All posts in A wine idea

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…

  Lovers of wine and the vine can be found all over the world, in every known clime and every inhabited continent. Meanwhile, the places where wine can actually be produced are confined to two relatively narrow strips of our dear old Earth, positioned between about 30 and 50 degrees north and south latitudes, per…

It may be the most viewed, most talked about, the most influential medical-related segment the long-running CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes ever produced. It was 1991 and host Morley Safer brought Americans some almost too-good-to-be-true news, wrapped in a mystery. His guest that Sunday night was a French doctor who had a theory about why it might be that…

There was a time when the tasting note was a wine insider’s tool. Sommeliers, cellar masters and wine brokers, whose job it was to make purchasing decisions made use of them to note the character and quality of what they tasted. For these folks, a hastily-scribbled note in an old leather pocket book was a…

One of the things we learn as we become more acquainted with the wide world of wine is that there’s almost no end to its variety — that it can be made in a myriad of styles from dry to sweet, fruity to savory. We all know that some red wines are big in body,…

The twentieth may have been the American century, but it was during the eighteenth that we made the transition from an ethnically uniform but marginally viable colony of the British Empire clinging tenaciously to the East Coast of North America to a fully independent polity taking its place and its chances among the nations of…

An American’s first wine encounter in Europe can elicit surprise. It’s not that Europeans keep the best for themselves — a strangely persistent canard. Rather, it’s the temperature at which wine is served. Whites abroad are typically served a bit warmer, reds consistently cooler than Americans are used to. Is this just a matter of taste, or…

Our brain’s ability to store visual images in memory and more or less instantly compare them with new inputs for similarities and dissimilarities is impressive. Rather than deal with the many individual features each memory contains, we find it more efficient to stitch the bits together into patterns we can more readily utilize. Recent research…