All posts in A wine idea

As a child, your correspondent loved television, cars and the newspaper. He grew up with three outlets for TV programming, a trio of automakers, and a daily Boston Globe. How very quaint and meager this all seems now. No amount of nostalgia can induce me to want to return to the limited horizons of those days. The…

Considering the antiquity of winemaking and wine drinking, wine writing (at least as we know it) is a fairly recent phenomenon, not reaching back more than a couple of hundred years. It’s interesting to see how, over the decades, writers have struggled to give their readers a way to comprehend the subject more readily. For…

When is a wine ready to drink? It’s not so much a complicated or difficult question as it is a misunderstood one, we think.

No wine intended for market rather than for immediate local consumption has a credible claim to be solely the creation of its winemaker, no matter how visionary.

It was in the midst of the hangover resulting from the 2008 Greek debt crisis, and I was packing up a case of wine for a customer when I noticed I had stowed an Assyrtiko from the Greek island of Santorini adjacent to a Riesling from Germany’s Mosel region.  I quickly thought better of it…

Dear Publisher, Excuse the impersonal greeting, but I am sending this along to quite a few of you bow-tied literary types and I really can’t be bothered looking up all your names, can I?  As someone already deep into the first draft of a blockbuster tell-all, I think all that research would be rather a…

Some of the chief pleasures wine affords derive from its effects on the special, hyper-sensitive tissue that lines the inside of our mouths — grasping the lips, tongue and palate in a palpable, sensuous embrace. The food science word for this is mouthfeel, a term I find unbearably awkward and clinical. A better choice is texture,…

the first one does the talkin’. Or so goes the rule we learned as novice readers. It’s why we pronounce ROAD as if it were RODE, and not RAID and why RAID rhymes with TRADE and not . . .  well, you get the picture, I think. We need the rule because of the frequency with which vowels…

Beg pardon. We don’t mean that kind of nouveau riche. Ambitious arrivistes, pretentious parvenus, up-from-nowhere nabobs are the furthest things from our minds this time of year. Rather, we bring our progressive trifocals to bear on our beloved Beaujolais shelf, where we eagerly await and then rejoice to witness the arrival of France’s celebrated first responders: Beaujolais Nouveau, or, occasionally, Primeur. It’s all the same, you see.…

When Harry Met Sally and the now famous line “I’ll have what she’s having” was just getting cultural traction, the Internet was still some nerdy DARPA project hardy anyone knew about. Trillions of Web searches later, we’ve all learned the usefulness of the ‘more like this’ query. Your job is to find just one thing that exactly hits the spot. Once you’ve…

Well, if it isn’t our old friend Heraclitus, come to pay a visit. He’s been hanging around for 2500 years or so now and just refuses to go away. True, it’s not so much the man himself who can’t seem to exit stage right as it is his ideas — or his One Big Idea,…

It may just be my historical imagination run amok (as it tends to do), but I see traces of the momentous struggle between ancient Romans and their German antagonists still drawing breath in the low-level but persistent rivalry between wine drinkers and beer lovers. The crudely binary nature of this contest is daily re-enacted and…