All posts in A wine idea

Importer Kermit Lynch was one of the first Americans to tramp the backroads of France’s wine country, knocking on doors and tasting in cellars that had never admitted an outsider before. His wonderful 1988 book, Adventures on the Wine Route, was instrumental in shaping my own idea of what constituted quality and proportion in wine and…

  Wine is attended by a surprising amount of ritual. For some, the traditional gestures of service are a comforting reminder that they are participants in an age-old liturgy. For others, they’re pure rigamarole, empty gestures devoid of any useful purpose. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Go back far…

The sketch at left is a bit of graffiti scratched by a 1st century Roman who may have been keen to have some fun caricaturing then Emperor Nero – as some think – or just engaging in an impromptu bit of self-portraiture.  It’s sure the wag never imagined it would still be amusing people 20…

It’s a provocative question but not a facetious one. The thought came to me while having lunch recently with an old friend (now in his eighties) who groused “that not enough Chablis today tastes like Chablis.” For him, a quality wine must always taste like what it is. This is a pretty pervasive notion, and…

There’s plenty of disagreement about what’s mainly responsible for the expression of individual character in wine, but right now, if you had to bet, you’d be wise to put your money on soils because that’s where the talk is.  In the soil-as-primary-determinant-of-wine-character theory it’s the mineral content and the organization of dirt and rock in…

Though it’s widely assumed that the juice of red grapes is red, and that of white grapes runs clear, in fact, with rare exception, nearly all wine grapes express juice that is devoid of any color at all. So where does red wine come from? It results when dark-skinned grapes are crushed and their juice…

Birds gotta fly, vines gotta climb. It’s the way of things, and for most of the history of winemaking, it proved convenient to give domesticated grapevines the opportunity to do what comes naturally by planting them alongside trees. The advantages of this strategy are obvious.  A vine that could embrace a sturdy tree trunk for…

Millions of wine drinkers rely on tasting notes provided by professional critics to guide their wine-buying.  Recently there’s been quite a bit written that’s skeptical about just how reliable such notes are.  I’m not going to address this contentious issue today, except to note that one of the serious shortcomings of these notes is the…

 Winemakers with property on the steep hillsides that overlook Germany’s Mosel River between Trier and Koblenz enjoy a worldwide market for their cooly aromatic, austerely-structured white wines. The road to success in the Mosel hasn’t always been paved with euros, however.  For most of the 19th century, the region was trapped in a vicious cycle…

The bold adventurers who first landed on the shores of what they thought of as the New World didn’t come alone. The newcomers brought horses and pigs to the Americas, and returned bearing the potatoes, tomatoes, squashes and maize that would subsequently enrich the diet of generations of Europeans. Though the Americas had native grapevines…

The chalkboard that hangs over our wine corner shelves lists a hundred or so lesser-known grapes from which wine is made today. It stands as a tediously hand-lettered warning to those who believe a passing familiarity with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Merlot punches their ticket into the fellowship of wine know-somethings. But even…

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are you yourself and not someone else? Where do babies come from?  Such good questions!  Thanks to all of you who send these, and many like them, to us in the mail every week. They’re potent reminders that from time to time one needs to turn one’s…