COPPOLA WINES: A STRAINED RELATIONSHIP
The esteemed movie director Francis Ford Coppola, of "Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" fame, nowadays is more a winemaker than an artist, presiding over an ever enlarging wine conglomerate in Napa and Sonoma. As much as I have loved his great movies, I have intensely disliked his wines either for their quality or their price. I have not come near any Coppola wines in several years, until last night when Bobby, my wife Julie's son, opened a "top of the line" label from his Sonoma outfit called "Archimedes". I approached the bottle with much trepidation and reluctance.Coppola got into the wine[...]
TURKISH HYGIENE
Growing up in the Istanbul of the 60’s, we were accustomed to shortages of basic necessities as a way of life. Included among these was running water and electricity. These services were not continuous. The city was rapidly growing beyond its capability to provide infrastructure. The country was relatively poor, still reeling from its turn of the century wars, and the deprivations of the Second World War it had deftly avoided. Modernization was along the way, but in fits and spurts. The European side of Istanbul was the most modern; still utilities were a constant headache.. As a child, I[...]
THE TIC
In the late 1960’s, while a student in Ortaokul (middle school) at the English High School for Boys of Istanbul I developed a tic. It was a peculiar contortion of my upper lip, raised high up, and draping the underside of my nostrils. By necessity my entire lower face distorted during the act, and my mouth took on a strange, puckered, rounded appearance. In the decades to come I was to study neurology and learn the precise definition of a tic: a sudden, repetitive, non-rhythmic, stereotyped motor movement. Classified as a variant under the heading of “movement disorders” (such conditions[...]
TURKEY AND WINE
Greetings from Turkey. Travelling in my original home country for two weeks I have found myself in a wine desert. While I am quite sure of the existence of a fine wine culture in the country, especially in Istanbul, I am not on a kind of trip that allows any exploration of it. My Turkish friend Selim Hacisalihzade, who has lived in Zurich most of his adult life and knows French wine in particular, met me on our first night in Istanbul. He now divides his time between Switzerland and Istanbul. One of his first admonishments to me was that[...]
WHORES AND CRITICS; HOW THEY ARE CHANGING THE WINE WORLD
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[...]
WINE BY THE GLASS – WHAT A RIP-OFF!
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[...]