Every year on the third Wednesday in January, at five-o’clock sharp, there’s a party in the charming Swiss city of Neuchâtel. It’s not a raucous affair with loud music or wild dancing; instead, it’s a dignified civic event with some costume-clad celebrants and some excellent young wine to drink. Good wine, however, is in the […]
A Wine of Note: Domaine Mermetus, Lavaux, Vaud
2017 Altesse, Une Touche de Fantaisie, Domaine Mermetus (Lavaux, Vaud) Like a lot of orphan grapes, Altesse suffers from some persistent, seemingly unshakeable origin stories. But thanks to modern genetic sleuthing, we can say for sure it’s not from Cyprus—which means it never hitchhiked with Count Amadeus VI on his way home from a 14th-century […]
Clos des Gondettes (Satigny, Geneva)
Look at a current political map of Europe and you might notice the outline of a limp handshake (choose your own piece of anatomy) where western Switzerland meets France. It looks limp for a reason. As a one time exclave—entirely surrounded by France and the old Duchy of Savoy—Geneva existed as an on-again, off-again city-state […]
Opinion: Why I Dislike Brands and Still Champion the Consumer
In Honor of Salvy, a True Wine Warrior Some of us in the wine world tend to look at branded wine with disdain. As a general rule, we don’t approve of focus-groups, big-dollar ad campaigns, laboratory shenanigans or distribution monopolies that crowd out the little guy. We don’t like that brands tend to exploit the […]
Bâtonnage: Some Thoughts On a New Wine Podcast
Earlier this month marked the debut of a new wine podcast (brave souls) hosted by food and wine maven, Fiona Beckett, and the seemingly tireless Master of Wine, Liam Steevenson. It’s called Bâtonnage—a play on the French term which in English means “to stir the lees”—and if the first episode is any indication the series […]
A Modest Proposal: Let’s Call Wine What It Is (or What We Want It to Be)
The excellent timatkin.com website recently featured an article by fellow Master of Wine, Christy Canterbury. In it she asks a very important question: Is an imitation wine better than a fake? It’s not a trick question. Wine forgeries, and the fraudsters who create them, are very much in the news lately as many of us […]
Profile: Weinbau Thomas Studach (Malans, Graubünden)
To many foreigners Switzerland is a land of carefully cultivated myths and legends punctuated by beautiful mountain landscapes. The would be traveler, without knowing it, is seduced by marketing—eagerly shared by travel writers and recycled by hyper-efficient feedback loops. Thus, the watch industry and train system feed—and are fed by—the aura of Swiss precision and […]
Book Review: Vineyards, Rocks, & Soils, Alex Maltman (2018)
Vineyards, Rocks, & Soils: The Wine Lover’s Guide to Geology by Alex Maltman, Oxford University Press (2018) The futility of writing a book review (or anything else for that matter) after British wine writer Andrew Jefford has already tackled the subject hit me hard the other day. His brilliant review of Alex Maltman’s Vineyards, Rocks, and Soils: The Wine […]
Profile: Weingut Möhr-Niggli (Maienfeld, Graubünden)
Graubünden is Switzerland’s largest and easternmost canton and the only one that trades in three of the national languages—German, Italian and Romansch. Despite its size and eye-popping beauty it’s not a common destination for outsiders except when it’s luxury they seek. The three-star chef Andreas Caminada is ensconced at Schloss Schauenstein and the high-brow resort […]
A Day at the Cooperative–Provins Valais
It’s not sexy, in fact, it’s one of those boring statistics that puts most people to sleep, even if it is true: more than half of all wine made in Italy, France and Spain combined is made in cooperatives. That’s a lot of wine but much of it is dreck destined for distillation, flex-tanks, or […]
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