The Wine Idea

I like wine that’s Italian and red. “I shall have a Barolo,” I said. But I had to think twice When they told me the price. Now I favor barbera instead.  The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.com where an editorial team and a host of contributors are compiling a complete English dictionary with each word defined within…

We returned to a familiar theme last week and played the game I call Three Bottle Monte at the tasting table in the wine shop where I work.  The bottles and their labels are on display, but their contents have been poured into three identical decanters. The challenge is to taste the wine from each…

Early in his career Robert Mondavi recognized that he could differentiate his California-made wine from those made in Europe by emphasizing the inherently fruity character of the former. In comparative tastings he habitually badgered guests into conceding that while European wine was often good California wines were “just a bit fruitier” and therefore just a…

The twentieth may have been the American century, but it was during the eighteenth that we made the transition from an ethnically uniform but marginally viable colony of the British Empire clinging tenaciously to the east coast of North America to a fully independent administration taking its place and its chances among  the nations of…

Andrew Bishop, 45, grew up in Simsbury, Connecticut, toured in a rock band, had a stint in the 1990’s as bar manager at “Boston’s first real wine bar,” Les Zygomates, and in 2000 bought a container of wine in Western Australia, brought it into the U.S. and sold it all. Today he’s founder and owner…

  Glou-glou. Jaunty French slang for simple, fruity wine that’s so delightful to drink you scarcely give a thought to anything but the pleasure it gives.  I think of glou-glou (pronounce it glue-glue) as red wine, although the distinction is hardly an important one.  The term is pretty well current in English-speaking wine circles now,…

At large-scale tasting events one very good indicator that I’ve sampled something quite fine is a reluctance to spit the wine out, as is customary.  I used to consider this a kind of professional failing until I realized that when a wine is still interesting after being aggressively swished and sloshed for long seconds it’s because…

Every trend has its own secret history, beginning when it’s still too small to be noticed and ending when its momentum is spent and energetic new trends overtake and supplant it. Between these points trends live a useful life – but what exactly is a trend good for and why are we so intent on spotting them?…

Trendspotting is a game we all like to play, and if you’ve been in the news business you’d better be good at it. I’m not anymore (in the news business, I mean) but I like to think that I can still tell when the blip on the radar screen of contemporary wine culture is an…

Like the fashion world it mimics, the world of wine likes to move a little faster than most of us can comfortably keep up with, thus the need for the occasional touch-up and top-up of our wine vocabulary. What follows are five terms you really ought to be familiar with even if you don’t plan…

Today, it’s common for people choose wines the same way they choose movies: by consulting what they consider to be expert opinion. While it takes the two thumbs of a film critic held way, way up to fill seats at the local cineplex, it takes a score of 90 points or better to generate real enthusiasm…

First, plant a chardonnay vine in the commune of Puligny-Montrachet in the French region of Burgundy. Now quickly plant another genetically identical to it in Santa Barbara County, California. Prune and train them similarly and when they’re of age make wine and mature it, using identical techniques, from the fruit of each.  Now taste them…