All posts by Stephen Meuse

THE COLLECTION of open wine bottles at left was shot in my kitchen this week.  There are usually four to six there at a time.  All are in the process of being nipped at. Chances are one or two will make their way to the recycle bin tonight – either because they’ve been emptied or…

I GET ASKED which alcoholic beverage first passed our greedy little lips – beer or wine. Since it’s not a case of needing to have one before you can have the other, the first-drink problem isn’t as daunting as the chicken/egg conundrum – but it does seem to linger. I don’t think there’s actually much of a contest…

SHOPPING FOR WINE IS THIRSTY WORK, so sipping an ounce or two while you scan the shelves mulling over varietals and vintages can only make an already pleasant task more enjoyable. At least that’s how it seems to us. On Fridays and Saturdays when I’m on the floor at Central Bottle we almost always have…

THE PICTURE ABOVE ISN’T some abstract expressionist art you might encounter in a Soho gallery. It’s a thermal image of a section of the North Atlantic  (Credit: NASA JPL). The warm Gulf Stream [A] appears as a red-orange streak separating the warm Sargasso Sea [B] from the colder continental shelf [C].  Coldest water is bluest; warmest…

THAT’S STANLEY TUCCI (left) and Anthony Shaloub as a pair of devoted but mismatched brothers running an Italian restaurant in the film Big Night. Primo (Shaloub) is a gifted chef who longs to express himself through his mastery of classic Italian cuisine; bro Secondo (Tucci) just wants to fill the dining room at the Paradise…

THIS FOURTEENTH CENTURY manuscript illumination shows just-picked grapes being hustled from the vineyard and dumped into vats where empurpled treaders are already frantically at work.  It was customary for medieval artists to compress events that happened over time into a single frame – but I like to think that in this case they may have…

PACKING UP A CASE of wine for a Central Bottle guest recently, I reached back in to re-arrange a pair of wines so that the Argyros Santorini Assyrtiko wasn’t adjacent the Kuntz Mosel riesling. When the customer threw me a quizzical look I explained my behavior this way: These days, we’re trying not to put…

IF ANYTHING CAN BE SAID to be genuinely innate about human taste it’s our appreciation and enjoyment of the flavors of ripe fruit. We came down from the trees already addicts to fruit sugars, the evolutionary biologists tell us, so it wasn’t something we had to acquire a taste for. Fruity flavors were very likely…

EMILE ZOLA’S 1873 novel Le ventre de Paris (‘The Belly of Paris’) opens with a pre-dawn parade of horse-drawn carts laden with produce making their way to Les Halles, the city’s great public food market.  Although the story unfolds during the Second Empire (1851-1870), the scene would have been familiar to a Parisian of the eighteenth or even…

VINTNERS WITH PROPERTY in the steep hillsides that overlook the Mosel River between Trier and Koblenz have a worldwide market for their cooly aromatic, austerely-structured white wines.  Today, growers there can count on steady demand and good prices.  In the U.S., the hipster segment appears to have succumbed to the taut allure of cool-climate riesling…

CAMDEN VALLEY ROAD runs east-west from Sandgate, Vermont across the state line into Washington County, New York.   It’s a winding, two-lane country road with hardly any traffic on it, and it’s partially for this reason that my wife and I walk it every day when staying nearby. The other reason is that it’s exceptionally picturesque –…

Decanting wine conjures visions of cobwebby bottles, guttering candles, crystal goblets, and white-gloved butlers. Performed primarily to relieve wines of sediment, the technique that’s known as the soft decant once involved all this and a good deal of practiced skill to boot. Today the soft decant is less frequently seen, since (1) we tend to…