All posts in October 2013

This week’s New York Times magazine featured an interview with that Moses of U.S. specialty importers, Berkeley-based Kermit Lynch — and it’s well worth your time.  Lynch was an early advocate of what we would now call terroir wines, but has never been a terroiriste.  By this I mean that, so far as I know, he…

In Europe’s more northerly vineyards the harvest is underway as we write.  2013 has turned out to be a problematic year in many places, with yields down for a second or third straight year.  In the Loire Valley August hailstorms not only wiped out the current crop of grapes in some places, but damaged vines…

There’s something out there called the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory. It’s run by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and one of the things that keeps its inmates occupied is the examination of some of the oldest containers known for signs they once may have held alcoholic beverages.The idea is to determine when and where controlled fermentations were…

OLIVIER COUSIN FARMS 12 hectares (around 30 acres) and makes about 3000 cases of wine annually from gamay, chardonnay, cabernet franc, grolleau, and chenin blanc in the Layon Valley in the central Loire. His approach at Domaine Cousin-Leduc is self-consciously naturalist.  He works his vineyards with the draft horses you see above (hear him explain why in this…

CENTRAL BOTTLE HAS a real commitment to winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who make honest, authentic wine, who shrink from excessive manipulations in the cellar. The shorthand term we use to describe wines like this is ‘natural’, and it’s a useful term  .  .   .  …