M. Senegor

What I am about to recount has become a common refrain in the wine world. Maybe it will come out with a bit of a personal spin.I recently joined a red wine club at K & L, a Bay Area wine chain, which sends me two bottles a month. The store is well diversified, and does not particularly specialize in anything. Thus the bottles they select for shipping end up being a hodge-podge of what they think their customers will like, cutting accross different regions and varietals. I find these samples quite refreshing, because many are wines I would never[...]

This past Saturday, the Wall Street Journal had a startling proclamation on its front page, above the fold, above the label: "the fraud of wine by the glass", it announced. Inside was their weekly wine column, now shared by two authors who alternate each week. The journalist, a New Yorker named Lettie Teague headlined with "why I hate ordering wine by the glass". Finally! Someone in an influential media outlet is putting to words an in-your-face dirty little secret of the wine world. I noticed this years ago, and feel exactly the same as the author. Ordering wine by the[...]

Among my wine tasting friends, my dislike of Italian wines has become legendary and solidified into a long-standing joke. If I say "it tastes Italian", it is synonymous with, "the wine is no good". Truth be told, I have opened up my horizons and discovered a number of different Italian wines I like, especially after several trips to Italy where I had no choice but drink their wines. As it so happens, traditional Italian wines do not show well in the company of French, and especially American ones in wine tastings. This is because they are made to be consumed[...]

In the Francophile culture of my wine tasting group a cardinal rule of wine collecting is that domestic wines, especially Napa, do not lend themselves to long term cellaring, and those who undertake such ventures are foolhardy. My wine mentors did have a few exceptions to this rule, e.g. pre-corporate Chalone Pinot Noir, Stony Hill Chardonnay, but these were almost all comprised of domestic products made in a French style. Napa Cabarnet in particular was considered particularly risky, since it is so expensive, and prone to spoilage with aging.In my early days of wine collecting back in the late 1990's,[...]

Do you have any friends or relatives who know some famous celebrity? If so, do they talk incessantly about it, and make you feel like you too are connected to this celebrity by association? Well, I do. My mother in law lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the ritziest cowboy spot in the U.S., which boasts of not one but two famous celebrities as its residents: Harrison Ford, the actor, and Dick Cheney ex Vice-President of the U.S. Ford keeps a low profile in Jackson. All we hear are occasional sightings at Albertson's, their local upscale supermarket. But when he was[...]

All wines grown around the world obey certain geographic rules. One of the most basic of these has to do with certain latitudes around the globe within which wines can be classified into specific climate zones. Vineyards can only be successfully planted around latitudes of 20 degreess (Yucatan, Cuba, Northern Egypt, Taiwan) to 50 degrees (Vancouver, Newfoundland, English Channel, Northernmost Japan). Farther north is is too cold, and near the equator it is too hot for commercially succesful winemaking. Thus one can plot two strips around the world between these latitudes, one in the Northern Hemisphere, another in the Southern,[...]