In his recent essay entitled Are We Entering the Post-Natural Wine Era?, author Jamie Goode attempts to answer one question by asking another: “Where does natural wine finish and conventional wine start?” The implication is that the two sides are now so close in their practices that to distinguish between them is nearly meaningless. There is no doubt, […]
Category: Food and Wine
Swiss Grapes: Completer — The Answer to a Prayer
This article first appeared in Trink Magazine — Issue 04-07-2021 By traditional measures, my first year of college was a waste. I spent a lot of it playing cards with a gang of liberal theologians at a Jesuit university in California. Towering above the group was our guru, the truest Renaissance man I’ve ever met […]
Nostalgia: César Drinks List
Once upon a time, I was in the restaurant and bar business with locations in Berkeley, Oakland and Fair Oaks, California. Every once in a while, some one from way back will reach out to me through this blog to say how much they miss the old days when wine was plentiful and eating out […]
A Wine of Note: Weingut Lenz (Uesslingen-Buch, Thurgau)
Recently, I received a sample box of organic and biodynamic wine from Winemaker.com, a new e-commerce site for Swiss wine, as a way to introduce me to their services. The list of participating wineries is impressive and if the business proves successful, I look for the list to grow. Frankly, there’s no reason it shouldn’t. […]
Swiss Grapes: Räuschling — The Acid Queen
Despite an encouraging trend toward greater grapevine diversity, two varieties continue to dominate the Swiss wine landscape: Pinot Noir is here to stay, because the Swiss, like their German counterparts, fancy themselves the new masters of this sensitive, climate-threatened variety; and the much-maligned Chasselas because it’s so emblematic of Swiss culture as the workhorse wine […]
Swiss Vin Nature: The Regulations Have Arrived
After several years of study and debate, the final regulations for “Vin Nature Swiss-style” have been published. What follows is my English translation of the regulations — officially released only in French and German — so please forgive any errors I may have made. I think it’s pretty clean. Upon a quick examination, the Swiss regulations […]
Eglisau: Vines of the High Rhine
This article first appeared in Trink Magazine — Issue 2, 14/12/2020 Every guide to Swiss wine begins with the same simple premise: There are six wine regions in Switzerland. That means one of them, Deutschschweiz, is forever miscast as a single entity, even though it encompasses nineteen cantons and covers two-thirds of the nation’s surface area. Meanwhile, […]
A Note to My Readers on the Winter Solstice
2020 is a year we must never forget. Yes, there have been worse years for humanity, but not one in my lifetime has left me as worried about the fate of future generations as this one has. Movies, television and books have done a good job of giving us fictional glimpses of pandemics, natural disasters and […]
In Wine We Trust: The Valentina Passalacqua Saga
The explosive Valentina Passalacqua saga is a cautionary tale for anyone who would exploit a human being for business advantage. It’s also a deep dive into business accountability, transparency and crisis communication. It may also mark the moment when the wine world begins to worry less about sulfite additions and native yeasts and more about […]
Müller-Thurgau: Then and Now
I would argue that the much-maligned cross of Riesling x Silvaner, better known as Müller-Thurgau, is a dual national. There’s no doubt the variety was born in Germany, but what’s not so well known is that it came of age in Switzerland. It was created by a Swiss scientist, Hermann Müller, at Geisenheim in the […]
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