Mental Geography
by Andy Neather
It felt mildly embarrassing. A member of the team from Black Chalk was trying to explain to me exactly where their Hampshire vineyard was as we sipped the fine, precise...
Topic: terroir
The Clay Sea
by John Atkinson MW
In discussions of terroir rocks have exalted status. The journey downwards through the geological record is mostly a search for hard boundaries – chalk, basalt, slate – while the overlying...
Cutting Through The Babble
by Margaret Rand
It struck me, watching Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne this last summer, that opera has terroir. It also has directors, who fulfil the same role as winemakers, either expressing the terroir...
Wine’s Invisible Cities
by Tom Hewson
Nested in the discussion of “Big” versus “Small” Champagne is an interesting question I saw posed by Oregon winemaker Jason Lett of Eyrie vineyards: “Is the Traditional Method antithetical to...
Luxury Bandits
by John Atkinson MW
Many qualifications have rocks and reefs rousing calm surfaces. Learner drivers are undone by parallel parking. Philosophy undergraduates discover The Spice-Box of Life isn’t a primer for formal logic. The...
The Pursuit Of Subtlety
by Dwight Furrow
If consumers cannot taste “terroir” should the wine world put so much value on place of origin? Margaret Rand raised the issue, on this very site, in an article titled...
Remaking Burgundy
by John Atkinson MW
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the...
How much terroir expression do you really want in your wine?
by Margaret Rand
I’ve got a great idea. Every time somebody asks my husband a question, I’m going to answer it for him. And it won’t be the answer he would give, because...
Has the shift to consumerism broken the wine world?
by John Atkinson MW
“All our hands are dirty, but some are dirtier than others” – Frédéric Neyrat Climate, for so long a remote ledger of mankind’s bid to unshackle itself from the brutishness...
The HoseMaster of Wine™ Solves The Enduring Mysteries of Wine
by Ron Washam
Wine is more mysterious than the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Yellow Tail of musical theater composers. It’s more mysterious than North Korean FaceBook. Wine has more secrets than...