The Wine Idea

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…

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…

  We’re not seriously suggesting that Ganymede is the sort to serve as patron saint of anything (putting some clothes on might be a step in the right direction), but if contemporary sommeliers were to do a serious search for the roots of their profession as wine service experts, the beautiful boy at left who…

  My passport says I’m 3 inches high and two inches and a bit across the middle, but as a practical matter, I’m even smaller. That’s because I require margins top and bottom and on each side, leaving me very little room indeed to do the work I’m paid for: standing in for a human…

You may be pleased to learn that the never-ending nature/nurture controversy is alive and well in the wine world. Why pleased?  Well, because it’s generally gratifying to be reminded that every field of human endeavor has its intractable issues, no matter how much the practitioners active in said field may try to put up a…

It seems we can now add Barcelona to the list of cities being loved to death. Along with Venice and Dubrovnik, Catalunya’s little jewel of a port city is now a place where the crush of day-tripping tourists make life miserable for residents and where large-scale Airbnb entrepreneurs are destroying working class neighborhoods block by cherished…

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 national authorities responsible for such things have strict rules about what can be said on a wine label. But there’s always room for creativity, and it can be hard to know where legally sanctioned terms leave off and marketing begins. In the latter category are references to the age of vines that are the…

Read magazines and websites devoted to wine and you can’t help but notice how much attention is paid to news about recent vintages here and there – where the weather was good or not so good and what we might expect when the wines from those vintages come on line in a year or two…

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