Does it strike you as strange that so much talk about wine is about wine talk itself? There’s certainly plenty to be said about somm (that’s sommelier) speak with its arcane vocabulary and bizarre syntax. One often hears the complaint that people writing and talking about wine are employing a kind of autonomous language (or just gibberish) and that…
Where Did My Wine Go?
It’s a question we’re often called upon to answer. It’s true enough that we sometimes move things around a bit to keep the Wine Corner looking fresh, a practice that can leave our clientèle scratching their heads when unable to quickly spot something they’re looking for. But this is a situation that’s quickly put right. More…
The Grapes That Fall Along the Way
We always make room to talk about the romantic side of wine — all the beautiful places and interesting people responsible for bringing it into being. We speak much less about the sometimes punishing, almost always unglamorous labor involved in producing it. Unpredictable weather patterns are not making the work easier. Early flowering makes vines vulnerable to…
Not Since Lunch
The place names Bordeaux and Burgundy may be the most well-known in the wine world. Even people with no wine experience at all know of them and with good reason. Each began its wine-obsessed life shortly after the Roman conquest of what is today France; Each is mainly famous for its red wine; Each is a prime object…
Stem Snatcher or Foot Pincher?
The wine experience is readily sorted into three distinct areas of operations. And, while two of these — the making of wine and its imbibing — draw the bulk of our interest, the third, connected with the keeping, serving and polite consumption of wine, gets far less attention. What constitutes good behavior in this area is admittedly…
Manipulation Not a Four Letter Word
Here in the wine corner, we have real admiration for winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who eschew needless interventions with the aim of making a more honest, authentic product. The shorthand term we use to describe wines like this is ‘natural’, and it’s a useful term . .…
A Brief History of Time . . . in a Bottle
What is wine made of? It’s not an easy question to answer. One could say fresh fruit, I suppose, but that will hardly do, since in the fermentation vat fruit undergoes a complete and total transformation — its solid parts (skin, pulp and seeds) forced to surrender their color, flavor and various organic compounds to the…
Time to Make Up with Chardonnay? A graphic essay
What the Birds Know
From an evolutionary point of view, a grape is really nothing more than a little seed bundle whose sweet flesh and bright color serve to attract the birds who, ingesting it, subsequently sow said seed far and wide, thereby making more grape vines. It’s perhaps humbling to think that, to a grape vine, we wine drinkers serve pretty…
Not the Same as Large or Blue
The wine world has always been obsessed with representations of quality. Strange, then, that quality should remain so elusive a concept. This is in part because, while all material objects have properties (the property of being large or of being blue, say), it’s not clear that quality is a property in quite this same way.…
No sex, please. We’re wine grapes.*
The chalkboard that hung over the old wine corner shelves at 244 Huron Avenue prior to the move to our new location listed a hundred or so lesser-known grapes from which wine is made today. It stood as a tediously hand-lettered warning to those who believe a passing familiarity with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir…
The Heart Has its Reasons
It’s gone from Val day, to Gal day, to Pal Day. Maybe, to cover all our bases, it should just be Enthrall Day — a day to celebrate, or at least wonder at, the mysterious force that attracts people irresistibly, ineluctably, and, more than occasionally inadvisably, to each other. Is it true, as Camus said, that love can…