All posts by Stephen Meuse

Wine ‘splainin is surely as old as wine itself, or, if not quite, then at least as old as wine whose source could not be taken for granted by the person consuming it.  The moment wine made the leap from something both created and consumed by the same household to an article of commerce, the…

What do an ideal cup of coffee and an ideal glass of wine have in common?  To answer that question allow me to introduce Giorgio Milos (above), master barista for the high-end Italian coffee company Illycaffè. For a while Giorgio maintained a blog at the Atlantic, and in a post written on the heels of…

Emile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) opens with a pre-dawn parade of horse-drawn carts laden with produce making their way into the city’s public food market. Although the story is set in the 1800’s, the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the 17th or even the…

“Casanova’s Europe” reveals a refined and visually seductive culture on the cusp of modernity—one characterized by pleasure seeking, movement across boundaries, and self-invention. Casanova himself inhabited many roles—entrepreneur, social climber, spy, author, and translator of the Iliad. But he was also a cheat and a libertine. So read the online tease for an MFA’s exhibition…

Why is a set of wines arranged in a particular order for tasting purposes referred to as a flight? Even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t seem to know – its editors don’t give an example of the word used in this way. But we might be going in the right direction if instead of…

“Try this one weird trick” those trashy online ads plead — promising to help you lose that belly fat, regrow a bumper crop of lustrous hair, outwit the market, or jump start the dead battery that once powered your sex life but hasn’t produced ignition since the Reagan administration. Snapping at clickbait like a famished…

Fashion is as fashion does. We crave the new, eschew what was. ’Twas ever so, and wine, you know, is not exempt from fashion’s flow. In Pharoah’s court, they have advised us, the stylin’ sip was from Abydos. Assyrian kings (a fearsome bunch) preferred Caucasian wine with lunch. Around the time they walked the stage,…

  When I became a wine enthusiast, the standards for fine wine were set in just three places: Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. In Boston, little Italian wine — or even French wine from other regions — was available well into the 1970’s. The situation probably has many analogues, but the one that keeps coming back…

Today, most wine education takes the form of a guided tour of what we might call the Appellation Trail. Since appellations constitute the fundamental categories nation states use to organize and police the wine produced within their borders, familiarity with them would seem to be important to developing a comprehensive view of the wine world and…

The dinner party differs from the cocktail party in one very important respect. Hemmed in as you are by a place setting, it’s generally not possible to seek new company if you find the people around you a trifle dull or just plain odd. No, you must stay put and make conversation as best you…

In Georgian England, three-bottle men were so-called because of the prodigious quantities of Port they consumed daily. It’s easy to see how, under these circumstances, dinner parties could (and frequently did) degenerate into the kind of riotous behavior immortalized in Thomas Rowlandson’s 1801 The Brilliants (above). Why then do we encourage visitors to the wine…

IS A RED WINE so deeply-hued you can’t see beyond its surface inherently of better quality than one you can peer right into . . . or even through? Wine marketers are betting your answer is yes.  They’ve been whispering this little bit of market research into the ears of winemakers for decades now. Long enough…