The Wine Idea

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…

Human beings are marvelously equipped to enjoy the broad spectrum of sensations brought to them by their food and drink. Yet, science maintains that taste involves nothing more than a mere five distinct, foundational perceptions. These are sweet, sour, bitter, salty and the recently designated umami (savory). It may be astonishing that the great and…

To judge from the conversations I have with friends, colleagues and Formaggio Kitchen clientèle, something called balance is considered a desirable trait to discover in a wine. It seems reasonable enough, since balance is something we value and try to maintain in many aspects of our lives. We strive to create a healthy work-life balance, eat balanced…

Here in the FKC Wine Corner we’re frequently asked for recommendations and we do our best to respond to them individually and thoughtfully. Often, your queries are routine; sometimes not so much. It’s one thing to suggest a red wine around $20 to serve with your roast chicken at home, quite another to propose something…

What’s the difference between an amateur and a professional?  You might say that the latter is someone who’s paid to practice a given skill, while the former engages in it purely for love of the thing (that’s the etymology of the word, after all), though non-monetary gratification might be a better way to describe it.…

Wine can be high-priced, high-falutin’, even high-minded. But the kind of loftiness that matters most – at least as far as the cultivation of the wine vine is concerned – has a more earthbound, geo-location kind of vibe, involving two commonplace, readily-comprehended concepts: altitude and latitude. That the two make an anagrammatic pair and sound…

  We long ago settled the question of whether cigarettes are bad for you and whether auto seat belts save lives. While nothing seems more obvious now, it wasn’t always the case. When I was coming up, what is now the settled science was still up in the air. Where it would come down no…