According to Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine, Floc de Gascogne is the Armagnac region’s answer to Pineau des Charentes (the vin de liqueur of the Cognac region)—which, readers may recall, I embraced as the unhip new sip of this minivan-driving suburbanite who has officially lost her grip on cool.

Alsace, France, is not only a world famous wine destination, but also a great place to reconcile two disparate notions of the perfect vacation. The teenage ideal: sleeping until noon. My ideal, calmly articulated each morning: “I didn’t drag your butts to Europe so you could sleep all day. Now, get out of bed and let’s mega-dose on culture and history.”

The medieval town of Eguisheim in Alsace, France is laid out in a series of concentric circles with several main streets named after three of the region’s most famous grapes—Rue du Riesling, Rue du Muscat, and Rue du Traminer—an indication that you’ve definitely arrived in white wine country.

La Route Du Vin in Alsace, France, is lined with storybook villages and colorful half-timbered houses all nestled against the Vosges—a forested mountain range sprinkled with castles. For a wine-loving Jersey girl with only two days to spare, a visit to La Route promised to be an exercise in frustration.

I live in the burbs. I drive a mini van. My grip on “cool” has officially loosened. So it’s only appropriate that I should embrace Pineau des Charentes, a fortified wine that, by some accounts, is not the hippest drink on the Paris nightclub circuit.