All posts by Stephen Meuse

  Question to noted wine expert: “Ever mistaken Burgundy for Bordeaux?” Expert’s answer: “Not since lunch.” Along with Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy may be the most well-known words in the wine world. Even people with no wine experience at all know these names and with good reason.  Each began its wine-obsessed life shortly after the Roman conquest…

From week to week, guests queue up at the Formaggio Kitchen  tasting table to sample a few wines from our shelves, chat about their respective merits and demerits and decide what they might enjoy taking home. It’s a ritual we count on to introduce guests to wines that we think are worthy of their dollar.  After…

Sauvignon blanc is one of the most popular wine grape varieties in the world. French in origin but widely planted elsewhere, wines made from this varietal display a distinctive profile. It’s readily recognizable sensory profile make it a favorite among younger and novice wine drinkers and it makes a handy exemplar when talking about the…

It was American essayist-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who first suggested that the mentality that rates order, uniformity, and predictability too highly is not to be trusted.  ”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” is how he memorably put it. It’s true that a world where everything happens in just the same way every…

Book Review Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of a Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine By Maximillian Potter We know from prison movies that inmates who really ought to be spending their time hatching plots to amend their lives are more likely to use their enforced leisure to meditate new and better…

I like wine that’s Italian and red. “I shall have a Barolo,” I said. But I had to think twice When they told me the price. Now I favor barbera instead.  The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.com where an editorial team and a host of contributors are compiling a complete English dictionary with each word defined within…

We returned to a familiar theme last week and played the game I call Three Bottle Monte at the tasting table in the wine shop where I work.  The bottles and their labels are on display, but their contents have been poured into three identical decanters. The challenge is to taste the wine from each…

Early in his career Robert Mondavi recognized that he could differentiate his California-made wine from those made in Europe by emphasizing the inherently fruity character of the former. In comparative tastings he habitually badgered guests into conceding that while European wine was often good California wines were “just a bit fruitier” and therefore just a…

The twentieth may have been the American century, but it was during the eighteenth that we made the transition from an ethnically uniform but marginally viable colony of the British Empire clinging tenaciously to the east coast of North America to a fully independent administration taking its place and its chances among  the nations of…

Andrew Bishop, 45, grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut, toured in a rock band, had a stint in the 1990’s as bar manager at “Boston’s first real wine bar,” Les Zygomates, and in 2000 bought a container of wine in Western Australia, brought it into the U.S. and sold it all. Today he’s founder and owner…

  Glou-glou. Jaunty French slang for simple, fruity wine that’s so delightful to drink you scarcely give a thought to anything but the pleasure it gives.  I think of glou-glou (pronounce it glue-glue) as red wine, although the distinction is hardly an important one.  The term is pretty well current in English-speaking wine circles now,…

At large-scale tasting events one very good indicator that I’ve sampled something quite fine is a reluctance to spit the wine out, as is customary.  I used to consider this a kind of professional failing until I realized that when a wine is still interesting after being aggressively swished and sloshed for long seconds it’s because…