The Wine Idea

The great — perhaps greatest of all — French actor Jean Gabin (above) is one of many to have played Georges Simenon’s beloved Paris police inspector Jules Maigret on the big screen, and is, for us, the only one to have truly inhabited the character. One of Gabin’s more indelible, though oft overlooked, performances is…

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 of these memories contain, we find it more efficient to stitch the bits together into patterns we can more readily utilize.…

How far back containers go in pre-history is impossible to say, though no doubt it’s very far indeed. Those early human groups who traveled in small, mobile bands across the landscape are known as hunter-gatherers, after all, and what is gathered must be carried. We can guess that woven baskets were primeval; and that the…

In movies of a certain kind (think  The Third Man, Port of Shadows,  Brief Encounter) fog plays a prominent role.  Its presence evokes mystery, doubt, and a vague anxiety  – all lovely things when you’re longing to sink into something entertainingly noirish. Wine and fog have some associations, too. 

There’s the noble grape of Barolo,…

The impending (or perhaps only threatened) 100% tariffs on some European luxury goods has the wine industry in a tizzy – as well it might. As Jenny Lefcourt, an importer of natural wines outlined in a recent New York Times letter to the editor, the industry has a deep reach into American business and the…

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…

We see that red pencil in your hand, censorious reader, poised to come down hard on some admittedly unorthodox grammar in this week’s headline. But let’s not be hasty, shall we? There’s a perfectly good reason why this age-old morsel of wisdom has come down to us in rough and tumble form: It’s straight from…

The fresh-squeezed Beaujolais that’s released every third Thursday in November was still ripening on the vine just a couple of months earlier. How, in so short a time, grapes transition into wine that is not only drinkable but delightful is a kind of miracle in a vat. The agents of this mad, annual race against…

The kids who wriggled and spun around American Bandstand’s TV dance floor every weekday afternoon at 4pm circa 1957 weren’t necessarily Philadelphia’s most sophisticated or articulate, but they knew what they liked in a pop song.  And when host Dick Clark asked for their take on the week’s new 45 rpm releases, they had a…

As caves go it’s not the sort to attract attention: no souvenir shops on the approach and no dramatic lighting within. What can be seen from the outside is a narrow vertical opening in a sheer rock face located deep in Armenia’s mountainous southeast. But, in 2011, it was found to conceal treasures. Among them,…

Today, the buzz word among wine’s chattering classes is minerality. You’ll hear it used to describe a broad range of sensory perceptions met in wine — from loam and humus to gravel, slate, flint, wet stones, chalk, even basalt and coal. But since few of us will have actually sampled any of these materials, it…

Some years ago, stranded in Greenfield, Massachusetts by the wrath of hurricane Irene, and eager for some 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. I watched from my seat at the zinc as the barkeep cheerfully mixed…