Jim - Lourdes Restaurant — Jim Lockard – After a Particularly Nice Cassoulet and a Bottle of the Local Red in Lourdes, France

I am a lover of wine and of the social implications of enjoying wine – at home, in restaurants and wine bars, at wineries, and traveling. I have been “into” wine for about 30 years and have been blogging since 2005 here and at other sites.

In 2017, we moved to Lyon, France from California. As I note in some of my blogs from 2020 & 2021, the wine life is different in France. But I’ll still blog about it and about our travels, which usually include touring wineries wherever we go.

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans” ~ Ernest Hemingway

JimLockardonWine.com is a blog about wine and wine appreciation in all of its aspects. Posts will include some of our great wine-related experiences here and abroad, and reviews of wines that I think you will want to know about.

Here is my first post reproduced:

MY PHILOSOPHY OF WINE

I really enjoy wine.

Wine - Paris Wine Shop Display — Paris Wine Shop Display

I enjoy shopping for wine, drinking wine, talking and writing about wine, reading about wine, making wine (I’m part of a wine co-op that produces 250 cases per year), traveling to wine regions, tasting wine, and so forth. I do not (so far anyway) collect wine as an investment or purchase wine futures.

I have wine nearly every day, mostly with dinner. I enjoy many kinds of wine and enjoy exploring everything from wine shops to wine regions to find new wines to enjoy. There are more important things to do with your life, and I do some of those things, too, but wine is a nice part of my life.

My philosophy of wine, which will largely inform this blog, is that wine is to be appreciated and enjoyed. By appreciated, I mean that it is important to recognize the amazing thing that wine is – a beverage that has been crafted for over 6,500 years by nearly every culture on the planet (even if you limit this statement to grapes only). Fine wine is crafted by amazing people who grow grapes and make wine using a wide variety of techniques, practices, and equipment. Wine is a living thing – it is never exactly the same at any level, whether from bottle to bottle or vineyard to vineyard. In fact, wine changes appreciably about every ten minutes that it is in the glass!

By enjoyed, I mean that wine is to be savored on its own AND it brings entirely new dimensions to many kinds of foods. Enjoyment also includes the wonderful social aspects of enjoying wine with friends, or with people you just met. And you can enjoy wine right away – you don’t need years of experience and wine education to enjoy wine. Appreciation of wine does increase with experience and education, but it is available to everyone.

So I encourage you to find the wines that YOU like and to enjoy them the way that YOU like to enjoy them. If that means white wine with a steak, so be it. If it means that you disagree with Robert Parker or another wine critic over how good a wine is, so be it. If it means that you prefer Charles Shaw Cabernet to Plumpjack Cabernet – well, we have to draw the line somewhere!

In short – this blog is about appreciating and enjoying wine. Not from the standpoint of the experts and the high-profile critics, but from the perspective of finding your own way in the world of wine. I will share my (and my wife, Dorianne’s) explorations and adventures with you and perhaps you will find some value in that. The goal is for you to find your own way. So, get ready to pop a cork or unscrew a cap, and let’s begin!