Most Recent Posts

Neat rows of grapevines run down the slopes of the Cotes de Beaune, all the way to the gravel driveway at Chateau de Corton Andre. The castle's traditional Burgundy black-and-yellow-tiled roof glistens in the autumn sun.

Despite the sun, Antoine Pirie, managing director of French wine house Pierre Andre, which is headquartered in the chateau, says rain and frost this spring and three bizarre summer hailstorms cut grape yields 50, 60, even 70 percent at some vineyards; this at a time when Burgundy is increasingly popular, and sales are booming in the U.S., Britain and across Asia.

"We're going to face a very small crop," he says. "So in fact, you're going to have a kind of difference between offer and demand. And in that case, the consequence is a big increase in prices."

In the chateau's cellar, which dates back to the 14th century, tourists and wine dealers are sampling various vintages. Burgundy is about seven times smaller than Bordeaux, France's other major wine-growing region. Its vineyards are divided into much smaller plots, which are often owned and worked by families instead of large estates.

Burgundy fans say each wine is unique here, reflecting not only the winemaker's style but also the soil, the sun and the specific place on the hill where the grapes are grown.

Wine dealer Philip Slocombe has come to Burgundy for 20 years. He says his clients can never get enough of grand cru Burgundy wines.

"I think when you taste a good white or red wine from Burgundy that is elegant, subtle, complex, and in the second and the third glass keeps asking questions, then you get something, you think, 'Wow, this is something special,' " he says. "Once you've been taken by Burgundy, you always come back. There's a wonderful soul here."

Wine is the lifeblood of the tiny villages that dot the landscape of this region. It will take more than bad weather or an economic downturn to change a centuries-old way of living centered on grapes.

The church bells ring as we arrive in the village of Pommard, and a deep, fermented smell permeates the air.

They are distilling a liqueur called Marc de Bourgogne. A large vat steams with a huge mound of crushed grapes in the town plaza next to the church. Some of those crushed grapes are from the vineyard owned by Anne Parent, a 12th-generation winemaker at Domaine Parent.

"Eleven generations of men, and I'm the first woman," she says in French. "It's the second French revolution."

Parent heads down into the cellar where the 2012 vintage is aging in massive oak barrels. There is room for 350 barrels here, but today there are fewer than 200. Parent says despite the dismal season, the harvest finished on a good note with hot, dry weather that pushed the grapes to full maturity.

"This vintage is an amazing vintage," she says. "A fantastic quality. Very nice balance between fruit, tannin, acidity. Very expressive. Very generous. But the quantity is ridiculous. Ridiculous."

A few miles away, the bottling plant at Domaine Albert Bichot is at full throttle. The company, one of Burgundy's largest, exports nearly 4 million bottles a year. Its owner, Alberic Bichot, says no matter how good the quality of the 2012 vintage, growers will not be able to make up for the loss in volume.

"It's impossible," he says. "Our customers are not ready to pay the double price or 50 percent increase. In the best conditions, we can increase by 10 or 15 percent."

But Bichot says Burgundy winemakers are always ready for the unexpected, so they keep reserves from previous years to smooth out the lean times. Still, he warns, the shortage this year is so acute, that come 2014, when the 2012 vintage hits the shelves, Burgundy lovers may have to drink sparingly.

Scottish comedian and actor Billy Connolly has been performing for more than 50 years, and says he has no plans of stopping. He summed up his style of comedy to the San Francisco Chronicle: "I believe in funny, not clever.... If I hear someone described as clever, I won't buy a ticket." Connolly talks about his career and about what kind of humor works in Scotland but not in the U.S.

When my nieces were small, I took them on a day trip to the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. We had fun touring a puckishly curated journey through the history of cinema, until my younger niece flushed the toilet in the noir-inflected bathroom — and set off the famous shrieking strings that amp up the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, creating the most terrifying moment in American cinema.

At age 8, my niece had never heard of Hitchcock — or the movie — so she wasn't in on the joke the museum was making at the expense of a director as obsessed with toilets as he was with symbolically whacking uncooperative blondes. But those few bars of Bernard Herrmann's score so freaked the poor child that she tore out of her stall, buried her head in my shoulder and demanded to be taken home at once. Bad Auntie!

As it turns out, attaching that particular musical fragment to that particular blonde murder was not Hitchcock's stroke of genius but that of his wife, Alma Reville, an accomplished script editor and story consultant. In Hitchcock — the second movie this year to make free with the life of a very secretive man (the first was HBO's The Girl) — Helen Mirren's Alma admonishes her husband (Anthony Hopkins) that his arty strategies of subtle suggestion are all well and good, but "you can't scare people just by going 'boo.' "

Where The Girl focused on Hitchcock's notorious abuse of actress Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock uses the couple's herculean struggle to make Psycho as backdrop to a crisis in their fraught but resilient marriage. Based on a book by Stephen Rebello, Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi (who made the hugely entertaining rock documentary Anvil!), seeks to give Reville her due as a canny wife and talented collaborator.

Hitchcock is billed as a love story, but you'd need a pretty elastic definition of the word to apply it to an apparently chaste and testy union that seemed to work best as a commercial and creative partnership. In a slight variation on her regal crankiness in The Queen, Mirren is all bossy business as Alma, which, according to most biographies, is probably about right. But in the film, at least, there's not much more to her than that.

So it's jarring that screenwriter John McLaughlin lumbers her with an extramarital dalliance that probably never happened, yet which consumes a lot of time and space and detracts from what is meant to be a portrait of a marriage.

As for the man himself, he's a visually distracting tangle of missed opportunities. On a good day, the pop-eyed Hitchcock looked like a giant goldfish staring out of its bowl; on a bad day he looked like a basset hound bereft of its bone. He ought to be a snap to imitate, but Hopkins, buried behind a stately gut and several tons of "makeup effects," looks like some nondescript fat guy doing a passable imitation of Anthony Hopkins.

Enlarge Fox Searchlight

Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) had worked in Hollywood for more than a decade before Psycho and its notorious shower scene made her a legend. Her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis made her own horror-genre mark with 1978's Halloween.

The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is quite a political boost for the Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. The Islamist leader spent long hours in meetings and on the phone with world leaders. He spoke to President Obama six times during the crisis and was able to produce a cessation of violence that brought him high praise and put Egypt back on the international map.