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Showing posts with the label Louis XIII Cognac

COGNAC

This is the third and final part of our trip to France in 2019.  Part 1 was to  champagne country , Part 2  Bordeaux , and this Part 3 to Cognac, which is both a town ( 250 miles southwest of Paris ) and the highest form of brandy.  All bottles labeled Cognac are produced from grapes grown in this location.  The population of Cognac is around 19,000, but was as high at 22,000 in 1975. We only stayed two nights in Cognac, at what was then a new  Chais Monnet , one of the very finest hotels we have ever experienced.  Virtually adjacent are the grand four cognac companies, Martel, Hennessey, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin.  I picked this hotel because Rémy Martin is just across the street, where we had made a special appointment to get a private tour.  These four make 93% of all the cognac drunk.   We arrived by train.  Every major train station has a taxi stand, right?  Nope.  We waited for 15 minutes, and finally got some...

STAR WARS vs JURASSIC PARK

There was a time in my life when I was into  Star Wars  films.  The first appeared in 1977 when I was still teaching engineering at the University of Hawaii.  That was 48 years ago.  I bring this subject up today because I will focus on entertainment, and saw a headline:   Giant "Darth Vader" sea bug discovered off the coast of Vietnam . First, this not an insect but a crustacean,  and a local delicacy. Second, does not much look like DV to me.  If this isopod ( Bathynomus vaderi)  was colored black, maybe There have been 12  Star Wars  films so far, and the next one,  The Mandalorian & Grogu , will be released in May, next year.  But I've grown up, and couldn't care less. This franchise has kept returning because later productions also scored well on Rotten Tomatoes. The highest rated was the first in 1977,  Episode IV--A New Hope , got the highest score, 94. However, #2 was the 1980  The Empire Strikes...