THE SMALL WINE SHOP, STILL RELEVANT
Fine Wines of Stockton, a venerable wine shop, just closed down. Its owners George and Gail Heron decided to retire. This left us with only two other small wine vendors, Wine Wizard’s and Mile Wine Company. Wine Wizard’s owner Larry Johansen, also around retirement age, might be next. George & Gail Heron Is there any room for new entrepreneurs to replace these establishments? The question was posed to me by a young woman, manager of a restaurant we frequent, who is currently pursuing a career in nursing, her training arduous. Owning a wine shop appealed to her as a romantic[...]
WINERY IN A HOSPITAL; ONLY IN FRANCE
In the historic French city of Strasbourg, a most unusual wine shop resides within a giant public hospital complex. Hospice Strasbourg, a 2000 bed hospital with an associated medical school, has been in continuous operation since 1395. It employs over twenty-three thousand people. Among them is a small staff that tends to the wine shop and cellar of the hospital, located in the basement of one of its buildings. In Medieval times wine was not just an alcoholic beverage. It was considered medicinal. It was also an indispensable part of Christian church liturgy. The monks that ran the early hospital[...]
” I ATE HIS LIVER WITH…..” HANNIBAL LECHTER’S REAL CHOICE, AND MORE ABOUT WINE IN FICTION
I was recently taken by a wine scene in a crime novel I am currently reading, A Conflict of Interest, by Adam Mitzner. In it, the night before his surrender to the FBI, a rich white collar criminal takes his lawyer to dinner at Peter Luger, a famous steakhouse in Brooklyn. When the waiter arrives with a wine list he rejects it. He already knows what he wants. He asks for Amarone, bring us your best he adds with a flair. Amarone would not have been my top guess for a wine to impress guests in such a restaurant. More[...]
AGING POTENTIAL OF WINES; HAZARDOUS PREDICTIONS
Of all the intimidating mysteries in the wine world, the aging potential of given wines is up there at the top. To be sure, for a vast majority of wine lovers this is a non-issue. Most wine is consumed within less than an hour of purchase. But us wine geeks – all right, let’s call ourselves collectors – obsessively grapple with this subject. How long do we cellar a given bottle? When do we know it has reached its peak? How do we tell what vintages are more age-worthy than others? First there are the basics. Certain wines are known[...]
TURKISH WINE; A SUCCESSFUL SPLASH IN SAN FRANCISCO
Introducing Turkish Wine Renaissance, the brochure said, referring to the world’s only wine exporting Muslim country as The Newest Oldest Wine Region. I was at Troya, my favorite Turkish restaurant in the swank Fillmore district of San Francisco, with Larry and Mariko Johansen, proprietors of Stockton’s Wine Wizard’s, for the first ever trade event staged in the City by the Turkish wine industry. The fledgling effort, hosted by a group of major Turkish producers, importers and San Francisco distributers, attracted much interest, tasters filling Troya shoulder to shoulder. It featured ten major producers representing all the wine regions of[...]