All posts in March 2023

Here in the wine corner, we have real admiration for winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who eschew needless interventions with the aim of making a more honest, authentic product. The shorthand term we use to describe wines like this is ‘natural’, and it’s a useful term  .  .…

  What is wine made of?  It’s not an easy question to answer. One could say fresh fruit, I suppose, but that will hardly do, since in the fermentation vat fruit undergoes a complete and total transformation — its solid parts (skin, pulp and seeds) forced to surrender their color, flavor and various organic compounds to the…

From an evolutionary point of view, a grape is really nothing more than a little seed bundle whose sweet flesh and bright color serve to attract the birds who, ingesting it, subsequently sow said seed far and wide, thereby making more grape vines. It’s perhaps humbling to think that, to a grape vine, we wine drinkers serve pretty…

The wine world has always been obsessed with representations of quality. Strange, then, that quality should remain so elusive a concept. This is in part because, while all material objects have properties (the property of being large or of being blue, say), it’s not clear that quality is a property in quite this same way.…