The Wine Idea

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…

Since my job is essentially to meet and chat with guests  and answer their questions about wine, I have a pretty good idea of what’s on their minds.  What follows are the five questions I field most often, and how I respond to them.

Assigning numerical scores on the 100 point scale has emerged as a standard tool for navigating the complicated world of wine. The intent to simplify may originally have been legitimate and laudable, but we’d argue that numerical scores have become the instruments of a new kind of retail tyranny that’s bad for both consumers and…

Wine has a long history, replete with fact and fancy. Over the centuries, its enthusiasts have wrapped it in a cloud of myths, tropes and what today we call memes. One of the more persistent has to do with what counts as real expertise. Who exactly is the wine connoisseur? In the popular imagination, it’s one who can…

Judging from the questions we field in the Formaggio Kitchen wine corner and what we hear in the classes we regularly conduct (if you haven’t been to one, you’re missing out), the how, what and why of pairing food with wine continues to be a source of uncertainty and not a little anxiety.  My sense is that…

When the exotic beverage known as coffee first appeared in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, inns, taverns, alehouses, pubs and caterers of every description were already well-entrenched. There were plenty of places to get a drink, a meal or a snack, although the restaurant as a place offering a menu of…

The first order of business for the Biblical patriarch Noah — once the ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat and he and the fam set their sandals down on dry land once again — was to plant a vineyard. We are not told where the vines for this enterprise may have come from, but as…

TThe first order of business for the Biblical patriarch Noah — once the ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat and he and the fam set their sandals down on dry land once again — was to plant a vineyard. We are not told where the vines for this enterprise may have come from, but…

Wine grape varieties don’t generally send out end of year letters as many families do. But if they did, some of the more interesting would surely be those leaking from the pens of the Sangiovese family — a large and diverse vinous clan with claims to a long and noble history. Some sense of the extreme antiquity…