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 to Les Halles, the city’s great public food market. Although the story unfolds during the Second Empire (1851-1870), the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the eighteenth or even…
All posts by Stephen Meuse
Eat your fruits and vegetables … Don’t Drink Them
Years ago I interviewed the doyenne of Americans involved in the Burgundy wine trade, the knowledgeable and colorful Becky Wasserman, for a story in the Boston Globe. We rendezvoused at the Parker House (now the Omni Parker House) at the foot of Beacon Hill in its famous bar. Becky isn’t one to put herself forward…
On the origins of sweet wines Having our fructose and alcohol, too
What are the origins of sweet wines? Evolutionary biologists tell us that our distant hominin ancestors came down from the trees already addicted to the sweet taste of ripe fruit. Grapes, having the highest load of sugars of any fruit were thus instantly attractive to our protoselves wherever we found them. What a thrill when…
Fresh from the back of beyond This Week in the Wine Corner
THURSDAY JANUARY 19 3-6 PM – FRESH FROM THE BACK OF BEYOND Belgium-born France Crispeels (above) didn’t spring from a winemaking family so when in middle age she decided to throw over her business career there was no patrimonial plot waiting to receive her attentions. After looking in the Loire and the southern Rhone she…
Sorting wine sensations Bitterness, astringency, tannin, and texture are related but distinct. Here's how to think about them.
My experience pouring in the wine corner for the Formaggio Kitchen clientele two nights each week has convinced me that there is no experience casual wine drinkers struggle to describe quite so much as what one might call the bitterness-astringency-tannin-texture constellation. If I were feeling bold, I’d venture to say that for very many of…
What’s hot in the world of wine? The world of wine, that’s what The world of wine, that's what.
In 2004, independent filmmaker and ex-sommelier Jonathan Nossiter administered a grand cru skewering to some of Big Wine’s biggest wigs with his quirky, accusatory documentary Mondovino. In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Michael Mondavi, son of the late Robert Mondavi, shares his dream of one day making wine on the moon. With a space program…
Final Exam We say adios to America's Test Kitchen with a quiz
If you heard the on-air piece, you know that this is the last wine segment Chris and I will do for America’s Test Kitchen Radio. So it seemed like a good time to see how much Chris has learned over the five years we’ve been a team. In fact, he did quite well, although there were a few answers we disagreed about. If you’ve been a regular listener, you might do even better. The questions follow, and below…
The wine world is in the pink.
Is that a good thing? America's Test Kitchen Radio
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…
Given up on red wine? Maybe you’ve been drinking the wrong kind America's Test Kitchen Radio
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…
I’ll clink to that:
On the uses of the toast
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,…
When troubles come America's Test Kitchen Radio
Often the variation that occurs in the same wine from one vintage to another is minor and limited to interesting variations on a theme. A cool spring…a drier than normal summer…a little too much rain in September…each can leave their imprint on a wine. But what happens when conditions are seriously bad? You might think…
Waiter, There’s a rock
(herb, green bean) in my wine! America's Test Kitchen Radio
It’s not easy to translate sensation into words, but sommeliers, retailers, and even winemakers are under constant pressure to do it. Much of the rhetoric that ensues is fanciful and frankly useless, but a handful of terms now seem to have entered what might be called wine’s universal, if unofficial, lexicon—a set of terms most…