The mission
Simple. Fly into Paris. Train to Dijon. Rental car to the Maison des Vins de Chablis. Taste through all 2010 producers.
The inventory
The execution
United flight 948 pushes into Charles De Gaulle an hour late. No sweat. Get track shoes on; hustle to baggage claim and...no suitcase.
Cut to…
The following feature is co-written by Drew Larson and Sayre Piotrkowski, two Certified Cicerone ® beer directors based in Chicago and Oakland, respectively.
With beer pairing dinners taking place at Michelin rated restaurants, craft-beer festivals featuring celebrity chefs, and people like Ferran Adria and James Syhabout creating proprietary brews, the integration of craft-beer into our contemporary culinary culture…
The story of Dom Pérignon and champagne – the blind monk who accidentally made sparkling wine and cried, “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” – is well known, as are the problems with the story. Although many wine drinkers accept it at face value, there’s no evidence that Dom Pérignon was blind, no evidence that he had a heightened sense of smell or taste, and – very important – no evidence…
"I was lost on a street corner in Toyko, several minutes late for my Kikisake-shi test, the Japanese Master Sake "Sommelier" exam. I had only a set of directions to the examination hall, written in Japanese characters, and my own limited command of the language to guide me. The first policeman I stopped spoke no English, but he was able to grasp my problem and pointed me in one direction, scribbling down more cryptic…
Marche and Abruzzo
Verdicchio, Castelli di Jesi and Matelica
Driving south from Verona along the Adriatic Coast, the land flattens as we pass through the fertile plains of Emilia-Romagna only to rise up again, jutting and carving upwards into the sky. The coastal areas in Veneto and Emilia-Romagna are unremarkably level, but in the Marche the land becomes mountainous and hilly; the central Apennines push out toward the…
The devil is in the details. Viticulture, even more than winemaking, is an apprenticeship-based practice. The complexities are only hinted at in the handful of books on the subject. The science spans many different disciplines, and since the subject is as varied and inscrutable as Mother Nature herself, there is no sign any time soon of us truly understanding any of the myriad aspects of viticulture, which range from…
The Ministry Official: To comply with the regulations, you must produce your wine solely from the single local variety. This is to preserve the integrity of the appellation, to preserve the terroir.
The Italian: No! You stifle my creativity; you deprive me of my freedom! You are heartless and sterile, and your watch is cheap! I am not a German!
The Ministry Official: Fine. You can add 15% of anything else you want. Just…
While in Tuscany last December I had dinner in Greve with Daniele Rosellini, chief enologist for the Chianti Classico Consorzio. More importantly, Daniele was a major part of the Chianti Classico 2000 project, a project that spanned 16 years and continues to alter the landscape for viticulture and winemaking in one of the world’s most well-known wine regions.
Rosellini began by saying that the clones of Sangiovese…