All posts by Stephen Meuse

By definition, etymology and inclination, sediment is just stuff that settles.  Most often, it refers to solid particles suspended in and carried along by a fluid, before they’re drawn inexorably downward by gravity to collect in the lowest place they can find. River beds and the ocean floor are rich in sediments both mineral and…

We see that red pencil in your hand, censorious reader, poised to come down hard on some admittedly unorthodox grammar in this week’s headline. But let’s not be hasty, shall we? There’s a perfectly good reason why this age-old morsel of wisdom has come down to us in rough and tumble form: It’s straight from…

The fresh-squeezed Beaujolais that’s released every third Thursday in November was still ripening on the vine just a couple of months earlier. How, in so short a time, grapes transition into wine that is not only drinkable but delightful is a kind of miracle in a vat. The agents of this mad, annual race against…

The kids who wriggled and spun around American Bandstand’s TV dance floor every weekday afternoon at 4pm circa 1957 weren’t necessarily Philadelphia’s most sophisticated or articulate, but they knew what they liked in a pop song.  And when host Dick Clark asked for their take on the week’s new 45 rpm releases, they had a…

As caves go it’s not the sort to attract attention: no souvenir shops on the approach and no dramatic lighting within. What can be seen from the outside is a narrow vertical opening in a sheer rock face located deep in Armenia’s mountainous southeast. But, in 2011, it was found to conceal treasures. Among them,…

Today, the buzz word among wine’s chattering classes is minerality. You’ll hear it used to describe a broad range of sensory perceptions met in wine — from loam and humus to gravel, slate, flint, wet stones, chalk, even basalt and coal. But since few of us will have actually sampled any of these materials, it…

Some years ago, stranded in Greenfield, Massachusetts by the wrath of hurricane Irene, and eager for some supper and a bit of company, I popped into The People’s Pint, a celebrated watering hole where the brewing arts are taken very seriously indeed. I watched from my seat at the zinc as the barkeep cheerfully mixed…

Assigning numerical scores on the 100 point scale has emerged as a standard tool for navigating the complicated world of wine. The intent to simplify may originally have been legitimate and laudable, but we’d argue that numerical scores have become the instruments of a new kind of retail tyranny that’s bad for both consumers and…

  We’re not seriously suggesting that Ganymede is the sort to serve as patron saint of anything (putting some clothes on might be a step in the right direction), but if contemporary sommeliers were to do a serious search for the roots of their profession as wine service experts, the beautiful boy at left who…

  My passport says I’m 3 inches high and two inches and a bit across the middle, but as a practical matter, I’m even smaller. That’s because I require margins top and bottom and on each side, leaving me very little room indeed to do the work I’m paid for: standing in for a human…

You may be pleased to learn that the never-ending nature/nurture controversy is alive and well in the wine world. Why pleased?  Well, because it’s generally gratifying to be reminded that every field of human endeavor has its intractable issues, no matter how much the practitioners active in said field may try to put up a…

It seems we can now add Barcelona to the list of cities being loved to death. Along with Venice and Dubrovnik, Catalunya’s little jewel of a port city is now a place where the crush of day-tripping tourists make life miserable for residents and where large-scale Airbnb entrepreneurs are destroying working class neighborhoods block by cherished…