Archive for the ‘Culture and Wine’ Category
I was watching the latest episode of, Mad Men, the best new drama on Television, and I swear I saw something very interesting and very wine related. Toward the end of the latest episode, Mr. and Mrs. Draper are having a quiet late dinner together at home. Mrs. Draper, the consummate housewife, admits to having "thrown the dinner together with what’s leftover." Mr. Draper assures her is a wonderful dinner. On the kitchen table sits, I’m almost positive, a bottle…
The anniversary of 9/11. I slipped onto FOX News this morning and was told that it is important that we "remember the meaning of this day for the rest of our lives" by some very nice looking, but stern, house-motherish anchor. I grew up in a household where the mother and father both lived through the Depression and where the father fought in WWII and lived through a prison camp experience, a set of circumstances that colored the advice my…
Now here’s something that would never happen in America: A French consumer group is making a serious complaint that wines from AOC-approved regions in France don’t taste they way they think they are supposed to, leading to recommendations that stricter standards be set for identifying wines that can actually carry said appellations on their label. Yet this is exactly the claim that a French consumer group is making concerning the country’s AOC wines. Specifically, the group—UFC-Que Choisir—claims that pressure to…
In response to Monday’s post about how the creation of new grape varieties will enhance winemakers’ status as "artist", one dear reader offered this comment: "How can anything you ultimately excrete be called art?" This is a darn good question that deserves and answer. Most often you hear winemaking referred to as both an art AND a science. Technically I think winemaking is clearly more "art" than science, unless you think of winemakers as mainly practitioners of the "fermentation sciences"….
Today is my annual check up. And I don’t mind. It’s the day I get to hear an expert say to me, "Drink your bourbon every day, Tom." My doctor’s read on the literature is that the moderate consumption of alcohol, not just wine, is connected with a number of good things things that promote longevity. A few years ago when he asked about my alcohol intake (he was naturally concerned since I work in the wine industry), I told…
