The Wine Idea

THE GREAT RUBE GOLDBERG wasn’t an inventor, he was a cartoonist. The insanely clever, laughably complicated chain-of-events machines (string, J, fires pistol, K.  Shot scares monkey, L, forcing razor, N, onto egg, O)  that are forever linked to his name existed only his imagination and in his drawings. A pity we can’t say the same for the inventors…

THE FELLOW ASSIDUOUSLY OGLING his glass of red wine is a detail from a lithograph that hangs in my office, one of a trio I bought from a shaggy bouquiniste (quayside seller of vintage books, pamphlets, and prints) in Paris long ago. There were around a dozen in a series depicting the pleasures of wine, but…

If you love the world of wine, there’s no corner of its territory that’s without interest – not a single one you wouldn’t care to explore if you had the time and the money.  A field of vines set in orderly array has the same aesthetic appeal wherever it’s found, yet every vineyard is somehow…

Historians of material culture know as new foods, dishes, and ingredients enter a social space they’re often accompanied by new equipment necessary – or at least helpful – to both preparing and serving them graciously. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, and tea all found their way to European and American homes beginning in 18th century, and provided…

ALMOST ANYONE who has ever had a frustrating conversation with an over-zealous sommelier or retail clerk knows that wine is bedeviled by jargon: the language peculiar to a given field that insiders use to recognize each other and keep the uninitiated at arm’s length. I suppose I have to admit to being a wine insider, but…

I RECEIVED an email this week from Hamilton Russell Vineyards in South Africa.  It told the story of a recent tasting of 31 vintages of their chardonnay, from 1982 t0 2012.  The aim was to get an idea of how capable the wine is of medium to long-term aging and to provide some guidance for those who have been buying…

SAMBUCO DI SICILIA, Sicily.   Somewhere straight ahead of me lies Africa — Tunisia, I think, though I haven’t consulted a map to confirm it.  I consider this as I sit on the little porch of our room at the Planeta winery on Sicily’s southwest coast and wonder how quickly, at after five in the…

SEAN SHESGREEN’S  scholarly paper “Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for the New Millenium“ is clever and entertaining enough to have been rejected by any self-respecting peer-reviewed journal. In it the former English professor describes the various ways in which wine writers have sought to describe and categorize wine over the last two centuries (wine-writing…

WE WERE ON A ROAD TRIP recently that took us from New Orleans to St. Augustine, FL and thence up through Savannah, GA and Charleston, SC. It was an eye-opener for me to realize how readily southerners pegged me for someone not like them. It wasn’t just the Boston in my speech apparently, but some…

I WENT OUT ON A LIMB last week trying to come to terms with what quality amounts to in wine – in some cases backing into it by suggesting what quality isn’t.  I inched further out on the same shaky branch when I promised that in a subsequent post I would have a stab at…

THE BELIEF THAT A FORTUITOUSLY-SITED vineyard can consistently produce wines of exceptional quality is at the very root of the notion of cru and appears to reach back to Pharaonic times.  From the medieval era to the mid-twentieth century the English relied upon the reputations of blender-shippers at the port of Bordeaux (above) as a…

THE STERN LOOKING FELLOW at left is Epicurus, a Greek philosopher of the early third century BCE. Considering that his name is linked to a way of life that puts a premium on sensual pleasure you might have expected him to look a bit more cheery, or at least a little fleshier. Granted, his facial…