THE PICTURE ABOVE ISN’T some abstract expressionist art you might encounter in a Soho gallery. It’s a thermal image of a section of the North Atlantic (Credit: NASA JPL). The warm Gulf Stream [A] appears as a red-orange streak separating the warm Sargasso Sea [B] from the colder continental shelf [C]. Coldest water is bluest; warmest…
All posts in A wine idea
When food satisfies – and when it doesn’t
THAT’S STANLEY TUCCI (left) and Anthony Shaloub as a pair of devoted but mismatched brothers running an Italian restaurant in the film Big Night. Primo (Shaloub) is a gifted chef who longs to express himself through his mastery of classic Italian cuisine; bro Secondo (Tucci) just wants to fill the dining room at the Paradise…
Please have snow and mistletoe and claret under the tree . . . .
THIS FOURTEENTH CENTURY manuscript illumination shows just-picked grapes being hustled from the vineyard and dumped into vats where empurpled treaders are already frantically at work. It was customary for medieval artists to compress events that happened over time into a single frame – but I like to think that in this case they may have…
Austerity measures
PACKING UP A CASE of wine for a Central Bottle guest recently, I reached back in to re-arrange a pair of wines so that the Argyros Santorini Assyrtiko wasn’t adjacent the Kuntz Mosel riesling. When the customer threw me a quizzical look I explained my behavior this way: These days, we’re trying not to put…
Rocks in our wine,
or just in our heads?
IF ANYTHING CAN BE SAID to be genuinely innate about human taste it’s our appreciation and enjoyment of the flavors of ripe fruit. We came down from the trees already addicts to fruit sugars, the evolutionary biologists tell us, so it wasn’t something we had to acquire a taste for. Fruity flavors were very likely…
Wine and the city
EMILE ZOLA’S 1873 novel Le ventre de Paris (‘The Belly of Paris’) opens with a pre-dawn parade of horse-drawn carts laden with produce making their way to Les Halles, the city’s great public food market. Although the story unfolds during the Second Empire (1851-1870), the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the eighteenth or even…
In Karl Marx’s youthful and spirited defense of Mosel wine-growers the foretaste of a revolutionary career
VINTNERS WITH PROPERTY in the steep hillsides that overlook the Mosel River between Trier and Koblenz have a worldwide market for their cooly aromatic, austerely-structured white wines. Today, growers there can count on steady demand and good prices. In the U.S., the hipster segment appears to have succumbed to the taut allure of cool-climate riesling…
Historic embrace The love affair between tree and vine goes way back. Here's their story.
CAMDEN VALLEY ROAD runs east-west from Sandgate, Vermont across the state line into Washington County, New York. It’s a winding, two-lane country road with hardly any traffic on it, and it’s partially for this reason that my wife and I walk it every day when staying nearby. The other reason is that it’s exceptionally picturesque –…
Gimme air!
Decanting wine conjures visions of cobwebby bottles, guttering candles, crystal goblets, and white-gloved butlers. Performed primarily to relieve wines of sediment, the technique that’s known as the soft decant once involved all this and a good deal of practiced skill to boot. Today the soft decant is less frequently seen, since (1) we tend to…
Field blends have something to say, but is anyone listening?
The hip, cozy watering hole known as Backbar occupies a back room of Journeyman restaurant in the scrappy Boston satellite city of Somerville. With its usual team of cocktail jockeys off for a few days of social muddling at a trade event, GM Meg Grady-Troia filled the void with a couple of somm-for-a-night guests. Sunday…
Of sassy barmaids, drinking by the numbers, and barbarian manners
THE SKETCH AT LEFT is a bit of graffiti scratched by a first 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 twenty…
Is there a bias against the blend?
THE STORY OF HOW a genial Swiss wine importer named Christoph Künzli undertook the recovery of the Boca vineyards in Italy’s Piedmont region when they were on the verge of extinction has been told before. It’s a story that should be better known, in part because it is so frankly…