The Wine Idea

Were we to pen a biography of wine, we might start out with a chapter entitled The Early Years – as many bios do.  There, we’d tell the story of how the wild wine vine was native to a highly circumscribed region of the globe (what is today Georgia,  Armenia,  Eastern Turkey and Northern Iran). …

”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” Ralph Waldo Emerson (that’s the old troublemaker himself, above) memorably opined. But in the world of commerce, consistency is pretty much everything — the very hallmark of the branded product.  Many perfectly reputable wine estates aim at achieving it. Historically, the wine world’s most accomplished practitioners…

That’s Orson Welles who as a 23 year-old wunderkind set America’s nerves on edge with the 1938 radio play War of the Worlds — listeners believed they were hearing a live report of an alien invasion — and later directed some of the twentieth century’s greatest cinema.  Here he is in his sixtes, appearing as…

I’ve written before in this space about what I like to call the fog of wine — that state we all get into from time to time; feeling lost in a cumulus of appellations, varietals, scores, ratings, pairings and terminology that, like a true fog, seems determined to swallow us up and keep us from seeing what’s…

Ever thought it might be time for a reset of some time-honored but badly out-of-sync-with-the-era holiday tunes? We have. What follows is just at the idea stage, of course. You can take it from here. Angels We Have Heard on High Seraphic voices in the sky! Is some divine announcement nigh? Relax, it’s only Spotify.…

When I became a wine enthusiast, the standards for fine wine were set in just three places: Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne. There wasn’t much French wine from other regions, or even much Italian wine, available in Boston well into the 1970’s. This kind of entrenched loyalty to a narrow definition of quality may have many…

Planet wine is a heavily regulated old orb. Few people, I think, are aware that in addition to being subject to laws that govern the sale and consumption of alcohol, there are very detailed rules about what names can be attached to a bottle of wine. These are mostly rules associated with protected geographic appellations that link…

Is wine good for your complexion? Can it adjust your temperament? Balance your humors? Don’t be embarrased If you haven’t asked yourself these questions recently.  Most people haven’t, at least for the last hundred and fifty years or so. But before that, it was a different story.  Here’s how it goes. For most of literate…

Wine has many faces. If it didn’t, how would we write a fresh essay about it every week (not counting the chestnuts from the archive  we twitch a feather duster over, spruce up a bit and republish from time to time)?  Considering the richness of the subject, its hard to imagine one would ever run…

Well, if it isn’t our old friend Heraclitus, come to pay a visit. He’s been hanging around for 2500 years or so now and just refuses to go away. True, it’s not so much the man himself who can’t seem to exit stage right as it is his ideas — or his One Big Idea,…

We were on a road trip that took us from New Orleans to St. Augustine, and thence up through Savannah to Charleston. It was an eye-opener to see how readily southerners pegged me for someone not like them. It wasn’t just the Boston in my speech, apparently, but some mix of factors involving dress and…

The answer — as is usual with these things — is that it  depends. Such a judgment is possible, but only if we provide not just the kind of wine but a context. The era matters, for example, as does the place. If you lived in an isolated village in the Caucasus, where for millennia…