All posts in A wine idea

Most of us turn to wine, if not as a vehicle of relaxation, at least as a gateway to it. If you’ve gone so far as to acquire the apéritif habit, the first glass of the day typically marks the moment you’ve set work aside and begun the slow evening unwind. Later, there may be…

This Week in the Wine Corner: Good of you to take time to talk with us here in the Wine Corner, Easter Bunny.  It’s been four years since our last chat with you.  Quite a lot has happened  since then, eh E.B?  Pandemics, political turmoil, Space X.  Who would have imagined? Easter Bunny: Sounds hare-raising. You’ll…

As a kid, your correspondent loved television, cars and newspapers. He grew up with four TV channels, three automakers, and two daily print papers. 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 world as I…

We see that red pencil in your hand, censorious reader, poised to come down hard on some admittedly unorthodox grammar in this week’s headline. But let’s not be hasty, shall we? There’s a perfectly good reason why this age-old morsel of wisdom has come down to us in this rough and tumble form: It’s straight…

The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.co, where an editorial team and a host of contributors were once busy compiling a complete English dictionary, each word defined by means of a limerick. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of words appeared there before the site somehow disappeared. Limericks are a bit like their even lower-rent siblings, knock-knock…

The universe, it seems, is a one way street, moving temporally from the Big Bang to some uncertain destination in one direction only, from the present to the future and never the other way around. The British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (that’s he chatting amiably with Albert Einstein, above) memorably described this phenomenon as time’s…

The great French actor Jean Gabin (above) is one of many to have played Georges Simenon’s beloved Paris police inspector Jules Maigret on the big screen, and is, for us, the only one to have utterly embodied the character. One of Gabin’s more indelible, though oft overlooked, performances is in the classic 1959 film “Maigret…

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 red/white divide that we…

It may have been France’s Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron who, in an attempt to provide a short, easily-grasped phrase that captured the essence of natural wine described it as “wine with nothing added and nothing taken away.”  I can’t be dead certain of the ascription, but I like it and have found it useful…

Here in the Wine Corner, we like to think we know a thing or two about wine and do our best to pass along what we’ve learned to those who may not be quite so far advanced in their wine journey as we. But we would be the first to admit that there are those…

Why have wine bottles assumed the shapes we see today? As you might guess, it was largely a practical matter, a compromise between ease of manufacture (and thus cost) and the work they were expected to do. The simplest form for early glass blowers to achieve (glass was not widely in use for wine storage…

Next time you’re in a restaurant where the wine list is taken seriously, eavesdrop on what the sommelier has to say as she moves from table to table. The word you’ll hear over and over is “minerality’’ — or one of its numerous more specific equivalents: granite, limestone, tufa, slate, shale, schist. It’s as if…