“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…
All the Rage Wine moves on, friend
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,…
Meet the Refusniks What happens when imitation trumps progress
When I became a wine enthusiast, the standards for fine wine were set in just three places: Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. In Boston, little Italian wine — or even French wine from other regions — was available well into the 1970’s. The situation probably has many analogues, but the one that keeps coming back…
On the Appellation Trail It's a consensus style, not quality, that matters most
Today, most wine education takes the form of a guided tour of what we might call the Appellation Trail. Since appellations constitute the fundamental categories nation states use to organize and police the wine produced within their borders, familiarity with them would seem to be important to developing a comprehensive view of the wine world and…
Don’t Just Chat Up Your Wine
The dinner party differs from the cocktail party in one very important respect. Hemmed in as you are by a place setting, it’s generally not possible to seek new company if you find the people around you a trifle dull or just plain odd. No, you must stay put and make conversation as best you…
Two Always Better Than One Wine education favors the multi-bottle personality
In Georgian England, three-bottle men were so-called because of the prodigious quantities of Port they consumed daily. It’s easy to see how, under these circumstances, dinner parties could (and frequently did) degenerate into the kind of riotous behavior immortalized in Thomas Rowlandson’s 1801 The Brilliants (above). Why then do we encourage visitors to the wine…
Of Wine Transparent and Opaque
IS A RED WINE so deeply-hued you can’t see beyond its surface inherently of better quality than one you can peer right into . . . or even through? Wine marketers are betting your answer is yes. They’ve been whispering this little bit of market research into the ears of winemakers for decades now. Long enough…
The Origins of Connoisseurship
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 to Les Halles, the city’s great public food market. Although the story unfolds during the Second Empire (1851-1870), the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the eighteenth or even…
Eat your fruits and vegetables … Don’t Drink Them
Years ago I interviewed the doyenne of Americans involved in the Burgundy wine trade, the knowledgeable and colorful Becky Wasserman, for a story in the Boston Globe. We rendezvoused at the Parker House (now the Omni Parker House) at the foot of Beacon Hill in its famous bar. Becky isn’t one to put herself forward…
On the origins of sweet wines Having our fructose and alcohol, too
What are the origins of sweet wines? Evolutionary biologists tell us that our distant hominin ancestors came down from the trees already addicted to the sweet taste of ripe fruit. Grapes, having the highest load of sugars of any fruit were thus instantly attractive to our protoselves wherever we found them. What a thrill when…
Fresh from the back of beyond This Week in the Wine Corner
THURSDAY JANUARY 19 3-6 PM – FRESH FROM THE BACK OF BEYOND Belgium-born France Crispeels (above) didn’t spring from a winemaking family so when in middle age she decided to throw over her business career there was no patrimonial plot waiting to receive her attentions. After looking in the Loire and the southern Rhone she…
Sorting wine sensations Bitterness, astringency, tannin, and texture are related but distinct. Here's how to think about them.
My experience pouring in the wine corner for the Formaggio Kitchen clientele two nights each week has convinced me that there is no experience casual wine drinkers struggle to describe quite so much as what one might call the bitterness-astringency-tannin-texture constellation. If I were feeling bold, I’d venture to say that for very many of…