Sublime

More recently, Paul Ricard, who became Marseille’s most celebrated and flamboyant tycoon—he once took fifteen hundred of his staff to Rome to be blessed by the Pope—decided as a young man to make his own brand of pastis. It wasn’t an original idea. The Pernod distillery near Avignon had turned its production over to pastis when the dangerously addi

You will have heard, I’m sure, that champagne was invented by the monk Dom Pérignon, who said when he tasted his divine invention, ‘I am drinking stars.’ Never has there been a better description. He lived to a good age—seventy-seven, I believe, which is a testament to the medicinal qualities of champagne. What is less well known is the unusual rel

vermouth cassis.

they had a formidable professor, Lucien Ferrero, who must have one of the most experienced and knowledgeable noses in France, and who has personally created more than two thousand perfumes. He had come from Grasse to take the class through its paces, to train young noses in good habits, and, with a little luck, to discover talent that could be deve

And there it was, champagne in glorious abundance, filling racks on either side of a narrow gravel pathway: Krug, Roederer, Bollinger, Perrier-Jouët, Clicquot, Dom Pérignon, Taittinger, Ruinart—in bottles, magnums, Jeroboams, Rehoboams, Methuselahs, and even Nebuchadnezzars.

two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon every night.