The Wine Idea

A dozen years ago my wife and I visited a couple who had renovated a hoary old estate in the Perigord, deep in the Mother Goosiest part of the French southwest. … For wine drinkers, no right </br>to freely assembleRead more

Earlier this year I was on the island of Vulcano, one of a flotilla of small land masses that poke up from the Tyrrhenian Sea off the northeast coast of Sicily. … Wine’s old frenemy</br>Read more

Drop by the Central Bottle tasting table any Thursday, Friday, or Saturday (or any night at Belly Wine Bar, below) and you’re likely to see a crowd of regulars milling about … Beyond swirl, sniff and sipRead more

I suppose that when the people I once worked for — Nick, Maureen, David and Liz — were traveling together in Italy and noodling the idea of opening a wineshop together … <span class="entry-title-primary">Containing ourselves</br></span> <span class="entry-subtitle">The ceramic revolution and the invention of moderation</span>Read more

For wine’s chattering classes no subject is more captivating than the elements that make one varietally-similar wine distinguishable from another. Plant a chardonnay vine in the Sierra Foothills of California and … It’s the little things that count</br>Read more

THE GREAT RUBE GOLDBERG wasn’t an inventor, he was a cartoonist. The insanely clever, laughably complicated chain-of-events machines (string, J, fires pistol, K.  Shot scares monkey, L, forcing razor, N, onto egg, O)  that … Shot scares monkey</br>Read more

THE FELLOW ASSIDUOUSLY OGLING his glass of red wine is a detail from a lithograph that hangs in my office, one of a trio I bought from a shaggy bouquiniste (quayside seller … Caught lookingRead more

If you love the world of wine, there’s no corner of its territory that’s without interest – not a single one you wouldn’t care to explore if you had the time … In love with the LoireRead more

Historians of material culture know as new foods, dishes, and ingredients enter a social space they’re often accompanied by new equipment necessary – or at least helpful – to both preparing … Glass menagerieRead more

I RECEIVED an email this week from Hamilton Russell Vineyards in South Africa.  It told the story of a recent tasting of 31 vintages of their chardonnay, from 1982 t0 2012.  The aim was to get … On the social hierarchy of un-white winesRead more

SAMBUCO DI SICILIA, Sicily.   Somewhere straight ahead of me lies Africa — Tunisia, I think, though I haven’t consulted a map to confirm it.  I consider this as I sit … Postcard from SicilyRead more

SEAN SHESGREEN’S  scholarly paper “Wet Dogs and Gushing Oranges: Winespeak for the New Millenium“ is clever and entertaining enough to have been rejected by any self-respecting peer-reviewed journal. In it the … Wine is sexy – but is it gendered?Read more