All posts by Stephen Meuse

Planet wine is a heavily regulated old orb. Few people, I think, are aware that in addition to being subject to laws that govern the sale and consumption of alcohol, there are very detailed rules about what names can be attached to a bottle of wine. These are mostly rules associated with protected geographic appellations that link…

Is wine good for your complexion? Can it adjust your temperament? Balance your humors? Don’t be embarrased If you haven’t asked yourself these questions recently.  Most people haven’t, at least for the last hundred and fifty years or so. But before that, it was a different story.  Here’s how it goes. For most of literate…

Wine has many faces. If it didn’t, how would we write a fresh essay about it every week (not counting the chestnuts from the archive  we twitch a feather duster over, spruce up a bit and republish from time to time)?  Considering the richness of the subject, its hard to imagine one would ever run…

Well, if it isn’t our old friend Heraclitus, come to pay a visit. He’s been hanging around for 2500 years or so now and just refuses to go away. True, it’s not so much the man himself who can’t seem to exit stage right as it is his ideas — or his One Big Idea,…

We were on a road trip that took us from New Orleans to St. Augustine, and thence up through Savannah to Charleston. It was an eye-opener to see how readily southerners pegged me for someone not like them. It wasn’t just the Boston in my speech, apparently, but some mix of factors involving dress and…

The answer — as is usual with these things — is that it  depends. Such a judgment is possible, but only if we provide not just the kind of wine but a context. The era matters, for example, as does the place. If you lived in an isolated village in the Caucasus, where for millennia…

Would it please you to know that you may well be a better judge of wine than you imagine? That you — casual, untrained, occasional wine drinker that you are— may even, in some contexts, perform as well as a bona fide expert? There’s at least one serious study of such things that says you…

We’re living through a period just now when the more natural a wine is, the more cachet it enjoys. We have no argument with this, exactly, except insofar as . . . well, insofar as it goes too far. Exactly what too far may be will always be a matter of taste and judgment, but…

Some years ago, finding myself stranded in Greenfield, Massachusetts by the wrath of hurricane Irene and looking for supper and a bit of company I popped into The People’s Pint, a celebrated watering hole where the brewing arts are taken very seriously indeed. From my seat at the zinc I watched as the barkeep cheerfully…

By definition, etymology and inclination, sediment is just stuff that settles.  Most often, it refers to solid particles suspended in and carried along by a fluid, before they’re drawn inexorably downward by gravity to collect in the lowest place they can find. River beds and the ocean floor are rich in sediments both mineral and biological.…

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

The chattering classes of the the food and wine world find plenty to argue about, but it’s safe to say that there is today near-universal agreement on one point: We all want to know where the things we eat and drink come from, how they were made, and by whom. It’s our appetite for such…