Summer wines, like Beaujolais, are light, flavorable and fruity. They are meant to go with light, informal meals. Winter wines are deeper in flavor, made to complement robust meals, like stews or cassoulet. Like their summer counterparts, they are neither pricey nor hard to find. As a special bonus, although prices are rising, these bottles cost a fraction of their expensive vintage counterparts from Bordeaux or Burgundy, or for that matter, in the case of Côtes du Rhône, their increasingly expensive neighbors from Châteauneuf du Pape.

We’ll take a look at three fine winter wines, Côte du Rhône, Madiran, and Cahors.

Has it really been ten years since we welcomed the Millennium in Paris? The years have flown by, filled with many visits to France, which inspired the beginning of our Music and Markets Tours business with the inaugural tour in Provence in 2003, dozens of new friends in this inviting country, and even the purchase of a village house in the south of France.

About a decade ago, in France on the Brink, the British reporter and francophile Jonathan Fenby examined the decline of France through several lenses: her drifting cuisine, scandal-prone politics, stumbling economy, subsidy-dependent agriculture and welfare giveaways. Comes now Slate magazine's Michael Steinberger with only one lens—France's declining cuisine—to explore a wider catastrophe: "the end of France."

As a mother of three daughters who love to shop, I have often dreamed of the perfect gift for holiday or any grand occasion: a plane ticket to Paris for a few days of shopping extravaganza!  Far out indeed, but nevertheless I researched the idea to find ways to make the trip easy and efficient – whether one goes searching for bargains, haute couture or simply wanting to see what’s chic.

It’s raining, not pouring down rain, just endlessly drizzling, and that’s the problem. You can do something with a real downpour, but it’s just spitting. If it were really raining, I could curl up in front of a fire, if I had a fire, and read a book, which I do have, and make the most of a domestic day, or maybe clean out a closet if the fire got boring or the book was dull. But it’s not like that, just gray and chilly and wet, a low-flying dense cloud, not enough reason to stay in, and out I go.

As I sit down to write the annual Bonjour Paris year-end letter, I realize I’m not quite certain how many have been written. It’s either the 14th or 15th. I’ve lost count since we first launched as Keyword: Paris on the travel channel of AOL. How times have changed.

Here's a recipe for Zaleti, a traditional pastry from Italy's Veneto region. Enjoyed during carnavale back in the Renaissance period, it fits right into the festive spirit of the holidays. The name Zaleti means "little yellow things" in the Venetian dialect and quite aptly describes the tasty sweet, yellow from the main ingredient: corn flour. I make them soft and crumbly; they somewhat remind me of Irish scones, which I miss terribly in France.

Two-and-a-half hours southeast of Paris is a lovely little village where Pierre Auguste Renoir and his family spent many of their happiest days. Today it offers the same quiet, peaceful ambience and inspiring landscapes that nourished the creative genius of not just one but two world-famous artists. Off the beaten track, at the center of an extraordinarily beautiful but little-known world, lies Essoyes (pronounced ESS-wah).

In the latest volume of short stories by Lynn Jeffress, The Dali Code & Other Paris Stories, sudden strangeness reigns free. The book is a slim volume of first person fictional narratives in which the different narrators (usually women, but not always) live in a world populated by an erratic (and sometimes erotic) admixture of normalcy and strangeness, somewhat reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism, Haruki Murakami, or perhaps Lewis Carroll.

If you have never heard of the French artist Fernand Pelez (1848-1913) you are not the first. His work on display until January 17, 2010, at the Petit Palais in Paris is a retrospective of his beginnings as a traditional, academic artist to his bold later works that resemble photography.

In conjunction with this exhibit, a free concert “Concert Paris 1900” will be held Tuesday, December 22 at 3 p.m. in the auditorium. Three musicians from the Orchestre National de France are performing a variety show from cabaret to opera. Reservations are unnecessary, but only 182 seats are available.

Mysteriously, Montparnasse, that ever-vibrant quarter full of legendary cafés, bars and brasseries, has not been a destination for tea. Now with the very welcome arrival of the charming Chez Charlotte salon du thé in the hip new Hotel des Academies et des Arts, locals and visitors can pop in off the busy boulevards and settle in to comfortable couches to savor selected macarons from macaron-master Pierre Hermé and loose-leaf teas from Palais des Thés. This is a savvy minimalist pairing. No less a master chef than Fernand Adria has declared Pierre Hermé’s macarons to be “perfection”. Palais des Thés is known for sourcing quality teas from growers that are environmentally sensitive.

Imagine a father who looked forward his whole life to the day when he’d have grandchildren of his very own. And then imagine that father having a daughter so headstrong and selfish that she decides she’d rather live thousands of miles away, in some country that speaks a tricky foreign language and that he’d have to travel 16 hours to reach.

Take this shortcut to simplify your holiday shopping. As the holidays approach, Bonjour Paris is hand selecting a collection of Paris-related books, gifts, and travel gadgets and showcasing them in our Amazon affiliate store.

If travel is in your holiday plans, you'll find the best hotel deals on Booking.com.

We are also adding more specials to the Bonjour Paris Marketplace.

Please free free to comment and recommend additions to our lists.

If you're wondering where talented super-chef Michel del Burgo is, he's alive, well and cooking up a storm in a picture-postcard maison dating from the 18th century, “Chez La Vielle “Adrienne”.

Del Burgo, ex-Le Bristol, Taillevent (3-stars), Hotel de la Cité, Carcassonne, Le Duc, Moscow, L'Orangerie etc, is now shaking those copper pots and pans in a tiny kitchen near Les Halles. In the wood panelled dining rooms expect to see top chefs (Maximin, Poujauran, Bouchet) welcoming their talented confrere back.

The great Anglophilic food writer, John Whiting, from whom I was separated at birth (if you don’t believe me, take a look at our photos side by side) frequently quotes English food historian Jane Grigson as having said, “We have more than enough masterpieces; what we need is a better standard of ordinariness.”

So many people are Christmassed out by the time December 25th rolls around that it’s a relief when the actual day arrives. If you travel, you can get a different dose of Christmas, depending on where you’re going. What is your holiday quotient?

Why wait for Sunday to Brunch?

This is the question Hotel de Crillon ask, boldly launching “Le Brunch du Samedi”. “The concept came to us because our Sunday brunches are so successful, but we often had clients popping in on a Saturday after a hard morning shopping on the Faubourg, who were really hungry and wanted something light and delicious to give them courage to continue to shop 'til they drop”, explains Elodie Tavares, the de Crillon's press manager.

Now is the time not just for attending to everyone else’s Christmas list, but for giving some thought to preparing your own. Who knows, with an artful hint or two, you might actually receive some of your favorite wines!

The cellars of the legendary La Tour d'Argent restaurant, created in 1582 the year William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, run for miles beneath its left-bank location. Those lucky enough to be invited are met by a blue uniformed flunky and escorted, through double-locked iron gates, into the dark, damp, musty warren of alleyways where 450,000 bottles of the worlds' rarest and costliest French vintages lie.