All posts by Stephen Meuse

It’s very likely that the first thing you learned about wine, even before you were old enough to have tasted any, is that it comes in two colors, red and white. Like lots of other stories we’re told as children, this one is too simplistic to be either useful or true. But it is, God…

Most of us turn to wine, if not as a vehicle of relaxation, at least as a gateway to it. If you’ve gone so far as to acquire the apéritif habit, the first glass of the day typically marks the moment you’ve set work aside and begun the slow, evening unwind. Later, there may be…

The picture above isn’t abstract expressionist art you might encounter in a Newbury Street gallery. It’s a thermal image of a section of the North Atlantic. The warm Gulf Stream appears as a red-orange streak separating the Sargasso Sea from the colder continental shelf. Coldest water is bluest; warmest is deepest red. Thermal imaging takes phenomena…

What accounts for the originality of a wine – the critical thing or things that makes it what it is and different from others?  To ask the question is to reopen an investigation as old as wine itself. Because the earliest written references identify wine by its geographical source (and most European wine is still…

Here in the FKC Wine Corner we’re frequently asked for recommendations — and we do our best to respond to them individually and thoughtfully. Often, your reco requests are pretty routine; sometimes not so much. It’s one thing to suggest a red wine around $20 to serve with your roast chicken at home, quite another to propose something…

Browsing for some information about an old Bordeaux (the 1967 Château Beychevelle) a while ago led me to a 1973 New York Magazine story whose banner you see above. The author, Romanian-born Alexis Bespaloff, wrote about wine for the magazine from 1972 to 1996. Bespaloff may be better known as the man who took over as editor…

Is wine art or craft? It’s the kind of question that can seem fun to knock around when the evening grows late and the company is the sort to have opinions and enjoy airing them out.  I’ve gone more than a few rounds with friends on this topic, and while I’m not sure I’ve been…

Today, most wine education takes the form of a guided tour of what we might call the appellation trail. Since appellations constitute the fundamental categories nation states use to organize and police the wine produced within their borders, familiarity with them would seem to be important to developing a comprehensive view of the wine world and…

It’s no mystery that quality is a rather mysterious concept; one of those things everyone understands perfectly until it’s time to define it. Judgments of quality in wine are particularly challenging because we’re so easily distracted by the price of a thing or what we like or don’t like. But quality doesn’t depend on either…

Just how many years into the natural wine era (trend? wave? meme?) we may now be, is, like many other aspects of natural wine itself, not very clear. But I can say with certainty when I first encountered the phenomena. It was 1999, and arrived in the form of a bottle of Angiolino Maule’s La…

It’s said that this is a time when respect for real expertise is on the wane, its reputation as a source of solutions for whatever ails us under assault. Heaven knows experts have often got us into terrible fixes. In hindsight, we may blame bad outcomes on the work of ‘so-called’ experts. But this could…

How many kinds of wine are there? It’s a question I’m often mulling, in part because the answer always seems so appealingly out of reach. The idea that the query could be addressed merely by itemizing the hundreds of official geographic designations enshrined in appellation law (think Sancerre, Sonoma, or Chianti) is frankly laughable. For…