GOING CLUBLESS
I recently cancelled all my wine club memberships, except one. They were a waste of money, but that’s not why I did it. It was a proliferation of unopened wine bottles all over my house, wines I would never drink, that finally caused me to go clubless. Living in Northern California, so close to thousands of wineries, the temptation to join wine clubs can be hard to resist. It was often the first time charm of a new winery that caused an impulsive decision to join. If I wasn’t taken by the landscape, décor, or winery staff, it would be the[...]
WINE ON THE ROCKS?!
It is said that Napoleon Bonaparte loved Chambertain, a wine from Burgundy, and he drank it watered down. Was Napoleon a brute, coarsely treating fine wine?Au contraire. Burgundy wines at the time were not at all fine. They were so muddy and rough that diluting them with water was the only way to make them drinkable. What about wine chilled with ice, like hard liquor on the rocks? Never! That’s the standard snob answer. Really?A case in point. The 2007 Jaboulet Vacqueras you see in the above picture was so highly extracted, almost tarry, and so tight, despite its nine year old[...]
THE EXTRACTION CHALLENGE
“High extraction,” I said, describing an Italian wine during our Friday night tasting group. It was a 2007 Campaccio Terrabianca, a super-Tuscan, Sangiovese fortified with Cabernet and Merlot. The comment provoked a challenge from a member of our group, a relative newcomer with Italian roots, who took umbrage at the slight – it was indeed a slight – and asked me what exactly I meant by “high extraction”. If I perceived a fruit forward style or high concentration, then why didn’t I say so?The wine was fruit forward and concentrated, but I had meant something else. I had no answer at[...]
DO ONTO OTHERS
“Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” Lettie Teague, wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal, recently recounted an anecdote involving her dentist who hosted two colleagues at a fancy New York restaurant. One of his guests, a self declared wine expert, ordered three bottles of Napa Cabernet worth over $1000 and let the host pick up the check. Teague’s dentist asked her if she had heard of such a thing, while inspecting her teeth. She most certainly had, on many occasions. Would that guest have done the same if he was paying for the wine himself?Do wine[...]
THE GALLOPING HORSE AND ITS TAIL
I have been feverishly writing my new crime novel since Christmas 2015. Despite voluminous, time demanding research needed for the story, both for settings and technical elements, in four short months I produced around forty chapters in excess of 70,000 words. All the while I had the strange feeling that the story was a galloping horse and I, the writer, was running after it, barely holding on to its tail.My biggest fear was to lose grip of that tail. If I interrupted my furious pace for any reason, would the story run away from me, never to return?The fear was[...]
ON PIANISTS, REAL OR IMAGINARY
Soon after the publication of my second book Appassionata, an anthology of seventeen short stories, I began fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to have a recital by a solo pianist entitled The Music of Appassionata. My first attempt at organizing such an event drew a surprising observation about pianists, real or imaginary. My flagship story Appassionataunfolds amid music for solo piano performed by Modesto, an Italian character I invented, a skillful amateur pianist. These include all three movements of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata (# 23, Opus 57, in F minor), Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G minor, the Chopin Nocturne in E[...]