Foreign Perspectives

Bonjour mes amis:

Last time you saw the extensive July 14th celebrations in Estagel. This pic is of the parade of the “confreries” (wine lodges) of Languedoc-Rousillon today (Saturday). As you can see, wine is a whole lot more important in these parts than revolution! Quite a colourful parade which has had the side effect of filling up Mas Camps with people.

We were starting to wonder why we were getting so many bookings as the first we heard of the thing was Thursday. Yup, there’s us being the only accomodation of any consequence in Maury and they forget to tell us about one of the major events! That’s pretty typical of here as they’re awful at tourist promotion in general: virtually all of the cars parked in the town today were French, yet 60% of the tourists aren’t French but then they only advertise it in French, don’t have a website and don’t distribute their brochures that widely.

Actually on the website thing, I’m thinking of running up something to cover each of the local wine producers in a bit more detail than is currently on my little guide. I already get hits for the couple of domaines that I mention (none of them seem to run to websites or even to brochures in anything but French even though the bulk of the wine is sold to Belgium (OK, they speak French), Denmark and Holland (who generally prefer speaking English)). Nope, I’m not planning on charging them: it’s just that it’s in my own interest to attract more folk to the area and if they’re coming to do a tasting trip locally (quite a common reason for people to come) it should be useful to have my website associated with the various wine producers. Longer term, I’m also hoping to organise such trips as a package deal.

Someone else is buying a property in Maury and is staying with us for three or four days in August. We’re starting to discover more and more English in the area and sold a couple of bottles of wine to one of them the other day. It’s not, yet, a form of English colony though lately the local shops have started to develop little “English products” sections. It’s quite good business for us as people buying property tend to stay for longer than others and those that have settled in tend to be keen on our type of restaurant (haven’t managed, so far, to get big numbers of French weaned off their favourite: “burgers and chips”).

Oh, that’s me and James towards the end of a very hot day. I look much better in the mornings before it gets too hot!

And finally, for now, I’d be keen to get some feedback on mark #1 of my online shop (which needs lots of development!). It’s at Personally Chosen . The links on it are “live” but don’t be going as far as entering your credit card information just yet as I’ve not worked out how to transport the wine from me to customers.