The Wine Idea

There was a time when the tasting note was a wine insider’s tool. Sommeliers, cellar masters and wine brokers, whose job it was to make purchasing decisions made use of them to note the character and quality of what they tasted. For these folks, a hastily-scribbled note in an old leather pocket book was a…

One of the things we learn as we become more acquainted with the wide world of wine is that there’s almost no end to its variety — that it can be made in a myriad of styles from dry to sweet, fruity to savory. We all know that some red wines are big in body,…

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 polity taking its place and its chances among the nations of…

An American’s first wine encounter in Europe can elicit surprise. It’s not that Europeans keep the best for themselves — a strangely persistent canard. Rather, it’s the temperature at which wine is served. Whites abroad are typically served a bit warmer, reds consistently cooler than Americans are used to. Is this just a matter of taste, or…

Our brain’s ability to store visual images in memory and more or less instantly compare them with new inputs for similarities and dissimilarities is impressive. Rather than deal with the many individual features each memory contains, we find it more efficient to stitch the bits together into patterns we can more readily utilize. Recent research…

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Why are you yourself and not someone else?  Where do babies come from? Such good questions! Big thanks to all of you who send these, and many like them, to us in the mail every week. They’re potent reminders that from time to time it’s necessary to turn our attention to…

You know by now that the Wine Corner cherishes a special fondness for winemakers with a historical consciousness; the kind of people who have a healthy respect for the old ways, even while making what is now considered cutting-edge, contemporary wine. So how delighted were we when earlier this week we had our first experience…

Gone are the days when This Week in the Wine Corner was must-hear radio — when my predecessor, mentor and BFF Edward R. Murrow (above with mike and ciggie) intoned the Formaggio Kitchen news from CBS studios in New York. Families all over America gathered around the wireless to hear our most respected broadcast journalist warn about the…

When the exotic beverage known as coffee first appeared in Europe in the second half of the 17th century, inns, taverns, alehouses, pubs and caterers of every description were already well-entrenched. While the restaurant* was yet to be invented, there were nonetheless plenty of places to get a drink, meal or a snack. Early coffee…

Hello to all TWWC enthusiasts and boo-birds (endeavoring to be even-handed, here!). It’s a great pleasure to announce the soon-to-be publication of my new multi-volume book of essays, the harvest of my many years of research in the writing of all those This Week in the Wine Corner missives some of you sort of enjoy.…

We’ve written before about the number of grape varieties at work in our world — many more than people imagine. Beyond the now thoroughly exploited (and, frankly, rather humdrum) varietals Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Sauvigon Blanc, many hundred of others are regularly used to make wine of varying quality. We hear less from…

Does winemaking resemble dog breeding? It’s a provocative question but not a facetious one. The thought came to me while having lunch with an old friend (now in his eighties) who groused “that not enough Chablis today tastes like Chablis.” For him, a quality wine must always taste like what it is.  But what exactly is Chablis? The…