All posts by Stephen Meuse

ARENI, ARMENIA.  As caves go it’s not the sort to attract attention. There are no souvenir shops on the approach and no dramatic lighting within intended to highlight the kind of fantastic calcified structures that are so beloved of spelunker-wannabe tourists. There is only a vertical opening like a nasty unhealed wound in this ancient…

There was a time in our wineshop when we took pains to identify wines made with organically farmed grapes or via the method known as biodynamics. And there was good reason for this. We’re located in a community with a high level of awareness about food-supply issues. Our clientele wants to know where its food…

At least once a month we play a game in the wine corner at Formaggio Kitchen that we call three bottle monte. The name is an allusion to three card monte, the notorious New York City street game used by scam artists to fleece tourists and other innocents of their pocket money. The aim is…

Judging from the questions I field every day in the wine department of Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge and the mail I receive from America’s Test Kitchen Radio listeners, food and wine pairing continues to be a major cause of uncertainty and, frankly, anxiety. My sense is that a significant part of the problem is a…

Previously, the Cambridge Formaggio Kitchen wine department took care to identify the wines on its shelves that were made from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes and with no — or minimal — applications of sulfur.  We used little ladybug icons to set them apart.  It seemed like a reasonable step to take, since a significant subset…

    It’s a provocative question but not a facetious one.  The thought came to me while having lunch recently with an old friend who was instrumental in making two once-celebrated Boston area restos destinations for wine enthusiasts — the waterfront’s Anthony’s Pier 4 and Newton’s Pillar House — more than forty years ago. The…

A chat with Julia Hallman, general manager at Formaggio Kitchen Cambridge this week about the shelf talkers that I had been busy rewriting.  The time between taking the old ones down and putting the new ones up gave me a chance to see what the response of our clientele would be to their temporary disappearance.  The…

I was pouring one white and three red Bordeaux at Central Bottle on  a Friday night a few years ago with the idea of playing a little catch-up on a neglected category. I’d noticed that the only attention the little Bordeaux corner got was from French speakers and a few people of – shall we…

I’ll admit to being a little in love with the analytic tool known as the semantic square (aka Boston box).   There’s seduction in the way it gives clarity to certain kinds of ideas one struggles to achieve by other means.  A skillfully designed square is particularly good at illuminating how perceptions shift as you…

“After that we went from one casino to another, not intending to commit any debauchery, but for want of something better to do.”   In the field of playing the field, Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was a giant who gave his name to generations of comparative midgets – guys who couldn’t pretend to attain the lofty standard he…

I’m often asked to weigh in on the question of which alcoholic beverage first passed our greedy lips – beer or wine.  Since it’s not a case of needing to have one before you can have the other, the first-drink problem isn’t as daunting as the chicken/egg conundrum – but it does seem to linger. I don’t think…