The Wine 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…

The tiny  Italian wine appellation of Boca shares some important features with elite neighbors a hundred kilometers or so to the south, Barolo and Barbaresco.  Both employ Nebbiolo, a noble and historic varietal that has been important in the Piedmont since Roman times. However, the law requires wines bearing the Boca DOC to include a…

I’ve written elsewhere about the age-old romance between the wine vine and trees, and of the numerous ways in which the two have interacted over the centuries. It’s understandable that this symbiosis goes mostly unnoticed today since vines are no longer trellised on stately elms, as was once common. But trees and vines are still a team. Many wines benefit…

I won’t mention a name. But his story, or at least one part of it, is one I’ve never been able to forget. He was forty, or thereabouts, when bitten by the wine bug in a particularly lethal way. Not content to merely experience or collect wine (he was the beneficiary of a family fortune,…

Wine talk is surely as old as wine itself, or, if not quite, then at least as old as wine whose source could not be taken for granted by the person consuming it.  The moment wine made the leap from something both created and consumed by the same household to an article of commerce, the services…

An American’s first wine encounter while 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 little warmer and reds consistently cooler than Americans are used to. Is this just a…

There’s plenty of mystery about what’s mainly responsible for the expression of individual character in wine, but lend an ear to wine’s chattering classes right now, and you would think the matter has been settled once and for all in favor of . . .  soils. In the soil-as-primary-determinant-of-wine-character theory, it’s the mineral content and condition of dirt and rock…

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off was a George and Ira Gershwin hit that made its debut in the 1937 film Shall We Dance?, sung by another incomparable duo, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (watch the scene here). The tune’s lyricsinclude the by now iconic line “You say potato and I say potahto”  — a kind of anthem for couples who can’t seem to agree…

Planet wine is a heavily regulated old orb. Few people, I think, are aware that in addition to being subject to laws that govern the sale and consumption of alcohol, there are very detailed rules about what names can be attached to a bottle of wine. These are mostly rules associated with protected geographic appellations that link…

It’s a truism — perhaps by now a cliché — that wine is made in the vineyard. It’s a way of saying that winemakers who start with ripe, healthy fruit have most of the work done for them. The adage makes perfect sense when you consider that while grapes are still attached to a vine, they’re subject…

How mysterious is taste? Let’s begin by observing that by time-honored consensus, there’s no accounting for it. Meaning, as we take it, that there’s no way to demonstrate conclusively why one person is drawn to something another is repelled by or, on another level, is merely indifferent to. Reasons can always be brought forward to…

The last time I saw the stunning Italian actress Virna Lisi on screen, she was having a wonderful time vamping it up as a reptilian Queen Catherine de Medici in the 1994 film adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas potboiler La Reine Margot. The photo above is from her 1965 Hollywood film debut, How to Murder…