The Wine Idea

  The signature on a document, work of art or other created thing is a mark of origination: a sign that associates the object in some definitive way with the individual responsible for its content, or, more fundamentally, its existence. Although it’s common for a signature to take the form of an autograph — that’s…

How did particular wines take the shape they did? One popular argument is that the possibilities are necessarily limited by the various atmospheric conditions, soil types and topographies that obtain in the vineyards from which they spring. This is plausible — but only to a degree. It’s true that each these naturally-occurring elements plays a…

Red and white might as well be the north and south poles of wine, reliably serving as stable orientation hubs on the vast and often confusing surface of planet Vino. Wine shops, wine lists and wine books all tend to organize themselves around these binary reference stations. So pervasive is the white/red divide that we…

The most common actionable fault in wine, by far, is what’s known as cork taint: A condition that announces its presence with an off-putting whiff of wet basement, soggy cardboard, mold, or vague but insistent mustiness. Less common (but not exactly rare) is a bottle that gives the impression that someone has poured out some…

“Casanova’s Europe” reveals a refined and visually seductive culture on the cusp of modernity—one characterized by pleasure seeking, movement across boundaries, and self-invention. Casanova himself inhabited many roles—entrepreneur, social climber, spy, author, and translator of the Iliad. But he was also a cheat and a libertine.” So read the online tease for an MFA’s exhibition…

As a child, your correspondent loved television, cars and the newspaper. He grew up with three outlets for TV programming, a trio of automakers, and a daily Boston Globe. How very quaint and meager this all seems now. No amount of nostalgia can induce me to want to return to the limited horizons of those days. The…

Considering the antiquity of winemaking and wine drinking, wine writing (at least as we know it) is a fairly recent phenomenon, not reaching back more than a couple of hundred years. It’s interesting to see how, over the decades, writers have struggled to give their readers a way to comprehend the subject more readily. For…

When is a wine ready to drink? It’s not so much a complicated or difficult question as it is a misunderstood one, we think.

No wine intended for market rather than for immediate local consumption has a credible claim to be solely the creation of its winemaker, no matter how visionary.

It was in the midst of the hangover resulting from the 2008 Greek debt crisis, and I was packing up a case of wine for a customer when I noticed I had stowed an Assyrtiko from the Greek island of Santorini adjacent to a Riesling from Germany’s Mosel region.  I quickly thought better of it…

Dear Publisher, Excuse the impersonal greeting, but I am sending this along to quite a few of you bow-tied literary types and I really can’t be bothered looking up all your names, can I?  As someone already deep into the first draft of a blockbuster tell-all, I think all that research would be rather a…

Some of the chief pleasures wine affords derive from its effects on the special, hyper-sensitive tissue that lines the inside of our mouths — grasping the lips, tongue and palate in a palpable, sensuous embrace. The food science word for this is mouthfeel, a term I find unbearably awkward and clinical. A better choice is texture,…