Vineyard geology – the rocks and soils in which the grapevines are rooted – pervades the world of wine. To illustrate the point, the picture below is a collage of wine labels – all of which bear geological terms. The back-labels on wine bottles also may mention geology, as in the following extracts: “our wine originates from limestone soils”; “the chateau is on sandy limestone from the Cretaceous period”; …

Wine is definitely a subject to fashion sense, too. Alsace is reminiscent of a 1970s lampshade you had forgotten for years in the attic but now you bring it up again with enthusiasm and dust it off.  When you start to grapple with Alsace, maybe you are like me, first consulting one of the hundreds of wine books that all of us have collected over the years working in the wine business. But the information on Alsace is quite…

British Columbia (BC) is a small but rapidly evolving wine region in western Canada. Despite grapes being planted and wine made for decades, the modern industry only really got underway with the signing of NAFTA between Canada and the United States and the subsequent planting of quality vinifera varieties from 1990 onwards.

There are five official wine regions within BC, known as Designated Viticultural Areas (DVAs),…

What is a clone? With regard to wine, that is. Are vine clones akin to Dolly the Sheep? Frightening! Yet, in the New World, and particularly in the United States, we obsess over clones, especially with regard to two of the world’s most coveted vitis vinifera grape varieties: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

 How peculiar.

 (Oh, and don’t worry. Dolly and 777 aren’t exactly the same. After all, Dolly required three mothers…

“I never lift to my lips a glass of this noble wine without seeing faces that are gone, and hearing the voices and the laughter and the jests that are no more.”
-Silas Weir Mitchell, A Madeira Party (1895)

Great Madeira is a bulwark against corrosion and timeless amid our half-lives of gentle decay.  It is inscrutable: to reduce it to tasting notes and the crude ephemera of snapshot opinions or scores seems…

The second of my Loire four-part series concentrates on eastern Touraine, which I have  extended westwards to take in Touraine Azay-le-Rideau and northward to the valley of Le Loir. 

If your image of the Loire is a series of honey-coloured châteaux, then you will be thinking of this section of the valley, the garden of France. Thinking of châteaux like the lovely Azay-le-Rideau and Chenonceau or the grandiose pile that…

"When I started my sommelier career in Washington, DC, I could count the number of exciting wine programs on one hand – and still have two fingers left. Only two restaurants employed sommeliers.  The scene was dominated by steakhouses and predictable wine lists. The dining public was dominated by politicians and lobbyists opting for the safety of the lowest common denominator. When a certain anti-business/pro…

Recently, I opened a bottle of Joseph Roty Marsannay from 2007, and its rim bore that smell of bacon fat that we associate almost exclusively with older, very fine wines from the Cote de Nuits (read: old DRC).  But there it was, out of nowhere, that old, fine scent.  Like it was making a cameo.

The 2007 Burgundy reds are moving along at a fast pace.  It makes them very useful in a restaurant.  This faster-than-usual pace…

Today is going to be good one!  I have been waiting for this morning for weeks. It is the day when the first of the spring namas arrive. I have been anticipating these unpasteurized sakes all winter--spring is one of my favorite times for nama sake. This year, the first one to arrive happens to be one of my favorites: Koshi no Homare "Pride of Koshi" from Niigata. This nama is beautiful with notes of marzipan, bitter melon…

We’ve all had that customer.  The one who wants to know wine, but is still hung up by the “Is Burgundy a grape or a region?” question.  It’s easy to get frustrated at the simplicity of questions like these, but the central idea remains the same.  The sheer memorization required to make sense of the modern wine world proves to be something of a Sisyphean task.  Within the United States, this problem…