen happily enjoying a holiday together on America’s west coast.
There was even a bad news story turned good in Menton on the Riviera the other day. A woman was reported missing by her family and extensive searches had failed to find any sign of her. Then, just as everyone was expecting the worst, she was found just as darkness was starting to set in. She was found relaxing on the beach, pissed out of her mind but happily enjoying the last rays of sunshine. Sadly, another story from the Riviera didn’t have such a happy ending. Last Sunday night, for no apparent reason, a 25 year old man was pushed under a tram in the centre of Nice and killed.
Another news story came with an amusing twist, this time from Arras in north-east France, where the authorities have taken to spraying dog poo in the streets with pink fluorescent paint, in a bid to embarrass the owners of dogs that made the dirty deposits.
It reminded me of the time in Belfast years ago, in the run up to one Christmas, when we spotted a large dog turd on the pavement that had been spray painted a festive gold and sprinkled with Christmas stars. And because of the district where we spotted the offending object was largely Protestant, we assumed it must have been a Proddy doggie that had done the dirty. The late Rev Ian Paisley would no doubt have been thoroughly approving of the fact that it wasn’t Papist dog dirt!
There’s even better news for tourists to Paris, where the authorities are close to agreeing a standard flat rate for people taking taxis from the city centre to either Roissy or Orly airports. Up to now, much depended on how good your French was and to what extent you could establish a good rapport with the taxi driver and bargain accordingly. The French are also considering setting up special express lanes on motorways for taxis, all of which reminds me of what Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary did in Dublin some years ago. The bus lanes in Dublin are reserved for buses, naturally, but also taxis. So O’Leary bought himself a proper taxi, but it was solely for his own use so that he could quite legitimately use the bus lanes to get wherever he was going much faster.
This week is also seeing a big strike by Air France KLM pilots, which means that around 90 per cent of flights are being cancelled by the airline. But these days, people take transport strikes in France as an inevitable and frequent part of the scenery, so that apart from the travellers directly inconvenienced, everyone else seems quite blasé.
Also in the Riviera, despite the poor tourist season this year, one facility has reported a big rise in users, the Mount Faron cable car just outside Toulon, which for some unknown reason is becoming a lot more popular. Last month, it had 23,000 passengers, a 15 per cent rise on the same month last year. But another tourist hot spot on the Riviera is in danger, the Baoli nightclub in Cannes, which has been operating for years under a 30 year licence from the municipality. But unless the mairie decides to extend the licence, the nightclub will close at the end of this month with the loss of more than 40 jobs.
On the media front, film buffs in France can now tune into Netflix, which has been late in arriving because of the heavily regulated television market in France, but one series French veiwers can look forward to is a House of Cards style series filmed on location in Marseilles. The woes of the traditional media can be see at Libération, the left wing daily founded in 1973.It’s losing €22,000 a day and the management now proposes to fire close on 100 workers or a third of the workforce and move its offices to a cheaper part of Paris, otherwise it’ll have to close. One curious example of how the printed press covers or doesn’t cover stories came in Ireland over the past few days.
In the 1960s and 1970s,one of the big stars of RTÉ television was John O’Donoghue, who fronted many news and other factual programmes. In those days, his name was all over the papers, yet since he died, at a ripe old age, nearly a week ago, the media in Ireland has generally been conspicuous by its absence in mentioning anything about his numerous broadcasting achievements. The media in this part of the world, including Britain, has also largely failed to capture the electric atmosphere of the Scottish referendum campaign, which has energised local communities up and down Scotland as never before. Many journalists have failed to get inside what people in Scotland are really thinking, on both sides of the yes/no divide, and the result on Friday could well be unexpected and unwelcome, especially to the London political establishment.
It’s also been a time for legal redress in France. In the small Vendée town of La Faute-sur-mer, at the end of February, 2010, a severe storm codenamed Xynthia wreaked havoc, killing 29 people in the process. Most of the people who were killed were living in new houses that had been built in areas at high risk of flooding. No-one in authority had told them and when the storm arrived, neither were any proper flood warnings issued. Now, a whole raft of local officials have been charged with negligence.
More negligence is going to be revealed in court following the dreadful rail crash at Brétigny-sur-Orge, just south of Paris, in July last year. An Intercity express travelling to Limoges during the Quatorze Juillet holiday came off the rails as it approached the station. The wrecked train just missed colliding with another train, but in the carnage, seven people were killed, including two old age pensioners who were standing on the platform and couldn’t move out of the way fast enough. Nearly 200 people were injured. Now, the company responsible for maintaining the tracks, which it clearly didn’t do, the Reseau Ferré de France, RFF, has been charged with involuntary homicide. SNCF, the State railway company, is expected to face similar charges in the next day or two.
Turning away from France, I heard a mesmerising documentary the other night on BBC Radio 3, all about Shanghai. In the 1920s and 1930s,this great city was run by the British and French, although the programme gave no information about the French involvement. But the 20s and 30s in Shanghai were an extraordinary time in living and entertainment styles for the expats who were living there, although local people were often treated as second or third class citizens. Now, however, that Shanghai is firmly in Chinese control, it has seen extraordinary development in the past two decades, as well as much reconciliation with its extraordinary heritage from the 1920s and 1930s.
Also from outside France, but just outside its borders, comes a strange story from the German city of Aachen. The other night, a young and very inebriated young man stepped out of a night club in the early hours of the morning, hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him home, nach hause. The taxi driver thought he said Hauset, the name of a town in Belgium some considerable distance away. So he drove there, then the passenger realised he was far from home, so then the taxi driver drove him back to his correct home address. The bill was €70,which the young man couldn’t pay, so he fled indoors. Now he is facing various fraud charges, which could make it a very expensive taxi ride indeed.
From neighbouring Switzerland comes the news that ETH Zurich, one of the country’s two federal institutes of technology, has just been named by the annual QS survey as being the top university in Europe.
Other news from Switzerland is less edifying. Last weekend, a 1960s Catholic church at Romaine, a new town in the canton of Geneva, was burned to the ground in a spectacular fire that was widely reported in the Swiss media. It now turns out that two children, both under the age of 10, had started the fire that caused all the damage.
The Swiss are also hellbent on shedding their traditional image of being very staid and proper, even puritanical. The Lenzburg football club is in the Swiss second division, based in the canton of Aargau, not far from Zurich. Quite recently, the players and staff held an end of season party at the Mascotte nightclub in the Bellevue district of Zurich. After the ‘do’, the players formed a circle in the car park, while the 41 year old masseuse who worked on the team got to work. A 20 year old player raised his shirt and lowered his shorts while the massuese masturbated him in full view of all his colleagues. Unfortunately for her, the sordid event was videoed and when the management found out just the other day, she was promptly fired. However, four other football clubs have stepped in and offered her work as a masseuse!
Also near Zurich, in the Swiss town of Baden, not to be confused with a German spa town of similar name, the mayor, Geri Muller, has got himself into hot water. It seemed that he had an online relationship with a 33 year old woman who worked as a teacher in the city of Bienne and while he was supposed to be at work in the mayoral chambers, he was busy sending her nude selfies of himself. The mayor refuses to step down, but now he can only perform ceremonial duties, as the council has banned him from any work duties. And you thought the Swiss were stuffy!
Now it looks as if come this Friday, another nationality will be found to be less than prim and proper, the Scots, who it seems are more than happy to do a little political upending.