L’Express – An American in Carcassonne
Sunday, August 14, 2011
This summer, we were very excited to be featured in a special wine issue of L’Express magazine in France. This is a national magazine and the equivalent of TIME in the United States. So it’s got a wide reach, and the people reading it aren’t necessarily wine geeks.
Billing me as an American in Carcassonne, Nicolas de Rouyn shares our journey in a fun, relatable way. “Mazette. Grosse affaire,” as the article says. 😀
We’re happy with the coverage. Especially because this publication is designed to be read by normal people.
So often the wine world tends to limit itself to other wine professionals or initiated wine lovers. But most wine is consumed by normal people who only think about wine a few minutes a week!
Hopefully this sort of article can get us out of the omphalocentric wine beltway and get the word about O’Vineyards out into the big open public.
This whole issue of l’Express was pretty interesting. They had something like 12 pages devoted to wine bloggers (where O’Vineyards was mentioned a couple times as well). The Languedoc Roussillon was well-represented throughout the issue. Hopefully, the French wine blogosphere can benefit from this exposure and get more people interested in wine.
But then, seeing the way some people reacted to the article, I don’t have TOO much hope for getting the French wine blog world popular exposure. We still seem pretty preoccupied by petty rivalries, alliances, and vendettas. If you don’t have the patience to read through the 200+ comments in this thread, suffice it to say that people disagreed with the selection criteria for the Express articles. Thankfully, most people will never be privvy to this squabbling (despite my willingness to link to it ;D) and most people will just think “Oh there are French wine bloggers. That’s cool!”
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