The Wine Idea

Michael Schmelzer is the enologist and agronomist at Monte Bernardi, his family’s wine estate in Tuscany. The 130 acre property is in Panzano, the very heart of Chianti Classico (it’s said that the dead center – the ‘bellybutton’ – of the region runs through the property).  Schmelzer, 38, lives on the property with his wife Claudia,…

Here in Wine Corner, we often bring consumers into direct contact with the people who make their wine by hosting visiting winemakers and showcasing their products at our tasting table. But while events like this close the gap between vintners and consumers, they don’t necessarily illuminate the process by which a bottle finds its way…

This week’s New York Times magazine featured an interview with that Moses of U.S. specialty importers, Berkeley-based Kermit Lynch — and it’s well worth your time.  Lynch was an early advocate of what we would now call terroir wines, but has never been a terroiriste.  By this I mean that, so far as I know, he…

In Europe’s more northerly vineyards the harvest is underway as we write.  2013 has turned out to be a problematic year in many places, with yields down for a second or third straight year.  In the Loire Valley August hailstorms not only wiped out the current crop of grapes in some places, but damaged vines…

There’s something out there called the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory. It’s run by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and one of the things that keeps its inmates occupied is the examination of some of the oldest containers known for signs they once may have held alcoholic beverages.The idea is to determine when and where controlled fermentations were…

OLIVIER COUSIN FARMS 12 hectares (around 30 acres) and makes about 3000 cases of wine annually from gamay, chardonnay, cabernet franc, grolleau, and chenin blanc in the Layon Valley in the central Loire. His approach at Domaine Cousin-Leduc is self-consciously naturalist.  He works his vineyards with the draft horses you see above (hear him explain why in this…

CENTRAL BOTTLE HAS a real commitment to winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who make honest, authentic wine, who shrink from excessive manipulations in the cellar. The shorthand term we use to describe wines like this is ‘natural’, and it’s a useful term  .  .   .  …

A dozen years ago my wife and I visited a couple who had renovated a hoary old estate in the Perigord, deep in the Mother Goosiest part of the French southwest. They subsequently fitted out the house and stables as an upscale B&B with fixtures and amenities charming enough to wring tears of joy from…

Earlier this year I was on the island of Vulcano, one of a flotilla of small land masses that poke up from the Tyrrhenian Sea off the northeast coast of Sicily.  It’s the place that gave European languages the word volcano, and one of four of Italy’s active, above-ground volcanic centers is located here. The…

Drop by the Central Bottle tasting table any Thursday, Friday, or Saturday (or any night at Belly Wine Bar, below) and you’re likely to see a crowd of regulars milling about and repeating a series of gestures that by now must seem perfectly routine — even second nature: pick up a glass holding a couple…

I suppose that when the people I once worked for — Nick, Maureen, David and Liz — were traveling together in Italy and noodling the idea of opening a wineshop together their first concern wasn’t what to call it.  But the name they finally settled on — Central Bottle Wine + Provisions  – is a particularly apt…

For wine’s chattering classes no subject is more captivating than the elements that make one varietally-similar wine distinguishable from another. Plant a chardonnay vine in the Sierra Foothills of California and another genetically identical vine in the commune of Meursault in Burgundy, let them mature and produce fruit and the wines that result from their…