All posts in July 2014

We returned to a familiar theme last week and played the game I call Three Bottle Monte at the tasting table in the wine shop where I work.  The bottles and their labels are on display, but their contents have been poured into three identical decanters. The challenge is to taste the wine from each…

Early in his career Robert Mondavi recognized that he could differentiate his California-made wine from those made in Europe by emphasizing the inherently fruity character of the former. In comparative tastings he habitually badgered guests into conceding that while European wine was often good California wines were “just a bit fruitier” and therefore just a…

The twentieth may have been the American century, but it was during the eighteenth that we made the transition from an ethnically uniform but marginally viable colony of the British Empire clinging tenaciously to the east coast of North America to a fully independent administration taking its place and its chances among  the nations of…