Oops! Written in early May, this missive never got published, it seems. So here ya go. Would be terrible to deprive you of all my wisdom . . .
I know, finally. But it has been a crazy few months for the Robertsons what with our pursuit of a long-stay French visa (so far, so good), a couple weeks hunkered down at the Houston Open and the U.S. Clay Courts (two of my favorite venues), an H-town move (complicated, yet well worth the trouble) and then traveling to France, which proved to be the biggest, most bizarre adventure of them all.
We’ll never be completely certain what happened, but my being “unresponsive” to a flight attendant was apparently deemed reason enough to turn a full United Houston-to-Frankfurt flight around over the Atlantic. We wound up landing in Boston, where things only got weirder. Two days later, following multiple consultations with medical professionals — doctors, EMTs and even an ambulance crew lugging a stretcher — each of whom pronounced me fit as a fiddle, we finally made it to France.
Now here I sit at our dining room table in the Ubaye Valley, contemplating the most beautiful view in the world, at least in my humble opinion. This lovely place, about 65 miles inland from Nice in Haute Provence, has been our home away from home since 1998 and only becomes more special with each visit in large part because our circle of friends, like-minded souls all of them, keeps expanding. We fell in love with the landscape years ago, but now it’s actually more about the people.
Although I probably sound naïve saying this, the Ubaye seems the safest of havens in this screwed up world of ours. While you can’t escape the news here, it almost feels OK to ignore it. The 12th-century church tower seen in the photo above still stands despite lots of bad stuff happening through the centuries. That’s reassuring, Still, it was a bit unnerving the other morning when a couple of sound-barrier-breaking French fighter jets screamed through the valley seemingly a couple hundred feet over my head.
Da hell?
Admittedly, I was curious how the locals we don’t know well would relate to us given what’s going on with the MAGA jackasses back in the USA. They are, to be sure, horrified by what they see on television and read in their newspapers. But, if anything, it has made them all the more welcoming. They can feel our pain. It has been hugs all around on almost a daily basis.
The Barcelonnette “suburb” of Saint Pons (population 400) will be our home base through October, but we are hoping to wander further afield than we have in the past, when our Ubaye hours felt all too limited. For starters, we’ll be visiting Marseille, where we’ll spend an evening with our great friend Claude Gouron, who has photographed the Ubaye probably more than anyone ever but now splits his time between Barcelonnette and Marseille. There his partner, the lovely Samira, lives and works as a ceramic artist . . . never mind that she’s legally blind.
For years, decades even, I went to extreme lengths to avoid Marseille. Remember Gene Hackman in the French Connection? Right, scary. But Claude introduced me to the city’s myriad charms, equal parts gritty and gorgeous. I absolutely love the place now for its energy and its diversity. In many ways, it’s Houston with an Occitane accent — but a bit more history. The Phoenicians first put down roots on that sunny, rocky Mediterranean shore some 2,600 years ago.
And, to be sure, a visit to Italy’s Piemonte — Barolo country! — looms at some point. It was a stopover Alba that led us serendipitously to the Ubaye for the first time in June of 1993. Needing to get to Nice to catch a flight the next morning to London — heading to Wimbledon — we took the long way through the southern Alps, arguably the best detour we could have possibly imagined.
Although spring is springing across the valley floor, the high road down to Nice over the Col de Restefond has only recently been cleared of snow and it’s still a winter wonderland up there in the thin air, as the photo above proves. I screwed up the courage to drive it for the first time yesterday. But it might be a few more weeks — and at least a 20-degree temperature rise — before I tackle those 4,500 feet of vertical climbing on the bike. (A recent attempt on my eBike fell a mile short when my battery ran out of juice, dammit!)
Regarding my wine consumption . . . Well, yes, there has been some. Both of our chain grocery stores have extensive options to choose from at, by Texas standards, absurdly low prices. Five euros (less than $6) will buy any one of a half-dozen delicious Provencal roses and a quaffable Gigondas goes for $17. A perfectly baked baguette to accompany same? Under $2.
But, OK, filling up my Peugeot hybrid SUV can cost $80-plus.
Anyway, going forward I hope to resume posting blogs with reasonably substantive content every two to three weeks and thesportywineguy.com podcast will continue remotely thanks to the technical wizardry of my buddy Jeremy Parzen (dobianchi.com). Parzen is currently curtailing his globetrotting a bit, in part because the Trump tariff debacle has badly disrupted his Italian wine marketing/consulting business and also because he’s busy helping transform Emmit’s Place in his Westbury neighborhood into, seriously, a wine-drinker’s destination, as I noted in the blog that dropped yesterday.
Late June will find us in Vichy, Debbie for a total immersion French class and me for lots of biking and wine-bar time. It’s one of France’s best-known and most beautiful spa towns, although it’s hard to erase from memory those dreadful years Vichy spent as the capital-in-exile of “free” France while the Nazis had Paris under their despicable boot heels. Truth to tell, we shouldn’t forget. As the philosopher Santayana famously warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Pay attention, people.
The Sporty Wine Guy 