The Wine Idea

Real journalism isn’t created in newsrooms, but in the places where news actually happens. That’s why from time to time your intrepid correspondent dons trench coat and fedora and leaves the confines of his cozy garret to get the story. And so, when, earlier this week, the rare opportunity arose to cop an interview with (HELLO!!)…

The golden age of Dutch art coincided with that nation’s high water mark as a commercial powerhouse.  In the first half of the seventeenth century, its merchant navy dwarfed England’s. The French, at that point, weren’t even in the running – though they saw the danger and began frantically planting the oak forests they would…

You have a nose and so do we. Some have more nose than others:  Cyrano (permanently, above) and Pinocchio (episodically, not shown) come to mind.  Wine also has a nose — at least that’s how we often refer to the aromatic profile it presents to us. Both kinds of noses prove to be frightfully complicated things…

It is a curious yet widely unremarked-upon thing that the world of wine is considered to exist entirely in the physical spaces where vines grow, fruit is harvested and wine is vatted and bottled.  The notion that wine is inextricably linked with tangible terrain is reinforced by atlases that plot areas of wine activity on…

It’s only four letters, and not likely to make any sixth grader slap his forehead in frustration. But not all spelling challenges involve bees, Scrabble games, or even letters. Musicians are said to spell chords when they analyze them into their constituent tones, for example. Someone seeking the details of how something happened may ask…

Importer Kermit Lynch was one of the first Americans to tramp the backroads of France’s wine country, knocking on doors and tasting in cellars that had never admitted an outsider before. His wonderful 1988 book, Adventures on the Wine Route, was instrumental in shaping my own idea of what constituted quality and proportion in wine and…

  Wine is attended by a surprising amount of ritual. For some, the traditional gestures of service are a comforting reminder that they are participants in an age-old liturgy. For others, they’re pure rigamarole, empty gestures devoid of any useful purpose. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Go back far…

The sketch at left is a bit of graffiti scratched by a 1st century Roman who may have been keen to have some fun caricaturing then Emperor Nero – as some think – or just engaging in an impromptu bit of self-portraiture.  It’s sure the wag never imagined it would still be amusing people 20…

It’s a provocative question but not a facetious one. The thought came to me while having lunch recently with an old friend (now in his eighties) who groused “that not enough Chablis today tastes like Chablis.” For him, a quality wine must always taste like what it is. This is a pretty pervasive notion, and…

There’s plenty of disagreement about what’s mainly responsible for the expression of individual character in wine, but right now, if you had to bet, you’d be wise to put your money on soils because that’s where the talk is.  In the soil-as-primary-determinant-of-wine-character theory it’s the mineral content and the organization of dirt and rock in…

Though it’s widely assumed that the juice of red grapes is red, and that of white grapes runs clear, in fact, with rare exception, nearly all wine grapes express juice that is devoid of any color at all. So where does red wine come from? It results when dark-skinned grapes are crushed and their juice…

Birds gotta fly, vines gotta climb. It’s the way of things, and for most of the history of winemaking, it proved convenient to give domesticated grapevines the opportunity to do what comes naturally by planting them alongside trees. The advantages of this strategy are obvious.  A vine that could embrace a sturdy tree trunk for…