The tchin tchin investigation chugs along

Ici, on parle français au sujet des vins: A big "Santé!" to the French media. While all of the English press seems to have totally forgotten about the SAQ scandal (click the image for all the news, served up fresh en français), important findings and analyses are continually being put on the record by French papers and broadcasters. Here's to that.

And here's to writers like Marc André Gagnon. Gagnon, in my mind, is shaping up to be the definitive local voice on wine in Quebec. He maintains a blogue -- which is a French blog -- on the province's wine scene. Packed with even more information, including reviews and an attractive searchable archive, is Vin Québec, an über-site for local wine enthusiasts. At the moment, Gagnon appears to be the main contributor, and a valuable one at that, to the online magazine, which has an interesting Outaouais perspective. This means that the site is a solid source of news on the Ontario market as well as the Quebec one. I really encourage readers to check it out.

Back to "ici"... When did Ici, that little alternative weekly, get its own wine column, penned by Raymond Chalifoux? Perhaps it was sometime around the same moment that the pack-leading Voir stopped running the Stéphane Émond column on wine, which is quite unfortunate since the larger paper had a comprehensive section on living that included food, restaurants and wine. For some reason, neither of these regular Montreal-based chronicles ever get posted online via their newspaper's sites, and they really should. At Ici the wine column is available but you have to download a PDF that comprises the entire publication. How do you say "a minor grumble" in French?