by Eve White
Wine is an integral part of history, documented for thousands of years in the daily lives of commoner and king, sinner and Savior and playing a leading role in art (Bacchus by Caravaggio), literature (Homer’s “Odyssey”), music (“Days of Wine & Roses”, Henry Mancini) and religion (Jesus’ miracle at Cana turning water into wine). So where did winemaking begin and how did it progress through centuries of politics, war and religion, beyond borders and countries, in spite of Emperors and conquerors? Persian fables say wine was discovered by a Princess who had lost favor with the King, so she tried to poison herself by eating spoiled grapes. Instead of dying, she became drunk, fell asleep and awoke to find she was no longer unhappy (imagine that!) and so she continued eating the...
by Jennifer Rosen
The following urgent story punctuated my normal flow of press releases that announce, at least a dozen times a day, that such and such a winery has just….released a wine! What WILL they think of next? Wineries, apparently, have been forced by competition to wake up and smell the marketing, a nasty business that Anheuser-Busch alone spends 10 times as much on as the entire wine industry does. While examining who their customers were, producers discovered who they weren’t: most of the country. In fact, 13% of people drink 89% of the wine, and 43% never lift a glass at all. This, the industry concluded, reflected fear, thus setting off a stampede to stupidity. Amid multiplying Wine Guides for Dummies, Morons, Cretins and Nit-wits, a menagerie of Grazing Bunnies, Drunken Anteate...
by Jamie Foster
Juice Jargon How to Talk About Wine By Stephen Reiss, Ph.D B&C Publishing 2005 $19.95 ISBN 0-09761237-0-3 There must be 30 books on the wine bookshelf and not many of them have laid out a way to easily start talking about wine quickly, confidently and competently. In my quest for the silver bullet and a book reminiscent of my first serious wine class I was delighted to hear about Juice Jargon. Juice Jargon, a wine book by Certified Wine Educator Stephen Reiss, is adapted from the world renowned Aspen Wine Program that he holds twice a year. The goal of the book is to teach people how to talk about wine quickly and competently. It is an excellent guide for beginners and a great reference for individuals who use words like “elegant”, “finesse” and “sophisticated” a b...
by Madelyn Miller
I am a nice Jewish girl. I grew up on Mogen David wine. I drank four glasses every Passover. Then I would help my mother wash and dry the glasses and put them away until next Passover. My parents occasionally drank wine in-between, but I thought wine was something you served with Matzoh. That is probably why it took me so long to develop a real interest in wine. I don’t remember tasting any white wine before Mogen David came out with theirs. Maybe that is why I have a preference for sweet wines. Flash back a couple thousand years. A BRIEF HISTORY OF WINE IN ISRAEL The Middle East was the cradle of the grape, with the art of winemaking beginning in the triangle between the Caspian and Black Seas and the Sea of Galilee. The Land of Canaan must have been one of th...
by Jennifer Rosen
We interrupt our regular wine column to bring you an irritating restaurant trend. Normal, cheerful wine attitude will return next week. The problem is over-eager servers, constantly interrupting to find out if everything’s OK, which it would be except for their interruptions to find out if everything’s OK. It’s like waking you up to ask how you’re sleeping. When did waiters start barging into conversations? They stride right over your punch line in order to introduce themselves and describe dishes already explained in the menu. They loom at your shoulder with a great phallic cylinder, asking if you wouldn’t like freshly ground pepper or cheese, as if the rest of your dish came out of a can. May they light your candle? Are you enjoying your appetizer? Your entrée? You...
by Jennifer Rosen
Pamplona, Spain: A crowded tapas bar is the safest shelter from the nightly running of the stop signs. Order a chilled Rosado – the dry, refreshing rosé swigged by local hero Ernest Hemingway. Or play Russian roulette with a plate of Pimientos del Padron, the crispy green peppers roasted in rock salt that always include a couple of scorchers. But first: the refusing of the ham. When it comes to Serrano ham, I just don’t get it. A burly cousin of prosciutto, its chewy fibers and bands of fat stick in my molars or end up grisly spitballs on my plate. It’s everywhere: alone on a plate, paired with French bread, camouflaged in local specialties like trout-wrapped-in-ham and ham-wrapped-in-trout. There is more than one ham museum. Hams hang from the ceiling of tapas bars, fitted wi...
by Jennifer Rosen
The slope I’m peering down could be a triple black diamond, gnarly enough to make the toughest boarder cry Mommy. But there’s no snow, only rocks and unrelenting, icy wind. In summer, I hear, the heat is just as searing. Welcome to Priorato, the newly hip appellation on Spain’s eastern flank. At first glance, the extreme landscape seems virgin and wild. But look closer: beneath the scrub of every hill lie the contours of ancient terraces. Europeans live with ghosts; the constant presence of their ancestors. Primitive cultures often believed their ancestors walked among them. They also put a lot of stock in dreams. I understand the connection. My dead mother routinely visits my dreams, vivid as life, with no respect for my linear logic. Eight hundred years ago in Pr...
by Jennifer Rosen
A picnic basket should be wicker with a red or blue gingham tablecloth spilling gaily out. Not like my Soviet box, solid as the case of an old Remington and packed with three steel cups and a confused assortment of openers, muddlers and other tools. But it’s beautiful to me because I won it in a blind tasting. It wasn’t easy. I mustered all my training and experience, taking copious notes on color, smell, taste, mouth-feel and finish, and tapping into my knowledge of terroir and climate in the world’s wine regions. None of which did me the least amount of good. The multiple choice answers made it clear that I had never heard of any of the grapes. The wines might as well have come from Mars, for all I knew about them. Ancient, SAT-honed strategies saved me in the end: wh...
by Jennifer Rosen
Who died and made cabernet king? Considered the noblest grape of all, cabernet sauvignon gets a higher price tag and more respect than anything else in the winery. It’s poured last in tastings, and you’re meant to ooh and aah, as though the winemaker had produced his kid’s law school diploma. It’s so well enthroned on top of the heap that we almost forget to ask why. Reviewers, loath to give zinfandel 93 points, award 100s to cabernets as though its zenith were somehow more perfectly vinous than any heights some frivolous grape with a whacked-out initial like Z could ever reach. Cab inherits sheen from its key role in Bordeaux, where a yearly futures market infuses it with the gravitas of a Wall Street commodity. Stratospheric auction prices reinforce its rep as a blue ch...
by Ron Kapon
The first person to feel the bite of alcohol on their tongue was probably an Arab alchemist of the eighth century. It is known that alcohol was made from wine in Italy in the eleventh century. It was called spiritus vini or “spirit of wine;” it was also known as aqua vitae or “water of life.” Spirits reached Poland from Italy or Germany in the 1620’s. Production developed at the end of that century and grew relatively slowly up to the early 1800’s. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the distilling industry appeared alongside home stills and small-scale enterprises. The large distilleries specialized in purifying spirits and producing drinks made according to their own recipes. During the half-century of communist rule of Poland the spirits monopoly was known as Polmos...
