Vive La France! a Mini Episode with Earth 2 Bill

Recording in progress, Mark.  Mark, come on. Hey, Mark, wake up.  I heard  through the crack. How come your art will save the world in the right direction and mine is backwards?  What happened there? How did you get yours correct?  I don't know. It looks like. I didn't notice that. It looks like Zeus is trying to stick their arms through my ears though.

You are what they're trying to touch.  Your head is the world.  I'm gonna have to figure that out. Why is mine backwards? It doesn't look backwards to me. Oh, to you it looks correct.  It's a physics problem that we have to solve. Okay. I'm not far apart. The mirrors, the magic of the mirrors.

Tell me about the long day that you had in France. I'm not, I don't mean long in a sense that it's long, bad, just You said you had an interesting day. A long time, yeah. That you probably heard some people talking about that. At some of these connector meetings around the world, right? Oh, Mark, Bill Gentry, tell us about the long day in France.

Tell us about your day, Bill. You're long. All  right. Let's see the long day. It's a long story too. This is about.  Four hour story, Mark, you got four hours? No, I got to go, man. All right, I'll try to cut it down to six minutes or eight minutes or something.  You got to tell us the context to where you were.

I'm on sales visits. I go to most of what's going on. I was going to France  in the later years when my ex and I weren't traveling together that much, but we were I was, I'm visiting, I was like the head of sales over Europe for a while. So we're visiting all the different offices.

I set up an office in Slo, Slovakia. I set up one in Warsaw. I hired new reps in various countries. It was quite an interesting five, six years, rebuilding the sales organization of Europe. But I didn't need to do anything in France because we had wonderful salespeople in France.

Like I said, I love the French, so I will say nothing bad about the French. Even the bad stuff about France is good, if you'd learn to love the French. So anyhow, the long day. I'm in Bordeaux. We're in Bordeaux which is nice. It's not a second tier city or something they call it.

It's only about a million and a half people, I think, in Bordeaux. And it's an elegant old town. And they and, my key sales guy in Paris, tell me about Bordeaux, Jacques. And he's filled with gentry. It's filled with the gentry, which is the nobles.  Why do they have so much money?

It's arguably the most famous wine district in the world. So Bordeaux wine and the city basically, I think the biggest income for that Bordeaux area is the wine. And I first learned to really drink Bordeaux wine.  And to me,  uh, Bordeaux wine is basically a blend of the Merlot and the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.

And there's a river that goes through the heart and the center of Bordeaux. I don't even know the name of the river, but let's call it the river that runs by Bordeaux. And  on the east side, on the west side, is where the wines and the, and I think the soil is more gravelly. And that's where all the heavy cab mixed Bordeaux's come from.

And on the other side is the, where the Merlot  based Bordeaux's come from. And that's basically how you tell the difference. And there's a difference then in Bordeaux's Homi dolk, Hot mi dolk is a famous area where the, it's a cab, cab sav based. Great. And I learned all of this as I was trying to court European women  living in San Francisco before I was married or anything like that.

So I was studying European women and I was studying European wines and initially it was French. And  I think it was 20 years before I even knew the Italians had any wine at all.  So  on this day we've made some sales calls and we're gonna, at lunchtime, we're gonna walk up the famous hill of Saint De Mion.

Saint de Mion is a famous section of Bordeaux, and it's a Merlot based section and rather than going to all the different chateaus to taste the wine, they had set up in Saint Émilion, this walk up the hill with 25  on the left and 25 on the right, chateaus represented in these small booths, these small little huts where you can do the tasting of their wines.

It's really a great experience, especially at lunchtime when you've got more  sales visits to make in the afternoon. Oh my God. And then that's, I think it was a Friday and that's okay on Friday. I think everybody's allowed to start drinking it for breakfast in France. They don't have that. You can't drink at lunch.

They might by now, but they didn't used to. So we were walking up with my sales. guy at the time. I won't say his name so he won't get in trouble.  And we're tasting um, the various Bordeaux's. And they say that if you get to the top, and at the top is the church, the cathedral of Saint Domingue. If you get to the top and you're sober, you got to go back down and start over again.

That would be a long day.  So we both qualified for not being sober. So what do we do? We jumped in our car and we drove to our next sales call. And the next sales call is really quite interesting because as my, my ex company, the family biz, the connector guys, most of our business in Europe especially was aerospace based, Airbus and, defense aircraft and so forth.

We went to this sales call. It's just about an hour, I think north of Bordeaux. This is a famous aircraft computer manufacturer  and we have a lot of connectors in aircraft airborne computers.  And so the interesting thing about that call is that they take you into this warehouse where these racks and racks of single board computers are not enclosed by the shell of a computer.

It's just a board that is functioning and everything's plugged in and everything's working and there's several thousand of these computers and what they represent is that every airplane that is still flying in the world. Supposedly, every airplane that is flying in the world at any moment  has a computer in it, and it's represented in this factory in the south of France, so that if somebody's having a problem with their computer on the airplane, and they're up in the air and they're having a problem, they can call and be patched into this factory, and people can go in there and check to see what might be the problem by looking at the computer motherboard.

Wow. Are you with me, Mark?  It's pretty cool.  It's a pretty cool concept. You'd never think of it. It's gotta be a pretty big building, man. There is a live, you actually know because they're in racks and these boards, at least the ones I saw, are not that big.  And what are you gonna say, there's maybe 2, 000 different types of aircraft flying at any one time?

There's not that many different aircraft that are flying. The  older ones don't have computers, right? It's only the ones that have their stuff on it though, right? No, anything. That was one of the roles that this company had was to service that part of the, the flight control, global flight control requirements.

I was told that every computer in the world was right there represented, but they were the world leader in making these types of onboard computers. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty funny how we made this sales call. I think we were sober by the time we got to their door and then we're then we need to go drive back to Paris.

All right, we're driving back to Paris,  and what is so typical, because I would say every two or three trips you're going to make into France, and we do drive a lot in France. The railroad system there is not so expansive that it can take you everywhere. We're driving at a high speed.

Yeah. French highways and suddenly traffic stops.  About every three trips you're going to take in France during the week, you're going to run into some kind of a strike, and it might be truckers strike. And what they'll do is they'll block the road. Oh, how does that happen? Two or three trucks have broken down right on the highway blocking traffic for hours.

And  they're Not necessarily striving for the rights of the truckers. They might, there might be a solidarity that the truckers have with the postal service or with the garbage collectors or the croissant manufacturing guild. Whatever it is, there is solidarity. So we got stuck in this traffic jam for quite a few hours.

So we're delayed. And typically when I'm staying in Paris, I stay in this area called the Latin Quarter, which is a fun nightlife area. anD but particularly on this trip, for some reason, I chose to say, and I think it was the on only one  uh, with this very kind of upper snooty section of town the high end hotels, the high end restaurants, et cetera, et cetera, the opera house, so forth.

So I'm going to be, I'm staying in the Western  expecting to arrive at five o'clock and we don't arrive at five o'clock. We arrive at one 30.  Oh, in the morning. Wow. So we're really late. And so I've missed my opportunity to check out this part of Paris. I don't think I've maybe one other time been into that part of Paris.

And the western is like so many of the hotels in France period, it's an elegant old building or an old hotel that's been renovated and they're in there. The architects in Europe are phenomenal, how they mixed the modern and the glass and the sleek and the metal with the old stone and the relief sculptures that might be built into the walls.

So it was a really high class, high end hotel. And I'm checking in at 1: 30 and it's. It's maybe almost two by the time I've got everything done and I've got my bags ready and I'm going to go upstairs. And so by that time there's no bellhop to help me because I don't think I had more than just one bag with wheels.

So I'm going upstairs. in the elevator to my room. It's not a super huge hotel, so it's not like the hallways or half mile long.  So I'm going upstairs, go up to whatever this floor three or four and I get off the elevator and it's totally black and dark because all over Europe to save energy, they have these motion detectors that you have to move and enter into the space before the lights will come on.

Have you ever seen that?  Yeah, they are very common in America. Yeah, like in bathrooms and stuff like that now before because people leave the lights on all the time. So you come in, they come on, they turn off when you leave. Yes.  Okay. All right. That's all over. European apartment complexes.

It's everywhere. It's, I don't know if it's a law that you have to have that, but it's it saves I'm sure a lot of energy long run. So I'm stepping off of one of the nicest, the elevator and one of the nicest hotels. Let's just say not in Paris, but in Europe. I'm at this Paris Western in the nicest neighborhood and I'm walking a few steps in the black and then the light comes on and I look down the hallway and what do I see?

I see a rat as big as a cat. Oh, shit. Standing there in the middle of the hallway and he's looking at me like. What are you doing here? And I'm looking at him going, what are you doing here? I'm the one who's paid for a room. And  so he shakes his head around a little bit. There's this kind of moment, this tete a tete, these, a couple of big powerhouses.

Who's going to, who's going to win out here. And the next thing you know, the guy dives under unbelievably. Cause I tell you what he was, I'm not exaggerating. He's as big as a cat. He slides under the door of one of the rooms.  Yeah. Was it your room? Here's the rest of the story. I walked down the hallway.

I didn't count if he was in door number 3, 4, 5, but I walked down the hallway and I looked at my key and I looked over and I'm going,  holy crap. He might've gone into my room. Oh,  . And you know what? I was so tired. I didn't go downstairs and complain or anything because. I didn't know what room he went into and they would have probably laughed at me and said, there's no way we had a rat that big running around in our hallways worth the wisdom.

I went in there and I looked, I swear, I looked under the bed and I looked around in the closets to see if I could find anything but I could not. And I've seen how rats can squeeze themselves. into the tiniest little unimaginably infinitesimally small holes and disappeared. Then he did that and he didn't show his face and he didn't bother me while I was sleeping.

I thought you were going to have a long day in your hand. You woke up the next morning. And the rat looked over to you and was smoking a cigarette.

That's the truth of it, but I'm not going to tell you all those details. Let me go get a bottle. How about a bottle of wine? Huh?  Is that what a little bit more discussion on what France is most famous for?  Absolutely. I am one. Oh, man. I, you know what? I do.  I do love the good, you know what? I, okay.

I should say I like a big, bold cab, right? I do. I like a big, bold cab. That's probably my favorite grape. But  I also really appreciate the Bordeaux blends and the different blends. I like blended wine. I think way more than I like it.  A single varietal wine, like a cob franc or a Cabernet or Syrah, those types of things when, if they're blended correctly.

And I think that's the beauty and the artwork of the wine is that, are they the different blends that they have, the different years, the different grapes, the different barrels that they use and stuff like that. It's but if you get it perfectly.  Balanced Bordeaux. Man, there's really not much better than that, really, because they're not sweet, they're not too dry, they're just perfect.

I really like them. They're world famous for a reason. I'll say that right now, I'm You know I'm back to drinking French wine after doing a lot of Italian and Spanish, but now I'm drinking Rhone wine, Rhone wines, Châteauneuf du Pape, I think,  you know what a Rhone wine is? It's a blend, and it's predominantly a blend of a Grenache and a Syrah.

Yeah, that's good. And the central coast right now in California, that's the hot thing. Is this Rome type of blends with the Syrah Grenache? Hang on a second, I'm going to go grab a bottle of wine, and we'll talk a little bit more about the Provence area of wine of France, which not many people probably know about.

Have you ever been to a place called, is it Nice or Nice?  That's the big city on the Côte d'Azur, which is right, right near the Provence wine area. Really?  Have you been there? Yeah, I've been there several times. It's really close to Cannes, Cannes Film Festival. Right there. Hang on a second.

Okay, so what do we do to cap off and say our final moment here on The Discourse on France, Bill's very brief, I think I could talk about France on and on Mark. But I have right here a cup of French wine, and this is it's a rosé.  And, a lot of times if you pull and ask for a rosé in America, they're gonna go, Oh,  you rosé, you go both ways.

Ha.  'cause it's generally considered a sweet LA  wine  . But in the south of France in the provenance area, that's where this wine is from. They make roses. They may be a red grape and I don't know what the process is, but we've gone and done wine tasting in, in, in provenance. And so I'm gonna open this up.

I've already. I was tasting this a little bit. I drank a little bit, about four glasses just getting ready for the  program.  Just sampling it. Yeah just making sure it was right. I wanted so badly to do a red. I thought we'd do a tour of the French winemaking areas starting up in, in Burgundy, the Bourgogne, and then go down to Beaujolais and across over to the Rhone and then the Loire Valley and then down to the big bold.

Gascon, the Gascon red wines of Southwest France. Wouldn't that be fun to do? And then we'll go over to Provence. And the wonderful thing, and a lot of people don't know this because I'm going to say, sorry, a lot of Americans don't know much about rosé wines because they first got introduced into America as being very sweet.

Yes. Almost some kind of a sweet juice. Almost with spritzers. They used to use a lot of rosés.  Put a, like a wine spritzer type of  wine spritzers. Yeah. Bastardized it.  Ruined it. Ruined the whole image of rosés for many years. But in France, the rosés are not sweet sweet.

In Italy, they have rosés. They have rosés out of Spain. And they're all generally considered dry. Some are very dry. I'm gonna interrupt you with the people who drink in august and in the hot summer months in europe is the rose what is more popular in france and this is just your opinion you could say  Red wine or white wine?

Oh my God, there's no question that red wine is. So many French people will say white wine. That isn't even wine that we don't even, we don't even say that again. Not in front of me. Don't you ever call a white wine? Why?  I guess there's no question that I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I would say.

In France, 70 percent of the wine that gets drunk is red. Do you like German wine? A, do you like their wines at all? Gerdsen? I like their sweet wines. No, there's some great wines out of Switzerland and Germany. But they're usually for local consumption. They don't have a, I don't think a huge market.

I bought a few cases of this. I found it down in Tucson once. What was called a Pinot Meunier. And I'm trying to make it wrong. It's generally a red, very light red grape that's used. Eighty, ninety five percent, they say, get used to champagne. Really? I guess they grow a lot of it in Germany.

And I guess they send it down to the Champagne District of  France. But sometimes they'll bottle it under the Pinot Meunier grape name. And I loved it. I loved it. You like champagne.  I'm no, I'm not a huge fan of champagne, but I loved this grape. It was very light. It was even lighter than a Pinot Noir.

Yeah.  No, I do Pinot Noirs too. Very much. That's one of my favorites. And I think that  to me, they're almost, you don't mind if I pour another drink. You want me to pour you a drink over there, Mark? Here.  Here you go, Mark. Oh, there you go. Yeah.  Enjoy.  I like that. They're pointing at my head now, too.

Yes.  Michelangelo's.  I like the Pinot Noirs and lately, and this is not French wine, but I also love the Amarone's too. I just absolutely love them. Oh, one of the best wines in the world. All right, why don't we go ahead and sign on to a yeah. Okay. Vive la France. J'aime beaucoup la  You know what  you've got.

Do a toast in and you don't need No, before we leave, vote to the,  or vote to the for  meat de.  The, and LA  . There you go. How can, how? That was a total destruction of the French language, but they all understood. The thing is that they will all understand and that's what matters. Here's, thank you, Mark in the audience.

Vivo La France. Okay.  With the French.

Let's go ahead and start.  Have you ever been over there when they had the Tour de France?