Corsica: Where You Don’t Need an Invitation

Domaine Pieretti, Credit: Vins de Corse

My first French teacher was from Marseille. I learned Provençal dialects, accents and lifestyle as my first course in “becoming” French. This began what has been a lifelong connection with Provence leading me there many times, introducing me to many friends and helping me to obtain my Provence Wine Master status (exam next month!).

While in that early French class, my teacher would often speak of Corsica…an island 100 miles from Côte d’Azur. He was a friendly guy, a grad student, and he’d tell us that when we came to France we simply must visit him in Marseille and also see Corsica. We were always invited.

Well, this month we see Corsica. Our French Winophiles group is scheduled to stop there via our blogs and we’ll all meet to share notes, pictures and food-parings on Saturday, February 18th at 10 am central on twitter under the hashtag #Winophiles.

The 2016 wine harvest in Corsica, Credit: Vins de Corse

According to Provence WineZine:

Corsica, as a French territory or, technically a collectivité territorial, is one of the 27 regions of France and thus falls under the French administrative system of classification and viticulture.

There are nine Appellations of Origin (AOCs). The two major AOCs are Ajaccio and Patrimonio. The others are Corse Calvi, Corse Sartene, Corse Figari, Corse Porto-Vecchio, Corse Coteaux du Cap, Muscat du Cap Corse, and Corse. There are just over 100 AOC producers although the vast majority of wine–over twice the combined amount of the AOC’s production–is made under the less stringent category called Vin De Pays (VDP) de L’Ile de Beauté. (The European Union equivalents are Appellation d’Origine Protégée or AOP and Indication Géographique Protégée or IGP, respectively.)

We will explore these regions as well as the food, travel, people and lifestyle of Corsica.

HOW TO JOIN US

If you are a wine writer or blogger, this is your invitation to join in!

Contact me to tell me you’re in: Include blog url, Twitter handle, and any other social media details. If you know your blog post title, include that…but you can also send that a bit closer to the event. We’d just like to get a sense of who’s participating and give some shout-outs and links as we go. Contact me here.

Send your post title to me by Wednesday, February 15th to be included in the preview post. I will prepare a preview post shortly after getting the titles, linking to your blogs. Your title may or may not include “#Winophiles.”

Publish your post between 12:01 a.m-8:00 a.m. EDT on Saturday, February 18th. You can always schedule your post in advance if you will be tied up that morning.

Include links to the other #Winophiles participants in your post, and a description of what the event is about. I’ll provide the HTML code that you can easily put in your initial post — which will link to people’s general blog url.

Get social! After the posts go live, please visit your fellow bloggers posts’ to comment and share. We have a Facebook group for participating bloggers to connect and share, too. If you need an invitation please let me know.

Sponsored posts are OK if clearly disclosed. Please be sure to disclose if your post is sponsored or if you are describing wine or other products for which you have received a free sample.