All posts by Stephen Meuse

What makes one wine better (and more expensive) than another? It’s not the easiest question to answer, but it helps to understand that there are really only a handful of factors that can be relied on to produce quality in wine. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that each of them means extra expense…

The few weeks sandwiched between yuletide and the onset of Lent in February may well have been the only time a medieval European could be reasonably sure of enjoying a glass of fresh, sound wine. Wine merchants raced to get the current vintage safely in barrel and on the water to their various markets while…

It was in shabby but comfy French cafés that I learned that common folk typically took their wine in tumblers – and decided that, since I was common folk myself, I should henceforth do the same. Over the years my wife and I have collected some nicer glassware, only some of it on purpose. Not…

Oak barrels have been important in winemaking for a very long time, and the spice and vanilla flavors they impart are by now familiar. The drama added by aging in new oak became so associated with prestige California Chardonnay that even wines without price points capable of supporting the cost of fresh casks each vintage…

The answer is yes, I think, so long as you can set the question firmly within a context. The era matters, as does the place. If you lived in an isolated village in the Caucasus, where for millennia every family made its own wine from a modest backyard vineyard, an ideal wine would simply be…

It’s a question we ask ourselves nearly every day – not so much because we worry about the breadth of our posterior parts (though this is never far from our minds), but because we’ve all been around the drinks business long enough to know that a glass of wine is never just a few ounces…

Unaccountably, many people who are perfectly capable as both cooks and hosts find themselves at sixes and sevens when it comes to bringing suitable wines to their holiday tables. Since I can’t guess what will be going on in your house, or what your guests like and don’t like in wine, the best advice I…

Yes is welcoming. Yes is affirming. In a negotiation, yes is the thing we strive to get to. In the Wine Corner, we like saying and hearing yes, but sometimes a good forthright no is the right tool for the job – especially when the task involves sorting out fact from fiction in wine, where,…

Is that which is complete inherently better than what is incomplete? By definition, the complete thing has and does it all; the incomplete, something less.  What’s complete is fully fleshed out, in possession of all its parts, totally fulfilling. The incomplete leaves something undone. Like an abandoned novel or short circuit, it doesn’t quite get…

 I do my best to avoid using wine jargon – but sometimes I don’t recognize it when I speak it.  Asked to describe a red wine, I might talk about extraction, density and concentration — only to be met by a blank stare.  Such words seem plain enough, but somehow when the subject is wine…

The signature on a document, work of art or other object is a mark of origination: A sign that attests to the individual responsible for the existence of a thing. Although it’s common for a signature to take the form of an autograph — that’s one of Pablo Picasso’s, above — there are many other…

The First Drink Problem isn’t as daunting as The Chicken-Egg Conundrum, but it does seem to linger. It appears that the question has now been definitively settled (I’ll get to that in a minute), but noodling the problem has convinced me that the main distinction to be drawn between these two ancient beverages lies mainly in…