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When we bought our farmhouse, we were told that we were the first people to open up the shutters on the first floor in 50 years. Amongst the cobwebs we discovered a lot of writing on the walls by American soldiers who were staying here during the First World War. Apparently our house was used as a small hospital/recovery house by the US 144 Infantry Division Medical Corps and Company H 11th Infantry. 

It is hard to describe the feelings that James, my husband, and I felt along with our two friends Julie & Mick, who helped us clear out the house, as we discovered the names, poems, tallies of numbers of days stayed etc. scratched on the walls. 

We felt humble and sad but also at the same time, we thought what a lovely spot for the boys to stop to recover from their injuries. Our house has a lovely and calm atmosphere and we feel no bad vibrations (If you are into that sort of thing!) and the land has great views over the countryside. Mind you our house would have been very basic and extremely cold in the winter.  Downstairs by the open fire someone had written "NO LOAFING" – definitely someone from the USA, not France! 

We also found what we believe to be an old sentry post, old ammunition, a dog tag (army identity tag), army cutlery, spy binoculars which took pictures and even an unexploded hand grenade when we did our landscaping. 

It was difficult to capture some of the writing on photographs due to the deterioration of the poor plaster… but I share with you here the most poignant ones:

Shutters Open for the 1st time in 50 years

This photo was taken just after we had opened

the shutters.

Our first floor used to be a grain store. 

There were only shutters, no windows. 

Poem C McElwaine

I am gone to the front

And the next man that

Takes this place as his bunk

I hope you don't have as hard a

time of it as we had here.

                                            McElwaine 16 071   11th Infantry 

Poem by John

We are ready for the front

I hope we will not bump

I hope I meet in that

land my darling sugar lump

John Na……..? 

A signature - Sgt. Anthony Chirarisi, High Cliff Wisconsin 

A signature - Pvt. Carl Rookstool, Oilton, Okla, USA  August 5 1916?, 1918? 

Incredible that we found our house to be a witness of time… The writing has been conserved behind dry wall lining so perhaps some day in the future someone else will discover this history book! 

We are renovating the farmhouse to be our home though our priority is the conversion and renovation of the barns to create independent gites for travelers and holiday makers as well as provide B&B. For more photos please check it out at www.sarahandjames.org  

It had rained heavily during the night. I put on my rubber boots and get ready to walk Wolfi. The heavy & soggy clay soil does not make for an easy walk. Determined though, we continue. Wolfi runs in leaps and bounds, happy to chase after the scent of deer and by-gone rabbits.

Another person approaches, with a bigger dog, from the other end of the green grass field. We meet. We talk about the weather while the dogs sniff each other. We introduced ourselves: “My name is Jan Kollwitz.” I detect a slight bow, a stylized Japanese bow. I recognized his name right away: “Well, my name is Andrea. I have heard a lot about you. You are an artist of Japanese ceramics here in the village, aren’t you?”

And so we begin to walk together through the green and wet field… I learn that he used to live in Japan for a couple of years, learn about the 400 year old tradition of Japanese ceramics through a traditional master, and learn about his own Japanese, wood-fired kiln. He graciously invites us to see his place.

* * *

A couple of days later, we visit him in his old brick house (the former pastorate). He took us right to the back and showed us the anagama kiln he built with the help of a 70-year-old traditional Japanese kiln-builder some 20 years ago.

In the anagama kiln, glaze is not applied to the pottery. Rather, the pieces are exposed to flames, smoke, glowing coal and ash. This makes for red and grey, and sometimes blue and purple colorings. The ash of the burning wood flies through the kiln and settles as fine dust over all the clay pieces. At temperatures above 1250 degrees Celsius, this dust combines with the clay and melts into a glaze. This naturally produced fly-ash glaze will vary in color depending on where the pottery item is positioned in the kiln.

The kiln is fired once a year for four days continuously. New wood is added every three minutes all day and night. The colors are determined not only by the particular mixture of clays, the stacking in the kiln, but also through the selection of types of wood (pine wood for example create a green hue) and the rhythm between oxidation and reduction, and the overall intensity of the fire. To fire up his kiln he needs four weeks of cutting & splitting 20 cubic meters of pine.

Jan asks us to step into his house. We go through his sparsely furnished interior living space before entering his exhibition space. It reminds us so of Japan, and we forget for a quite while where we are. This room is equipped with drawers that function as presentation tables, covered by Tatami mats, where we see his beautiful art pieces – each one different from the other. Truly fascinating. We congratulate him for his enthusiasm, passion, profession and success. He is doing really well for himself. We're just delighted he invited us – it gave us a glimpse of his world.

Looking through his brochures he hands us as we leave, we learn that Jan is the great-grandson of renowned artist Kaethe Kollwitz. (He himself never spoke of it.) He has made quite a name for himself. You just never know who you or your dog will meet while walking through the marshy lowlands of the Ostsee.

www.jankollwitz.de

Exceptional start to the year I must admit. It seems as if last summer turned to fall and winter got lost somewhere! I am eating an improvised market lunch outdoors today with a bunch of friends and talk is all of global warming, weird weather and so on.  Here in Uzes in the Gard, southern France, the locals haven’t seen a winter this mild since 1956.  But let’s hope it doesn’t finish up the same way. The warm days of January fooled Mother Nature into thinking it was April. Everything started budding and blooming until a long cold snap put an end to it and destroyed almost all the olive trees in the region. Afterwards, dismayed paysans planted vines instead of olives and were able to do very well for many years selling cheap so-so wine to thirsty consumers. 

These days with fierce competition from the new world and changing habits cheap plonk is close to extinction. A winemaker must make great grog in order to survive.  Thankfully there are lots of great small producers in Uzege. Young entrepreneurs like Amy Lillard and her husband Matt who moved to the area from Colorado about six years ago. They make a great Cotes du Rhone village after only two vintages. Their place is called Domaine la Gramière (http://lagramiere.typepad.com/) and if you ever get to St. Quentin la Poterie and go for a visit tell them the Wine Ranger sent you. That’s me by the way but that’s another story. 

St. Quentin (we shorten the name all the time out of sheer paresse) is were we live. Just down the hill from the fist Duchy of France, Uzes. Hard to imagine the beautiful facades, the chateau and the winding cobble stoned streets were falling to bits in the 1960’s. But thanks to changing laws and much investment the mediaeval core of Uzes was saved from certain death. 

Lets get back to St. Quentin. A great small community of people from all over the world that have taken a liking to the laid back, sunny way of life here. A mix of retired French and assorted northern Europeans with a smattering of Brits, a few Americans and two Canadians. And of course all the St. Quentinois who’ve been here forever. For them we won’t qualify as locals for at least another two generations. But in spite of this everyone seems to get along very well. 

There is a word here that is essential to learn as soon as you arrive. And that is normalement. The concept of normalement is not easy for outsiders to grasp. It’s placed at the end of many conversations by artisans, merchants and everyone else. Example: I can come next Monday to fix your smelly toilet, normalement. This means that the said artisan will not be there next Monday. You may see him a day later or a week later or you may never see him again.  What this means is you end up learning how to fix a smelly toilet all on your own. I am exaggerating a bit. It takes some getting used to but normalement eventually grows on you. 

Did you know that St. Quentin has the coolest butcher shop anywhere? Really. A jolly, rather round guy named Franck runs it and besides making prize-winning sausages, patés and andouillette (an acquired taste) he knows just about everything about everybody in the village. Franck’s neighbor Kanska decorated the place recently. Hordes of dainty dancing dairy cows and cute little pigs are everywhere. Even a chair Franck keeps on hand for older folks looks like a Holstein with metal legs. Several awards posted by the door attest to prize-winning pâtés and special sausages. And true enough, Franck specialties are very good but people come back as much for Franck as for the meat. Normalement, you can get in and out in under 20 minutes but it can take much longer.  Such is the charm of St. Quentin. Time doesn’t really work here the way it does in the hectic modern world of say New York or Chicago. A quick trip to the market for bread and eggs can take over an hour as you always run into at least four or five friends. A short coffee break with another friend can last a morning. I must assure you that the whole country doesn’t run this way. Most people work in France but they also know how to enjoy life and take the time to be. 

Friday is market day in St. Quentin and I love nothing better than heading out on a fresh morning to meet up with my favorite producers, share a joke or two and feel the buzz of a dying way of life. If all those nasty multinationals get their way we’ll all be eating the same industrial produced crap within a generation. Thankfully there are lots of people in St. Quentin and all over France that are preserving the quality and traditions of old. 

Winter is the time the locals reclaim the market, especially the Saturday market in Uzes. I love spending the better part of the morning touching base with old friends. For several years I sold local wines on the market in Uzes, St. Quentin and three other towns. So I always run into people I know and invariably we end up chatting at one the local cafés. Michel for example. He is known all over Provence as the king of accras, those crispy morsels of fried cod. He makes great falafel too and the best brandade or creamy salt cod paste, anywhere. He's a veritable star on the Place aux Herbes. In summer the line-ups are so long I don’t even bother saying bonjour. In winter we catch up. Just opposite is another market legend, cheese vendor Néné le Berger. He has what the French call le bagou, the gift of the gab. He can charm an unsuspecting victim with a mix of silly prose and slightly suggestive claims about the side effects of his excellent ewe’s milk cheese in no time. You end up with more cheese than you could ever consume in a week but the show makes it all worthwhile.    

Spending a Year in Provence

The really exciting news is we are on the move. My wife and three kids (daughter Julie 20, sons Sam, 11 and Simon, 8) decided over a year ago to go back to Canada for a year or so. So I am very busy finding work in Canada and finishing up our house in order to rent.

If any of you are interested in coming to this very special part of France you can check out our place at two addresses:      

http://sabbaticalhomes.com/Home_Exchange.aspx  (long term rental info) 

http://www.maisondesbalais.iowners.net/index.php (vacation rental info) 

You might ask yourself why anyone would want to move away from such a fabulous part of the world. Well all I can say is that I love a bit of adventure from time to time. Wishing all of you a healthy and successful year.

Slainte, Joe McLean

Olive trees are an integral part of the Cretan landscape and a source of life and health to Cretans, symbolizing peace and fertility. So, on a sunny Sunday in January we went out to pick olives. My mother, Katharina, had planned this day for a long time. We were invited to pick olives at Eytyxis Daskalakis's, a good friend of the family, but we were determined to go first to the beautiful village of Kandanos because that's where the best table olives come from.       

When we arrived after a breathtaking drive seeing snow-covered mountains, we were shown to an old olive orchard with huge trees and netting laid under them. These trees were very old and their trunks looked more like monuments from another era rather than parts of someone's producing crop.  Mind you, in the village of Kandanos you will find a huge olive tree, like the famous one in Vouves, God knows how old this one is. It takes four men to encircle its trunk, which is about 12 metres in perimeter. It produces about 50 kilos of olive oil alone.  

The wind storms of previous days had dropped many fresh olives onto the nets. Olives must be large and deep blue in colour, in other words, ripe enough to be edible and of course good in taste. We began our hard labour of hand picking the best olives of western Crete one by one.  

However, the olives did not fall on to one heap for us to collect easily. They were scattered all over the netting. After an hour of this I began scheming how to run my efforts more efficiently. Not forgetting that this day was to be spend in the Cretan countryside the old traditional way that my mother knew: Slow but constant pace of work. In spite of this my mother had the solution: Gather up olives in large piles so we could sort through them while sitting down. As these huge nets covered the entire field my mother disappeared and came back holding brunches of thyme to make a broom to sweep the olives up to a pile. It worked wonderfully. Within two hours we had about 30 kilos. 

Shortly before noon we went off to join our friend Eytyxis in the village of Kampos.The trees were loaded with a variety of olives called "tsounati" in the Cretan dialect. Eytyxis was very proud of his orchard and showed us around explaining how well and promising this harvesting season is. He invited us to break for lunch at his house, but we insisted instead on our goal for the day: picking as many olives as we could.  

We started work quickly but the olives were too small for our purpose and unripe, green. We selected carefully as many large green ones as we could find up in the trees. Alternative plan, we would make instead cracked olives, known as "tsakistes". They get preserved in lemon juice and salted water. They are great on their own or with bread and cheese or in salads or even to cook with them (using wild greens and olive oil, cuttle fish and fennel casserole). 

The snow-capped mountain across the valley in the afternoon sun was absolutely gorgeous. The colours of the fields and the houses were wonderfully clear and bright. In the sight of such beauty, I thought that we are so lucky to be living in such a blessed place. 

First image by Jonxyz; second image by scullywho; third image by Kjersten on www.flickr.com.

Curing your own table olives

The techniques of curing olives, that is, soaking the bitterness out of the them and making them edible are ancient and very simple. The most famous method used today in western Crete is nothing more than coarse salt.

Alatsolies (black olives in salt)

Olives of the "tsounati" variety are used for this recipe. The olives must be harvested late in winter so that they are ripe, with loads of olive oil in their flesh to give them a rich taste. They are first washed well, then mixed with thick salt in a sack or basket or plastic container so that all the juices produced by the flesh run out. The olives gradually wrinkle. They are stirred around regularly so that the salt goes everywhere. They must be stored in a dark and cool place to preserve. They can last for quite a long time up to a year. Before serving they should be rinsed well from the salt. They are generally eaten as a starter or enjoyed with bread and cheese, or in salads.

Tsakistes (cracked olives)

The same olives here are harvested in October or November while they are still green, unripe and with not much olive oil in their flesh, which is still quite bitter. These olives are beaten gently with a stone or wood to crack the flesh open (but be careful not to touch the pit). Then they are soaked in large glass containers in a mixture of water, salt and lemon juice or bitter orange juice. Change the water mixture every 10 days, tasting the olives to see when they will turn sweet and edible.

Then put loads of lemon juice in the water and various herbs, if you like; cover with some olive oil to prevent the top ones from getting mouldy. These olives can be used in cooking or eaten on their own as a starter. Wash them gently and drain before serving with a bit of lemon juice and olive oil and if you like sprinkle them with coriander or rosemary. They do not preserve for very long - maximum a year. My friend Eleni at Sfinari village told me that she uses sea water for her olives until the bitterness comes off and she does not crack her olives at all, which helps to keep them longer.

“We're going to the car wash,” said my friend Thomas. Not my idea of a good time, actually. Bob and I were visiting for the weekend; we had no choice, since Thomas was driving.

We set off along the romantic, meandering Moselle river valley between Koblenz and Trier, with Thomas giving “the Americans” a running commentary. The Moselle is 545 kilometers long, with steep vineyard slopes known throughout the world for fine Riesling wines. Thomas showed us idyllic winegrowing villages, vineyards with familiar names, taverns, pilgrim sites and cultural history at every turn.

“I will show you Europe's steepest vineyard” Thomas said. It turned out to be the Calmont near Bremm, 380 meters high with a 55-degree gradient.

I was unprepared for the imposing view. The cliff, about two kilometers in length, is laced with narrow paths that wind in serpentines across the mountain. Stairways that climb over the rocks and walls of the terraces. There is no single “vineyard” per se, but rather sections of earth. It may seem hard to believe that it is possible to cultivate such steep, craggy slopes. No machine can be brought up by the wine growers. Fertilizer is transported on their backs in the spring and grapes carried down in the fall. Their work is laborious and dangerous.

Thomas told us that he reads frequently in his local newspaper about tourists who die on the slopes of the Calmont – mostly of heart failure or pure exhaustion while attempting to climb the mountain.

As I sat in the back of the car – on the way to the car wash or so I thought - I couldn’t help myself thinking that even in the worst of weathers - nasty, cold, windy and rainy - this region is so very attractive and romantic. See rainy photo the day we were there and sunny photo of the German Tourist Office website for a contrast.

After driving off-road through the mud from the hinterland to the peak of the Calmont, Thomas's BMW desperately needed a car wash. Did I end up going to one? Nope! Thomas couldn’t find it or so he said….!

Up to this part of the story I truly thought this was the end of my blog entry…. until Bob read it and said to me “You are not staying true to the facts.” “But I am staying true to the facts. What do you mean?” Bob insists that Thomas (naughty Thomas!?!) yanked my chain with the pretext of a trip to the car wash. Is this true Thomas? True or false: A) Car Wash or B) Calmont or C) Very diplomatic - both answers are correct.

For serious wine geeks, it's all about the pursuit of perfection. We'll tolerate the bafflement of friends, the disappointment of poor vintages, the torment of indifferent service and the frustration of inferior bottles–because we have faith that now and again, with the clarity of a religious vision, we will experience something Utopian.

In a column last week, Slate.com's resident wino Mike Steinberger asks whether a bottle of wine is worth $700. Not just any bottle, but the 1996 Corton-Charlemagne from Coche-Dury. Well, duh. On the internet, that wine sells for over $1,500, but Steinberger sniffs out a modest restaurant not far from Paris where it's on the list for 550 euros. Of course, by the time he buys two plane tickets, finds a hotel and pays for dinner, he's sunk a lot more into the venture than a handful of Franklins.

Was it worth it? Steinberger quotes his own tasting notes: "What a nose–hazelnut, oatmeal, sweet white fruit, smoke, spice, and a touch of nutmeg. Stirring nose. Ripe, spicy, sublime, succulent grapefruit, pear. Perfect balance. Holy shit." That was just the teaser, though. Then he tastes it: "On the palate, the wine had a rich, oily texture and a Platonic balance of fruit and acidity, all backed by a steel rod of minerality. Think of your favorite painting, or favorite novel, or favorite piece of music–this was it in liquid form."

So, yeah, it's worth it. We're game. At El Gaucho in Belltown (celebrating its 10th anniversary this month), there's a bottle of 2002 Corton Grancey from Louis Latour on the Captain's List for only $160. Not what we'd drink with steak, but we'd match it up with scallops, crab cakes or oysters and take our chances. As they say, hope springs eternal. It might be perfect.

Corton-Charlemagne's stony limestone vineyards cover 72 hectares, over 180 acres, making it the largest white-wine grand cru appellation in Burgundy. (Fewer than 40 vineyards, representing just 2% of Burgundy's acreage, have been designated grand cru.) The growers and merchants fortunate enough to own vines in Corton-Charlemagne will vinify a total of about 300,000 bottles a year. It's not so much a rare wine like Romanée-Conti (1.8 hectares, a bit more than 4 acres, producing 6,000 bottles) as a truly great one.