The Wine Idea

Yes is welcoming. Yes is affirming. In a negotiation, yes is the thing we strive to get to. In the Wine Corner, we like saying and hearing yes, but sometimes a good forthright no is the right tool for the job – especially when the task involves sorting out fact from fiction in wine, where,…

Is that which is complete inherently better than what is incomplete? By definition, the complete thing has and does it all; the incomplete, something less.  What’s complete is fully fleshed out, in possession of all its parts, totally fulfilling. The incomplete leaves something undone. Like an abandoned novel or short circuit, it doesn’t quite get…

 I do my best to avoid using wine jargon – but sometimes I don’t recognize it when I speak it.  Asked to describe a red wine, I might talk about extraction, density and concentration — only to be met by a blank stare.  Such words seem plain enough, but somehow when the subject is wine…

The signature on a document, work of art or other object is a mark of origination: A sign that attests to the individual responsible for the existence of a thing. Although it’s common for a signature to take the form of an autograph — that’s one of Pablo Picasso’s, above — there are many other…

The First Drink Problem isn’t as daunting as The Chicken-Egg Conundrum, but it does seem to linger. It appears that the question has now been definitively settled (I’ll get to that in a minute), but noodling the problem has convinced me that the main distinction to be drawn between these two ancient beverages lies mainly in…

Wine ‘splainin 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…

What do an ideal cup of coffee and an ideal glass of wine have in common?  To answer that question allow me to introduce Giorgio Milos (above), master barista for the high-end Italian coffee company Illycaffè. For a while Giorgio maintained a blog at the Atlantic, and in a post written on the heels of…

Emile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) opens with a pre-dawn parade of horse-drawn carts laden with produce making their way into the city’s public food market. Although the story is set in the 1800’s, the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the 17th or even the…

“Casanova’s Europe” reveals a refined and visually seductive culture on the cusp of modernity—one characterized by pleasure seeking, movement across boundaries, and self-invention. Casanova himself inhabited many roles—entrepreneur, social climber, spy, author, and translator of the Iliad. But he was also a cheat and a libertine. So read the online tease for an MFA’s exhibition…

Why is a set of wines arranged in a particular order for tasting purposes referred to as a flight? Even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t seem to know – its editors don’t give an example of the word used in this way. But we might be going in the right direction if instead of…

“Try this one weird trick” those trashy online ads plead — promising to help you lose that belly fat, regrow a bumper crop of lustrous hair, outwit the market, or jump start the dead battery that once powered your sex life but hasn’t produced ignition since the Reagan administration. Snapping at clickbait like a famished…

Fashion is as fashion does. We crave the new, eschew what was. ’Twas ever so, and wine, you know, is not exempt from fashion’s flow. In Pharoah’s court, they have advised us, the stylin’ sip was from Abydos. Assyrian kings (a fearsome bunch) preferred Caucasian wine with lunch. Around the time they walked the stage,…