All posts in August 2016

When I started writing about wine lo these many years ago, it was something of a struggle to interest readers in pink—rosé—wine.  At the time, the only examples most consumers had encountered were   marketed as “white zinfandel”or “blush.”  These were highly technical wines made on an industrial-scale. A bit of carbonation and sugar was often added and there might be an aromatic grape — like gewurztraminer or muscat — thrown into the mix. By the mid­-nineties these wines had taken on a distinctly declassé character—nobody with even a smidgen of pretension to sophistication wanted to be seen drinking them—and with good reason. But, by taking rosé off the table completely, lots of good wine—indeed a whole category—  was being ignored, it seemed to me. And if one travelled now and then, one knew that the quality rosé wines of Provence, for example, could be very good. Interest in the Mediterranean diet was just cranking up then—and it was a natural accompaniment to much of it. Well, things have changed. Today pink wine is hot, and the time seems right to interrogate it.  What’s out there? How do we organize them?  What impact are they having?  What do consumers need to know about them? Let’s start with some history. The story of red wine that isn’t really red reaches back to the ancient world. We know from Roman agricultural treatises that landowners…

Every retail wine shop worth its salt ought to be part clinic, a place where problems can be addressed and resolved. In the wine corner at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge where I work, for example, we spend time showing folks how to use a waiter’s corkscrew to open a bottle of wine safely (and with a…

THE LAST TIME I SAW Italian actress Virna Lisi she was having a wonderful time vamping it up as a reptilian Queen Catherine de Medici in the 1994 film adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas potboiler La Reine Margot.  The photo at left I take to be from her 1965 Hollywood film, How to Murder Your Wife.   Together the smile,…