Senior executives dinner with French Senator Ben Guiga

We were pleased to welcome the French Senator representing the French community linving abroad, Mrs Monique Ben Guiga. A dinner was organized on her behalf with local French senior executives from very diverse sectors and activities.

From links to right:

Alinh Louan, , Laure-Alessia Leroy, Mr Mayoral, , Marco Onetto, Amazon.com, Senator Ben Guiga, Jack A. Cowan, French Honorary Consul and Executive Director of the FACC, Béatrice Delmas, Microsoft, Philippe Sanchez, Starbucks Coffee France, Norbert Gaillard, SafranUSA, Laurent Rotival, GE.

New FACCPNW Website

It took me about 7 months to realize the new website for the FACCPNW.Indeed a long time, when you imagine that my daily tasks were still waiting for me and that I am not a webmaster!

But finally, the new website is online since February and our FACC is proud to be the 3rd Chapter in the US to launch it!

But enough. Now, check it out: www.faccpnw.org !

French Wine Connection 013108

The new year has begun for the FACC with the organization of a trade wine tasting for a French delegation of 19 wine makers.

The day started with a seminar whose aim was to give the exhibitors the opportunity to understand better the stakes of the American and more specifically Washingtonian wine market. The Executive Director of the FACC, Jack A. Cowan started by giving a wide overview of the WA States, underlining the high qualification of local employees and the many HQ of worldwide firms such as Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon.com etc.

Bill Schallert, Young & Columbia’s Distributors’ presentation gave a rather precise idea of what the tendancies and figures for the wine industry in the Pacific Northwest were.

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Finally, the third speaker, Ray Bloom from Riversati Importer, talked about what the American consumer was looking for in terms of wine flavors, labels etc. underlining the importance of educating the younger population who is also start drinking wine.

The tasting took place in the afternoon at the Bell Habor International Conference Center and brought over 220 visitors. Among them were importers, distributors, retails etc and our exhibitors have had the chance to meet interesting contacts. Mostly were indeed look for an importer.

 The second and last day for the delegation was dedicated to visiting the Chateau St Michelle winery, the biggest one in WA State, followed by a visit at Costco, QFC, Esquin Wine merchants and finally at the Tasting Room, which is a wine bar downtown Seattle.

Thanks to those visits, the French producers have had the opportunity to see how wines in general and French wines in particular where sold in the largest points of sales to the smallest one. Also, they had the chance to taste WA wines allowing comparison with their own. They indeed were surprised by the good quality of local wines in general.