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Which Glass Should I Use to Taste Champagne?

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Which glass should I use to taste Champagne?
Excerpts from an interview with Clément Pierlot, Cellar Master of Pommery Champagne.
(This post was edited by Word Factor. Click here for more information)
A French version of this article was published on Le Petit Journal. click here.

It was an unexpected and happy movement. I brushed aside two glasses standing on a coffee table. They were wider in the middle and beveled down, yet their shape did not matter anymore. All that remained on the ground were shards of broken glass.

These two glasses were a gift, two champagne glasses that had nothing in common with the ones I used for my friends: six “tulip” glasses made of crystal, also known as flutes. Thin, elongated, fragile, and unique with reliefs of light on a stand, my flutes have a formal spot in my home.

I therefore could not care less about the two broken glasses, yet I was doubting: “Am I serving champagne with the proper glasses when I use the flutes?” 

I asked the question to the Chef de Cave—the winemaker—of Pommery Champagne, Clément Pierlot, while interviewing him during an online tasting dinner in June 2020 organized by the French Institute-Alliance Française, Tastings and Vranken-Pommery America:

Pierlot’s answer was a resounding ‘no.’

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One Hundred Women to Inspire Us to Change

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One Hundred Women to Inspire Us to Change
Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower (Assouline)


On September 6, 2020, French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter wrote an editorial in Le Journal du Dimanche, one of France’s main Sunday’s paper to denounce a dangerous post #metoo radical neo-feminism, which she says transforms all women into victims and all men into presumed aggressors. At the same moment in the United States, Assouline and the American foundation Vital Voices published a groundbreaking book with 100 portraits and texts of women ‘using their power to empower.’

Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exceptions.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, lawyer and former Justice, United States Supreme Court


Their names are Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG passed away a few days after this article was published), Melinda Gates, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Bachelet, Geena Davis and Jacinda Ardern. Some have led countries, some head a foundation, one is a US Senator, while another is one of the most powerful judges in the United States. The book also features Panmela Castro, Xiye Bastida, Yin Myo Su, Hindu Oumarou Ibrahim, Andeisha Farid, Amani Ballour, and Tarana Burke. Less known in the Western media, they too run foundations, corporations, paint large murals, engage in politics, and transform the healthcare delivery landscape of their communities.


There are 100 of them in this book edited by Alyse Nelson, President and co-founder of Vital Voices Global Partnerships, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Melanne Verveer, and Madeleine Albright. This Washington-based non for-profit organization works with women in 182 countries to help them become professionally empowered, visible and heard. One hundred portraits painted by Gayle Kabaker, one of the greatest American illustrators, known especially for her New Yorker covers. One hundred women who share their visions, their ambitions, and raise their voices. They could be a thousand, a hundred thousand, millions. In fact, these 100 women leaders, activists, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, diplomats, financiers, biologists, journalists, athletes and artists are de facto ambassadors of half of the world’s population.

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The Power of Words to Empower Women

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To Power of Words to Empower Women: Five questions to poet Amanda Gorman


Amanda Gorman looks a bit younger than her age of 22 says, and at 22, the Los Angeles born activist has already reached heights that very few people have. A Harvard University student, she made her way as a Youth Delegate to the United Nations in 2013  after listening Pakistani survivor Malala Yousafzai speak. Her own words made her poet. She became the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 and ambitions to run for President in the United States sometimes.


A young poet? Think again. Arthur Rimbaud was a teenager when he composed some of his most famous poems.


Gorman is a poet, an activist and a social entrepreneur. Period. She is a leader whose voice is already vital. She created a youth writing program, read poetry on MTV and at the Library of Congress, and she just authored the foreword of  Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower (Assouline). No wonder her portrait, created by Gayle Kabaker, made the cover of a book that includes Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, Fashion Designer Diane Von Furstenberg, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


No surprise either: her foreword is a poem. It is about words after all, and sharing them.


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At Your Home Without You: Jerry Wonda Shares Music He Loves

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At Your Home Without You: Jerry Wonda Shares Music He Loves

When I connected via Zoom with producer and former Fugees’ bass player Jerry Wonda Duplessis, I was greeted with music and rhythm, Bowie’s Let’s Dance! Seated with his bass guitar at arms’ reach at his Minnesota studio, minutes away from Prince’s home and the sadly well-known street where George Floyd was choked to death, Wonda is doing what he loves the most, sharing the music he loves.


His music of course. That includes hits such as Fugees’ cover of Killing Me Softly, Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, Carlos Santana’s Maria Maria, Melissa Ethridge’s Pulse and more recently the viral success of Newark’s Mayor Ras Baraka’s What We Want.


Music from others as well. That day, Wonda was in the mood for the period-worthy Harold Melvin’s Wake Up Everybody and a song he and I both like dearly, The Eagles’ iconic Hotel California. With some of his musical friends, Wonda launched early May ‘Share Music You Love,’ an initiative to raise funds for MusiCares and help musicians while concerts are halted. A UN Goodwill Ambassador for Haiti, Wonda is also working on bringing music, voices and musicians, professionals or not, from all over the world into a song to symbolize unity.


Born in Haiti, Wonda has never forgotten the donkey he rode to school before he moved to East Orange, New Jersey, into the home of his cousin, Wyclef Jean. He now lives for sharing his luck and dreams with others, children who like him, are born into poverty. “I went to school to be a recording engineer,” Wonda told me, “but I wanted to be Quincy Jones. I wanted to make the music, I wanted to be a producer. I wanted to produce a lot of Michael Jacksons!”


And so, he did.

 

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At Your Home, Without Me: Ramatuelle, Jacqueline Franjou’s Essential Festival

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At Your Home, Without Me: Ramatuelle, Jacqueline Franjou’s Essential Festival

Tonight, August 1st, 2020–and until August 10th. If you are in Ramatuelle, a little village above the Mediterranean Sea near Saint Tropez in the South of France, you might be among the luckiest people. While almost all summer cultural events have been canceled in France, Jacqueline Franjou is opening the 2020 Festival of Ramatuelle, a series of plays, stand-up comedies, and concerts under the stars and the songs of crickets. A must attend annual event, a rarity this year.

This summery feast  has been scheduled every August since 1985. But with movies, theaters, operas and museums still closed in most places around the world because of containment and a very much still present covid19 pandemic, the mere possibility to see comedians and musicians on a stage has become an extraordinary experience. This year’s Festival is an act of audacity and resistance, against all odds, a small, yet safe step to keep us on the pace of being humans, together. 

I was fortunate to attend last summer and I remember fondly the performance of French actor Gérard Depardieu (Golden Globe 1991 for Peter Weir’s movie Green Card) sing Barbara’s most iconic songs in a soft and elusive voice.

I cannot go this summer but will have a special thought for Franjou, the co-founder and President of this Festival, a woman I was lucky enough to work with for a few years and who has never been afraid to be disruptive to keep all of us thinking beyond the obvious. We need this festival, we need culture to fill our hopes and dreams, we need words and scores and stories to pave our immediate future.

Next is the translation from a French interview I did with Franjou while I was still confined in New York and she was already planning this week’s performances (published in Le Petit Journal).

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