The Wine Idea

I drew this cartoon a few years ago after a conversation with my wife about just how much the where and the when of wine affects our experience of it. It’s especially common, we decided, with people who have just returned from vacation with a bottle or two in their suitcases. It seemed almost supernaturally…

One of the more remarkable things about wine is the reverence that people seem to have for it. And I don’t just mean among geeks; you see this in people with no special relationship to wine. Even among novice wine drinkers, there is the idea that there is something rather special about this ancient and…

Let’s talk about wine bubbles. Not bubbles as in Champagne, but the kind of bubbles that are created when a market overheats. Think real estate, for example, the stock market, or, even tulips. In a wine bubble, a particular kind or category of wine becomes wildly popular—far too popular for its own good. To meet…

I get asked with surprising frequency which alcoholic beverage first passed our greedy lips – was it beer or wine?  Since it’s not a case of needing to have one before you can have the other, the first-drink problem isn’t as daunting as the chicken/egg conundrum, but it does seem to linger. I don’t think there’s actually…

The late Yogi Berra is credited with saying that you can observe a lot by watching. As with many of the late Yankee catcher’s quips, it seems silly at first. Only upon reflection do you begin to see that there’s something meaningful hiding behind those tortured semantics. If we were to apply the Yogism to…

If you’re a regular listener to America’s Test Kitchen Radio, you know that all sparkling wine is not Champagne and cannot be so-called, and that in most places where winemaking has long been a part of local culture, there is a tradition of making bubblies of some sort. Chris and I have tasted and talked about fizzy…

ARENI, ARMENIA.  As caves go it’s not the sort to attract attention. There are no souvenir shops on the approach and no dramatic lighting within intended to highlight the kind of fantastic calcified structures that are so beloved of spelunker-wannabe tourists. There is only a vertical opening like a nasty unhealed wound in this ancient…

There was a time in our wineshop when we took pains to identify wines made with organically farmed grapes or via the method known as biodynamics. And there was good reason for this. We’re located in a community with a high level of awareness about food-supply issues. Our clientele wants to know where its food…

At least once a month we play a game in the wine corner at Formaggio Kitchen that we call three bottle monte. The name is an allusion to three card monte, the notorious New York City street game used by scam artists to fleece tourists and other innocents of their pocket money. The aim is…

Judging from the questions I field every day in the wine department of Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge and the mail I receive from America’s Test Kitchen Radio listeners, food and wine pairing continues to be a major cause of uncertainty and, frankly, anxiety. My sense is that a significant part of the problem is a…

Previously, the Cambridge Formaggio Kitchen wine department took care to identify the wines on its shelves that were made from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes and with no — or minimal — applications of sulfur.  We used little ladybug icons to set them apart.  It seemed like a reasonable step to take, since a significant subset…