The Wine Idea

Is this seat taken? No? How lucky for me! Mind if I plop down? Chances are that we’ve met before, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised or offended if my face (if one can call it a face) isn’t familiar. It would have been over another glass of wine; a Côtes du Rhône, likely…

A vigorous world trade in wine had existed for perhaps a thousand years when the western Roman Empire collapsed and cities, key hubs of both mercantile organization and of customers keen for the product, fell into decline and decay. Late classical civilization didn’t disappear utterly, but was dealt a severe blow. As a new order…

We’re not talking about Ball, Teale, Davis or Inman squares here (as you Cambervillians may be thinking). No, this is about conceptual squares and how what we’re calling Next Square Thinking can help you be a savvier, more adventurous wine consumer. I say adventurous, but one of the nice things about NST (as I’ll refer…

The people who work hard everyday to present a positive image of wine and wine culture like to emphasize wine’s ancient lineage and unbroken continuity. The simple process of harvesting grapes and fermenting them into something flush with gastronomic, mood-enhancing and social lubrication skills has been familiar to, and appreciated by, who-knows-how-many generations of grateful…

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…