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How Valais put the charm in Chasselas

Simon J Woolf
Features
7 min read
When Michel Chapoutier mentioned in 2011 that he was considering planting a Chasselas vineyard in the UK, some may have thought this was the ultimate insult to “le vin Anglais” - the famously neutral variety is increasingly ostracized in French vineyards, and is so disliked that even when it appears

Is Coffee the New Wine? Embracing Coffee’s “Third Wave”

Evan Dawson
Features
6 min read
How’s this for a tasting note? “Cherry, roasted cashew, baked apple, and chocolate.” Or this: “Toasted nuts, caramel, milk chocolate and tobacco.” The first is difficult to place. The second sounds like a modern Bordeaux with about ten or fifteen years of age. But we’re not talking about wine. We’re

Comté and the terroir of cheese

Mary Cressler
Features
9 min read
I’d only been in the region a few hours. I was tired and jetlagged after twenty hours of travel and a nine-hour time difference. But our guide at the museum, our first stop, decided to wake us all up by giving us a playful quiz – an activity to awaken our

134 year-old California wine research: Conclusions pending

Erika Szymanski
Features
6 min read
In 1880, Dr. Eugene Hilgard asked the California state legislature for $3000 to start a wine research program at the University of California, and he got it. His first start-up – the “California Agricultural Experiment Station,” now transmogrified into the University of California Davis's massive agricultural extension program – had

Terroir is for Weirdos, and other Place Lessons from Beer

Erika Szymanski
Features
7 min read
Beer is playing catch-up. Craft brews have recently begun earning the kind of respect, devotion, bottles, and prices heretofore reserved for grape-derived beverages: the so-called “wine-ification of beer.” Respect and devotion leads to sensory analysis, and – in our oenophilic culture – sensory analysis leads to terroir. And terroir leads

Playing with Yeast Diversity: Not Quite Science

Erika Szymanski
Features
7 min read
I feel as though I need to whisper this, but I think that yeast might be trendy. The furor (both supportive and critical) over natural wine is bleeding over into an interest in the “wild” yeasts that contribute to their distinction, and whether or not they're really “wild.” Meanwhile, a