The gap week between the celebrations of America's Independence Day and upcoming France's Bastille Day, this is the perfect time to dabble in some French and American wine tasting history. Ever since the ground-breaking Paris Tasting in 1976 where in a blind tasting France's top wine tasting experts (to everyone's shock) picked American wine over their French counterparts as the best, America's reputation in wine has been on a steady rise. Specifically it was California's......

Today is Bastille Day, marking the day in 1789 when French people stormed a prison known for arbitrary imprisonment on the king's orders, to show their support for the creation of a constitutional, rather than absolute, monarchy. (Trading in one sort of monarchy for another seems like a half measure these days, but it was rather something at the time.) Shortly thereafter, in August, the new French government would proclaim the Declaration of the Rights......