Cycling the Tour de France has been likened to running 20 marathons in 20 days. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t run one marathon in 20 days.

Yet there I was, under the blistering sun of Provence, slowly pedaling my way up one of the most dreaded, soul-crushing climbs of last year’s Tour: Mont Ventoux. What lured me to that beast of a hill was a longing to do more than just watch the Tour de France. I wanted to experience the Tour de France. I yearned to ride the very roads that, just hours later, would be chewed up by Lance Armstrong, Laurent Jalabert and Joseba Beloki. I wanted to white-knuckle it down the same hairpin turns, and be cheered on by the giddy spectators who’d camped out for days, waiting for that colorful tsunami of Spandex to speed by. Basically, I hungered for a taste of what the world’s most grueling sporting event really felt like.

That’s what landed me, my husband and 13 others on a Tour de France cycling trip with Backroads, an adventure travel company. The plan was to follow the last third of the three-week race as the riders whizzed their way past the lavender fields of Provence, up the mythical Alps and down the cobblestoned Champs-Elysées in Paris. Along the way, we’d stay in four-star hotels, consume obscene amounts of French fare and work off those calories by cycling 40 to 60 miles a day (except during the trip’s three rest days). We’d get to bike some of the most memorable segments of Tour de France routes. We’d also tackle short sections of last year’s course, a torturous 2,032-mile journey.

“How hard can this be?� I naively wondered as I sat on my couch, lazily thumbing through a Backroads catalog. “It’s not like we’re doing the whole Tour. Just part of it.�

But that “part� happened to be the part with the mountains. Big, colossal, mammoth mountains.

Even so, I saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If the prognosticators were right, I’d be witnessing Lance Armstrong pedal his way into the history books, becoming the first American ever to win six Tours. I’d be right there, literally, on Armstrong’s road to victory. Mountains, shmountains, I reassured myself. I’m 34 years old; I take spinning classes. I’ll be just as good as anyone else on the Backroads trip.

I knew I miscalculated that last part as soon as I got a glimpse of the other Backroads travelers. Most of the men’s legs were shaved closer than mine. This meant there was either a disproportionate number of transvestites on the trip, or these were some serious cyclists. It turned out to be the latter, which meant my husband and I were destined to play the role of lanterne rouge, the red lantern that hangs from the back of a train. It’s Tour-speak for “the slowpokes.�

But unlike the Tour, this was a vacation, not a competition. At least that’s what I kept telling myself as I crawled up Mont Ventoux, which I think is French for “makes you curl up in a ball and cry for Mommy.� The 6,273-foot mountain juts out of the Provençal landscape like a giant tumor; and this tumor is anything but benign. Comedian and cycling aficionado Robin Williams summed it up this way: “Even the mountain goats don’t like it.�

Ventoux is a relentlessly steep 13-mile climb to the barren, lunar-like summit, where exhausted British cyclist Tom Simpson keeled over and died during the 1967 Tour. As I started to wonder if the same fate might await me, a burly Frenchman with a moustache as big as my handlebars decided I needed a little pep talk.

“Allez! Allez!� he repeatedly shouted in my ear as I crept up the mountain in granny gear. My French friend was telling me to “Go! Go!� which was what I wished he would do, since sweat was stinging my eyes, my legs felt like the beleaguered stage during “Riverdance� and the last thing I wanted was a hairy cheerleader.

But his words pushed me on, if only to put a little more distance between me and his Burgundy-infused breath.

I’d hear the “Allez! Allez!� refrain countless more times from the throngs of onlookers who’d staked out their spot on the mountain, waiting for the Tour to wheel by in a few hours. Folks like me were merely the warm-up act.

We all know the French are very good at some things (food) and not so good at others (war). But they’re extremely adept at the high art of tailgating. When they weren’t rooting on amateur cyclists like me, they killed time by sipping wine, nibbling on brie and baguettes, playing cards and painting riders’ names on the street.

At my heady speed of 4 mph, I had ample time to witness all of these pre-race festivities. It became clear that, to the French, the Tour is much more than a sporting event. It, like Jerry Lewis, is a cultural phenomenon. Unlike Jerry, it’s easy to understand the Tour’s appeal. This is a race packed with more drama than a Jerry Springer show, and with at least as much potential for bloodshed. Catastrophic crashes. Drug raids. Cheating. Smack talking. Not to mention jaw-dropping displays of athleticism. It’s hard to imagine just how much pain these guys put themselves through until you’ve sampled some of it firsthand.

Mont Ventoux is a kick-in-the-teeth climb, even when you’re cycling it with fresh legs like we were. But the Tour racers had logged 120 miles that day before broaching the base of Ventoux. And they still managed to go up it faster than I went down it. How’s that for an ego-deflater?

It truly is a humbling experience to watch more than 150 Tour riders sail up the very road you just cycled. They make it look so easy. But your burning quads and aching back remind you that it’s not.

I thought cycling Ventoux would leave me too exhausted to cheer on the racers. But one glimpse of that Texan wearing the coveted yellow leader’s jersey had the effect of a dozen espressos. There he was. Lance Armstrong — cancer survivor, cyclist extraordinaire — about an arm’s length away from me, plowing up the very mountain that made my legs feel like overcooked fettuccine. Despite being chased by a pack of cyclists who wanted nothing more than to strip that golden jersey off his back and feed it to him in tiny pieces, he looked more serene than I do in a bubble bath.

Other racers gulped oxygen like frat boys chug beer. But Armstrong seemed to be barely breathing while he pumped his pedals like pistons. I knew I was watching an über-athlete in action. I had a front row seat at the Tour de Lance, and I’d earned it. At the top of my overworked lungs, I shouted the words I’d once heard from a wise, mustachioed Frenchman: “Allez! Allez!�

In the culinary world, three is also a magical number. Here’s where the harmonic convergence of flavors, textures and aromas can feed off one and other. Three wisely chosen ingredients can create taste sensations that truly are greater than the sum of their parts, yet less involved, less expensive and less time-consuming than infinitely more complicated dishes. And the best news is that with fewer ingredients and fewer steps, you’ll have more time for your love triangle. Now if that genie would just respond to your text messages.

Here is a succulent, sensuous, trilogy of foolproof three-ingredient recipes.

Cocktail Dates
(yields 12 bites)

In their unadorned state, Medjool dates are nicknamed “nature’s candy�. Stuff these babies with the nuttiness of Parmigiano-Reggiano, wrap them in the smoky saltiness of bacon, and bake them, and they will turn into molten balls of decadence that will explode in your mouth and blow your mind.

12 large dried Medjool dates
6 slices bacon, cut in half
4 oz. chunk Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

Slice date from top to bottom as deep as the pit. Pry open date and remove pit. Reserve dates.

Using your sharpest knife, cut Parmigiano-Reggiano into pieces that are just slightly larger than the pit you have just removed. Place cheese where the pit was and pinch the date around the cheese to seal.

Wrap each Parmigiano-stuffed date with a slice of bacon. Set dates on a baking sheet, seam-side down, and skewer with a toothpick to hold bacon in place.

Bake for approximately 20 minutes, or until bacon is crispy. Caution: Let cool for a few minutes before serving.

Maple Salmon Suckers
(yields 12 suckers)

This savory sucker comes with the Surreal Gourmet’s money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied, we’ll refund the purchase price and transfer an undisclosed sum from the estranged wife of a deported Nigerian business tycoon directly into your bank account. Simply forward us your banking details.

1 1/2 lbs. salmon fillet, preferably wild (select thickest fillet available)
3/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 T coarsely grated black pepper (I consider pepper a condiment rather than an ingredient. If you disagree, feel free to contact my attorney)

Slice salmon into 1/4-inch-thick strips.

Place salmon slices in a resealable plastic bag along with syrup and soy. Force out the air and seal. Marinate in the refrigerator for a minimum of 4 hours, but ideally for 24 hours.

At the same time, soak 12 bamboo skewers in water (resealable plastic bags work well for this task too).

Preheat grill or broiler to high heat.

Remove salmon from marinade and skewer from the wide end.

Place pepper on a small plate and dip one edge of the salmon in it.

Grill salmon on a well-oiled BBQ grate over direct heat, or directly under a broiler for 1 minute per side, or until just cooked throughout, yet still moist. Serve immediately, or suffer the consequence of the fish drying out.

Bee Stings
(yields 12 bites)

The pigs, cows, and bees have done all the heavy lifting, making this the least amount of effort you will ever have to expend for the greatest amount of accolades.

1/4 cup best-available honey
1/2 T white truffle oil
6 oz. block Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

In a small bowl, combine honey, truffle oil, and pepper. Reserve.

Just before serving, use a paring knife to chisel cheese into irregular 1/2-inch nuggets. Drizzle truffled honey over each nugget. For added savoryness, finish with freshly ground black pepper

(To get the most Parmigiano-Reggiano for your buck, look for rindless center cuts. For the freshest Parmigiano-Reggiano, purchase from stores that move a lot of it.)

Somewhere in the uphill struggle to world-class status, the California wine industry lost a very important tradition. The French still have it. Bovine festivals still have it. Even garlic, cherry and apple growers still have it. But when autumn rolls around in California wine country, the folks are left empty-handed. Without representation. Without hope. Without...a queen!

Things weren't always this dark. In the 1950s and '60s, wine queens reigned over the California vineyards like welcome spring showers. Each October, at the California State fair in Sacramento, vintners chose a local lovely to represent them as their queen during National Wine Week. Some queens were blonde, some brunette. Some even studied dramatic arts. All, of course, were beautiful.

For seven glorious days, the newly crowned Vintage Queen would take her position as wine's goodwill ambassador, making appearances at vintage festivals, attending dinners and proclaiming the excellence of California wines. But perhaps the most important duty of the Vintage Queen was posing for stunning publicity photos, personifying the glamour, grace and charm of California wines. Even some 40 years later, the message comes through loud and clear.

It's time for these photographs to charm the world all over again! Let's raise a toast to these lovely ambassadors of the grape and honor their contribution to the success of the California wine industry as it stands today. In fact, why stop there? Let's be the first to shove all the nineties politically correct crap aside and elect new wine queens to lead us proudly into the 21st century!

Long Live The Queens!

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Everything grows large in California, they say! The beautiful 1950 Vintage Queen has the proof, as she playfully prepares to drink a giant glass filled with California Champagne.

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Sultry! 1951 Vintage Queen Jeri Miller pauses during the wine grape harvest to adorn her hair with grape clusters. No wonder the grape was America's third ranking tree fruit that year!

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Diane Bagshaw, 1953 Vintage Queen, wears the traditional grape picking outfit favored by field workers of the day.

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Dee Hardy, 1957-58 Vintage Queen, has a sunny disposition in spite of the grape vine growing out of her head.

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Wine Queen June Adler reigned over National Wine Week, October 10-17, 1959. She is truly the picture of glamour!

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Making wine is hard work, but Marilyn Lockway, 1963 National Wine Queen, makes it look easy!

Going against the better advice of my high school English and sex education teachers, this story starts with the climax. For anyone involved in wine, the three months from the end of August until the end of November are both the most exciting and the most frightening of the year. These three months dictate the final say in whether you happily learn that your wines will be served at the White House or whether you become the largest vinegar producer in your neighborhood. These are months of 60- to 80-hour work weeks (and many times more) that on one hand require complete control of the environment around you and on the other hand require you to give in completely to the whims of nature. These are months where all thoughts of family and friends dim in an ever growing purple haze as your sleep deprived mind attempts to reconcile the hundreds or thousands of details that'll make or break the next year of your life. This is Crush.

More specifically this is my accounting of Crush for David Coffaro Vineyards and Winery. This vineyard/winery is owned and operated by (take a big guess here) David Coffaro and I'm his assistant winemaker (i.e. only employee). This is the inside scoop of what we have to do in order to put a prime bottle of vino on your table. David Coffaro Vineyard and Winery consists of 20 acres of grapes that Dave planted in 1979 and a winery building that he's been operating since 1994. We make wines that are big and red; zinfandel, petite sirah, carignane, an "Estate Cuvee" (a blend of the previous grapes plus cabernet sauvignon) and a "Neighbors Cuvee" (our only non-estate wine whose blend changes from year to year). Like a sandblaster to Tammy Faye Baker's face, I hope to strip away the layers of overglamorized marketing rhetoric and highlight the best advice I ever got about becoming a winemaker -- "Don't do it!"

The excitement of crush takes place on two separate but intertwined stages that seem to spin and twist in independent motion. The first of these stages is the vineyard. The 20 acres of vines we grow is minuscule by industry standards (There are certainly vineyards that are smaller but we are definitely of the side of pretty-darn-tiny). The first job we have in the vineyard is to wait for the grapes to turn from a rather pretty translucent pink color into an intense dark purple/black color. This process is called veraison. Once the color changes we're in the picking ballpark and ready to play the game. The second step is doing a large amount of grape sampling from each block of vines. It's amazing how grapes will vary from one small block to another, even if they're only 10-100 feet away. For about a month before the actual harvest, my job is to pick a representative sampling of all the grapes we grow and monitor them for sugar content. In general we're looking for a level of 24 to 25 percent sugar, which we measure as 24 to 25 degrees Brix.

The Brix reading is only the second stage however. Knowing the sugar level lets you know the technical ripeness of the grapes but not their actual flavors. Somewhere in the early to mid-twenties (sugar level), grapes go through an incredible change of flavors that ultimately add to the complexity of flavors in the finished wine. This change can only be determined by tasting the grapes themselves. So during the final week before harvest Dave and I walk through every block and randomly snack on grapes to make sure they have the flavors we want. If the sugars are perfect but the flavors aren't there then we simply wait until they develop before picking. Once they do, Whamo!, it's time to wake up really damn early and pick some grapes!

Harvesting grapes is a demanding and sticky job. The grapes are about 25 percent sugar and as the workers dump their picking tubs into the half-tons bins, grape juice splashes everywhere. It's well worth the effort, however, because I get to drive a really cool tractor. Once the half-ton bins are full they are driven to the winery and weighed. From there they're taken, by forklift, into the winery and the grapes are put through a machine called a crusher/destemmer. Now, agricultural machine manufacturers are not very creative when it comes to naming their equipment. When I say we dump the grapes into a crusher/destemmer you can be well assured that the machine will probably crush (lightly) the grapes and destem then, doing very little if anything else. We then pump the destemmed/crushed grapes (a.k.a. "must") into a one-ton bin (again, no big guess on how much it holds). The must is then inoculated with yeast and the transformation into wine begins. [As a side note I should mention that this is specifically the process for making red wine. White wine is processed in a similar but distinctly different manner. I'll get into the whites later.]

The addition of yeast is technically a winemaking choice and not a requirement. Native yeasts, which accumulated on the grape skins in the vineyard, will naturally transform the grapes into wine. But most winemakers don't trust these native yeast strains for the same reason you don't let your crazy cousin Leroy baby-sit your kids -- you just don't know what might happen and, even though the results might be fine, it's just not worth taking the chance. Yeast contribute four things to the winemaking process: heat, alcohol carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfites. The heat and alcohol produced make it possible to adequately extract the flavors and characteristics from the grape skins (almost all of the character and all of the color of red wine comes from the skins being broken down). Alcohol acts as a solvent that extracts organic compounds in the grape skins and the heat aids in and speeds up the chemical reaction involved in fermentation.

The CO2 has a separate and interesting effect on the fermenting grape skins. As the CO2 is released by the yeast cells it catches in the grape skins and causes them to float to the surface of the fermentation bins. This forms a solid layer of covering the top of the bins like ice on a lake. This layer is called the "cap" and can get so thick in larger tanks that a full-grown person can walk across it without falling through. The cap, however, presents a small problem. Since most of red wine's character comes from the skins, having them separate from the juice during fermentation can be bad. This small problem is solved by either "punching down" or "pumping over" your bins or tanks. Punching down involves taking a stick-like device (a 2x4, garden hoe, etc.) and breaking up the cap while at the same time mixing it with the juice. Pumping over involves hooking up a pump to the bottom of the tank and pumping the juice over the top of the cap. These actions insure that the grape skins have enough opportunity to breakdown into the wine.

We monitor the fermenting bins at Coffaro constantly and record the residual sugar levels and temperatures at least once a day. When our measurements show that there's one percent sugar or less left in the wine we prepare the press. We use what's called a bladder Press (For $200, what item is inside this press?). The bladder press is a long cylinder made up of a perforated screen. We pump the fermented juice and skins into the press and rotate it while inflating the internal bladder. This is such an efficient form of pressing that when we remove the grape skins -- the squeeze-dried skins is now called pomace -- they are dry, warm and flaky. They serve no real further purpose and are dumped back into the vineyard as fertilizer.

The pressed wine is pumped from the press into a selection of barrels that we've pre-chosen dependent on the wine varietal and individual character it exhibits. At Coffaro we use six to 10 different cooperages, with barrels ranging from American, French and Hungarian oak. However, this doesn't mean we make "oaky" wine. Barrels serve two general purposes; the first is storage and aging; the second is imparting flavor. Barrels only contribute oak flavors to wine for the first two-to-three years of their life, then, after that, are considered "neutral." As storage containers they can be used for decades with the proper care. So, although all of our wines are barrel aged, we only use 20-25 percent new oak to contribute delicate oak flavors. (This percentage varies from winery to winery. Some use as much as 100 percent new oak, some don't use any depending on the varietals grown and the style of wine preferred by the winemaker.

Once the wine is in the barrel we inoculate it with a malo-lactic starter. All red wines and most whites go through a process called malo-lactic fermentation (ML). ML is a bacterial process that changes the malic acid that's naturally found in wine (it's the same acid that makes green apples taste tart) and changes it into lactic acid (the same acid found in milk). This process makes reds more chemically stable, and for white wines it adds flavor (i.e. that "buttery" flavor in most chardonnays). Now that this is done both the wine and the winemakers get a chance to take a short break and recuperate before it's time to start the whole process over again.

Next time we'll learn why they call cellar workers "rats."

I am anything but a teetotaler. Ask any of my friends if they’ve ever seen me without alcohol in my hand (after 6pm... okay, when i'm awake) and they’ll laugh you silly. Mind you, I am a responsible drinker. I don’t drink and drive (mainly ‘cause I don’t have a car) and I don’t get shit-faced to the point I can’t remember my name (that’s what friends are for, right?).

I do, however, enjoy a great mug o’ coffee or cup o’ tea. That’s why when the press release from Teaposy crossed my desk… okay, it’s really more like an old door on sawhorses, I had to get a sample. Because very few products end up looking or performing as well as the press release boasts.

The Garden Gift set (pictured above) lived up to all expectations and PR boasts. The cute little Socrates cups (every time I hear/read Socrates I remember Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and pronounce it “so-crates�) are just that, and the tea pots are not only elegant but thoughtfully functional. Granted, the little cups hold about as much tea as I consume in one sip (I solved that prob by drinking directly from the pot), but for a special dinner or meal (or prelude to sex) this is the perfect tea set to bring out.

Wait, there’s more. If you really wanna WOW your guest(s), drop a Teaposy “Blooming Tea� into your pot and watch a beautiful blossom unfold before your eyes. There are eight blooming teas to choose from, each containing silver needle white tea and herbal flowers, stitched together with natural cotton thread. And each produces a wonderfully unique experience and taste.

For more info visit www.teaposy.com.

XXX – Highest Rating

- JC