All posts in A wine idea

Wine can be high-priced, high-falutin’, even high-minded. But the kind of loftiness that matters most – at least as far as the cultivation of the wine vine is concerned – has a more earthbound, geo-location kind of vibe, involving two commonplace, readily-comprehended concepts: altitude and latitude. That the two make an anagrammatic pair and sound…

  We long ago settled the question of whether cigarettes are bad for you and whether auto seat belts save lives. While nothing seems more obvious now, it wasn’t always the case. When I was coming up, what is now the settled science was still up in the air. Where it would come down no…

In 1888, when Claude Monet moved to Normandy, he was already a skilled painter with an established reputation. His 1872 work entitled Impression, Sunrise moved a Paris art critic to refer to the sketchy, atmospheric style in which it was executed as impressionistic and the movement it inspired as Impressionism. The work marked a departure…

Taste wine for a living and you may find that at some point around the umpteenth bottle, the notes you take begin to look a little repetitive. That such a thing should happen is not really surprising, since wines from similar places with similar profiles will, after accounting for vintage variation, have much in common.…

While other months boast direction and purpose — single-mindedly hustling us from one season to the next each replete with its own bundle of busyness and todos  — August is, by comparison, idle. A slacker and lollygagger among the year’s hard-working weeks, a month low on ambition and energy and accomplishments, August seems to hover…

Wine has been an integral, if not always necessary, element of many of the world’s cuisines for a very long time now. Those intrepid proto-vintners of the Caucasus, the Georgians, assert that they’re working on their 8000th vintage, give or take a happy hour or two.   Evidence exists that the Chinese were in the…

Wine has been an integral if not always necessary element of many of the world’s cuisines for a very long time now. Those intrepid proto-vintners of the Caucasus, the Georgians, assert that they’re working on their 8000th vintage (give or take a happy hour or two), a claim which places the origins of winemaking in…

I’ve’ve written before about what we like to call the Fog of Wine; the feeling that finding your way in the world of wine is like wandering in a misty landscape where the trail is hard to keep to and waypoints uncertain. I don’t actually believe that in this regard wine is any more difficult…

I remember reading the late Marcella Hazan’s first cookbook in the 1980’s and being taken struck by her confiding that the secret of all savvy cooks is  . . .  water.  She went on to explain how either adding a bit or simmering out a bit would balance flavors and adjust the consistency of a…

Winemaking is simple, but isn’t always easy. From the beginning, crafting sound, durable wine has been a challenging undertaking. The medieval Church was exceptionally good at it because it had (i) heaps of money, (ii) swaths of prime vineyard land (thanks to the pious bequests of expiring nobles eager to endow masses for the repose…

The wine world isn’t unique in prizing expertise; Let’s just say that it does so to an exaggerated degree. Ask someone, just offhand, to associate a subject domain with the word connoisseur, and chances are very good that wine would come out on top, or very near the top, of any list of responses.We generally don’t…

When helping our clientèle choose wine, I typically suggest several options that seem appropriate — at different price points. What typically follows is a conversation about what qualities attend a more expensive candidate versus a less expensive one. Sometimes, a guest will decide to spend a bit more to get a bit more. At other…