The Wine Idea

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…

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  .  .…

  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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

Birds gotta fly, vines gotta climb. It’s the way of things, and for most of the history of winemaking, it proved convenient to give domesticated grapevines the opportunity to do what comes naturally to them in the wild by planting them alongside trees. The advantages of this strategy are obvious.  A vine that could embrace…

An unexplained interest in the categorory of functional foods having recently gripped me, I uncovered a couple of New York Times stories that proved helpful.  One, Dessert, Laid-Back and Legal, from 2011 reported on processed snacks containing melatonin; another, Foods with Benefits, or So They Say, attempted to shed light on the murky world of health claims in…

Real journalism isn’t created in newsrooms, but in the places where news actually happens.  That’s why from time to time your intrepid correspondent packs his duffel, dons trench coat and fedora, and sets off to get the story.  And so, when earlier this week the rare opportunity arose to cop an interview with (HELLO!!) the…

A few months ago, I said something in this spot about having multiple bottles open at a time being a sign of a certain maturity in your wine drinking. The title of the post was “The Wine Cellar in Your Kitchen.” In it, I talked about the value of comparative tasting – sampling several wines…