The Wine Idea

The universe, it seems, is a one way street, moving temporally from the Big Bang to some uncertain destination in one direction only, from the present to the future and never the other way around. The British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (that’s he chatting amiably with Albert Einstein, above) memorably described this phenomenon as time’s…

The great French actor Jean Gabin (above) is one of many to have played Georges Simenon’s beloved Paris police inspector Jules Maigret on the big screen, and is, for us, the only one to have utterly embodied the character. One of Gabin’s more indelible, though oft overlooked, performances is in the classic 1959 film “Maigret…

Red and white might as well be the north and south poles of wine, reliably serving as stable orientation hubs on the vast and often confusing surface of planet Vino. Wine shops, wine lists and wine books all tend to organize themselves around these binary reference stations. So pervasive is the red/white divide that we…

It may have been France’s Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron who, in an attempt to provide a short, easily-grasped phrase that captured the essence of natural wine described it as “wine with nothing added and nothing taken away.”  I can’t be dead certain of the ascription, but I like it and have found it useful…

Here in the Wine Corner, we like to think we know a thing or two about wine and do our best to pass along what we’ve learned to those who may not be quite so far advanced in their wine journey as we. But we would be the first to admit that there are those…

Why have wine bottles assumed the shapes we see today? As you might guess, it was largely a practical matter, a compromise between ease of manufacture (and thus cost) and the work they were expected to do. The simplest form for early glass blowers to achieve (glass was not widely in use for wine storage…

Next time you’re in a restaurant where the wine list is taken seriously, eavesdrop on what the sommelier has to say as she moves from table to table. The word you’ll hear over and over is “minerality’’ — or one of its numerous more specific equivalents: granite, limestone, tufa, slate, shale, schist. It’s as if…

Note: Discovered during routine morning coffee and celebrity news crawl: the following report of a pair of holiday notables tying the knot. ROVANIEMI, Finland, Dec 18 — In one of the most glamorous and star-studded gatherings ever seen above the Arctic Circle,  Frosty Snowman and Rudolf “Red Nose” Reindeer were wed here yesterday. While wind…

For many people, the notion of how wine is made boils down to something like this: there exists a discrete plot of vines from which an individual winemaker annually harvests a crop of one variety of grapes – Malbec or Chenin Blanc, say. The fruit goes into the winemaker’s own cellar, where it is crushed,…

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Why are you yourself and not someone else?  Where do babies come from? Such good questions! Thanks to all of you who send these, and many like them, to the Wine Corner mailroom every week. They’re potent reminders that from time to time it’s imperative to turn our…

How did particular wines take the shape they did? Some say that the possibilities are necessarily limited by the various atmospheric conditions, soil types and topographies that obtain in the vineyards from which they spring. This is plausible — but only to a point. It’s true that each these environmental factors plays a role in…