All posts by Stephen Meuse

A dozen years ago my wife and I visited a couple who had renovated a hoary old estate in the Perigord, deep in the Mother Goosiest part of the French southwest. They subsequently fitted out the house and stables as an upscale B&B with fixtures and amenities charming enough to wring tears of joy from…

Earlier this year I was on the island of Vulcano, one of a flotilla of small land masses that poke up from the Tyrrhenian Sea off the northeast coast of Sicily.  It’s the place that gave European languages the word volcano, and one of four of Italy’s active, above-ground volcanic centers is located here. The…

Drop by the Central Bottle tasting table any Thursday, Friday, or Saturday (or any night at Belly Wine Bar, below) and you’re likely to see a crowd of regulars milling about and repeating a series of gestures that by now must seem perfectly routine — even second nature: pick up a glass holding a couple…

I suppose that when the people I once worked for — Nick, Maureen, David and Liz — were traveling together in Italy and noodling the idea of opening a wineshop together their first concern wasn’t what to call it.  But the name they finally settled on — Central Bottle Wine + Provisions  – is a particularly apt…

For wine’s chattering classes no subject is more captivating than the elements that make one varietally-similar wine distinguishable from another. Plant a chardonnay vine in the Sierra Foothills of California and another genetically identical vine in the commune of Meursault in Burgundy, let them mature and produce fruit and the wines that result from their…

THE GREAT RUBE GOLDBERG wasn’t an inventor, he was a cartoonist. The insanely clever, laughably complicated chain-of-events machines (string, J, fires pistol, K.  Shot scares monkey, L, forcing razor, N, onto egg, O)  that are forever linked to his name existed only his imagination and in his drawings. A pity we can’t say the same for the inventors…

THE FELLOW ASSIDUOUSLY OGLING his glass of red wine is a detail from a lithograph that hangs in my office, one of a trio I bought from a shaggy bouquiniste (quayside seller of vintage books, pamphlets, and prints) in Paris long ago. There were around a dozen in a series depicting the pleasures of wine, but…

If you love the world of wine, there’s no corner of its territory that’s without interest – not a single one you wouldn’t care to explore if you had the time and the money.  A field of vines set in orderly array has the same aesthetic appeal wherever it’s found, yet every vineyard is somehow…

Historians of material culture know as new foods, dishes, and ingredients enter a social space they’re often accompanied by new equipment necessary – or at least helpful – to both preparing and serving them graciously. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, and tea all found their way to European and American homes beginning in 18th century, and provided…

ALMOST ANYONE who has ever had a frustrating conversation with an over-zealous sommelier or retail clerk knows that wine is bedeviled by jargon: the language peculiar to a given field that insiders use to recognize each other and keep the uninitiated at arm’s length. I suppose I have to admit to being a wine insider, but…

I RECEIVED an email this week from Hamilton Russell Vineyards in South Africa.  It told the story of a recent tasting of 31 vintages of their chardonnay, from 1982 t0 2012.  The aim was to get an idea of how capable the wine is of medium to long-term aging and to provide some guidance for those who have been buying…

SAMBUCO DI SICILIA, Sicily.   Somewhere straight ahead of me lies Africa — Tunisia, I think, though I haven’t consulted a map to confirm it.  I consider this as I sit on the little porch of our room at the Planeta winery on Sicily’s southwest coast and wonder how quickly, at after five in the…