All posts in May 2023

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…

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…