M. Senegor

Wine Spectator, an influential U.S. monthly, issues a yearly list of wine friendly restaurants. Entitled The Best Wine Lists of 2014, this year's edition just appeared. It is a massive compilation, currently  over three thousand, of mostly U.S. restaurants, often including some highly respected ones in major cities, wine destinations, and lesser known establishments with local reputations. Foreign countries are also included. The listed restaurants have only one common feature: exceptional wine lists. As I browsed through it I was taken aback by a listing of 21 Turkish restaurants, all in Istanbul except for two. It was larger than France[...]

"This is a syrah oriented wine group," said Todd, a relative newcomer to our Friday night tastings. It was a surprising revelation.A large tasting had just ended, seventeen bottles sampled by sixteen of us. Since our tastings are free-style, no pre-announced themes, no formal invitations or RSVP's, there is a certain unpredictability to Friday nights. Yet, as it turns out, there are also some predictable trends.On this occasion we had six syrah based wines, the most common varietal that appeared,  Cabarnet Sauvignon coming second (two Napa, two Bordeaux). There were no pinot noirs.I now realized that indeed, in recent years[...]

"Bad news," I said to a friend and fellow Bordeaux-lover, "Larcis Ducasse has been elevated to  Premier Grand Cru Classe status." It had caught my eye in Wine Spectator where it was mentioned on passing. My friend sighed and nodded in agreement. Here goes another one, we both thought, a gem we had grown to love, that we purchased at reasonable prices, was surely poised for the stratosphere, now that it joined the rarefied circle in which the best of St. Emillion resides.This wine first caught my fancy with its 1999 vintage which was ready to drink some seven, eight[...]

A recent Wall Street Journal article (5/31/2014) discussed the pros and cons of wine investing in a rather dry, technical exposition. Investing in wine? asked the headline. Sip, don't gulp.It went on to explain what a fickle investment wine is. While wine prices have beat the inflation rate by an average 5.3% per year (in records that go all the way back to 1899), investment returns on wine have been "lumpy and inconsistent", falling very low in the aftermath of the Great Depression, rising very high during the Nazi occupation of France. and in recent decades, with the entry of[...]

Does anyone find the various varietals that start with the word pinot confusing? I certainly was, for many years.They actually all are cousins originating from pinot noir, a grape that has unstable genes prone to mutations. Pinot meuniere is a red variant, often used in champagne and occasionally as a still wine similar in nose and palate to its progenitor. Pinot gris is a mutation that produces white wines, the grape known as pinot grigio in Italy. While gris and grigio are synonymous and the grapes identical, some classify them as different varietals, mainly because stylistically, the Italian expression of[...]

Our Friday night wine tasting group, free-style as it is, with anyone who wants to participate bringing any wine they wish, is sometimes conducive to wild, unbelievable coincidences. We had one recently.The format is a blind tasting, loosely ordered, with whites first, then light reds, to heavy reds, the participants attempting to guess the identity of each wine tasted. Since no-one knows what others brought, the sequence of the wines tasted is somewhat random.On this occasion, a red we sampled seemed clearly from the Southern Rhone, with hints of smoke and tobacco on the nose, a crisp, fruity entry, mild[...]