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When the French Attack


SethG

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During a recent visit to a local wine shop in Brooklyn I was given a free 30-page booklet made by Sopexa USA, which has been the official promoter of French wine in the U.S.A. since the 1960s. The booklet is a somewhat informative and somewhat curious tutorial for beginners on how wine is made and categorized in France. I'm keeping the booklet because the descriptions of varieties of grapes, regions and labeling have already proven useful to me as a reference. But I wonder, does anyone actually do the quiz at the back and send off for a diploma?

These booklets must be expensive to give away. Does anyone know, is this a new offensive to recover business lost since all that Iraq stuff happened in the Spring?

"I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast;

but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast!"

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You can take the 20-question test online. I just passed (barely) without studying, and will be receiving my diploma within 6-8 weeks. Very exciting.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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It seemed to me like a recipe for spam e-mail/snail mail. Did you have to provide an e-mail address, or just your home address?

"I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast;

but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast!"

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I had to tell them everything, including income and penis size. I lied about both, though.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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That's pretty good. I got 75%. But they didn't tell me which ones I got right and wrong.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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I had to tell them everything, including income and penis size. I lied about both, though.

inflated one figure, deflated the other, I presume?

It's not really possible to deflate my income.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Way too easy. I scored 18/20, cold, guessing on only three of the questions ("edelzwicker," the Bordeaux classification exception, and the region that is double the size of California's wine growing area).

You can bet that, come mid November, I'll be camping out by the mailbox for that diploma, "suitable for framing," of course.

Michael Laiskonis

Pastry Chef

New York

www.michael-laiskonis.com

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Reasonably easy, but then again I do live closer to France than most of you. Of course I don't get a certificate because I don't live in the US so I used a fake id to enter. Some guy in Iowa is going to be mighty surprised.

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Way too easy. I scored 18/20, cold, guessing on only three of the questions ("edelzwicker," the Bordeaux classification exception, and the region that is double the size of California's wine growing area).

You can bet that, come mid November, I'll be camping out by the mailbox for that diploma, "suitable for framing," of course.

hey me too. I thought it was a little harder than the theoretical portion (advanced) of the court of master sommeliers! But it was 450.00 cheaper too.

over it

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  • 3 weeks later...

We're proud of you, Steve.

I'd like to know:

1) What does one have to consume to make one's wines look like that in real life?

2) Who is that "President?" The signature looks like Prince's ex-glyph after a few too many glasses of Pernod.

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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Reasonably easy, but then again I do live closer to France than most of you. Of course I don't get a certificate because I don't live in the US so I used a fake id to enter. Some guy in Iowa is going to be mighty surprised.

:biggrin:

England? Hell, you can't even click "District of Columbia" when you sign up for the quiz, even though you can register as a resident of Puerto Rico or the "U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands." As if not having a vote on congress weren't already bad enough!

I wonder if the Post Office will look at the zip code and send the thing to my house, or just hunt around until they come up with someone in Washington, Maryland to send it to.

A 95%, by the way. Which I attribute wholly to the close relationship to The Force, French Chapter, I achieved with two glasses of wine at lunch.

I'm on the pavement

Thinking about the government.

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