From the category archives:

Wine

George Taber, author of Judgment of Paris,
takes a look at the Bargain Wine Revolution

January 7, 2012

I met George Taber, the author of Judgment of Paris, the 2006 wine book that told the story of the seminal 1976 blind tasting in Paris where a panel of top French wine experts choose unknown California wines over some of France’s finest wines, at the 2011 European Wine Bloggers Conference. This tasting shocked the [...]

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I think, therefore I..must be an inflexible, over-analytical,
unyielding, general-all-around pain in the derriere

May 29, 2011

I’ve lived in France for most of the past 20 years, but I’ve never felt the weight of Cartesian logic as much as I have over the past nine months or so. Cartesianism is a philosophy developed by French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. His belief that method holds a higher place than practice, and [...]

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Wine-filtering technology up close

May 2, 2011

The oenology program that I’m attending in Toulouse recently took our class to the INRA wine research center that is located on the Mediterranean coast near Montpellier. INRA (the French Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) is the largest academic agronomic research center in Europe. Besides being a repository of over 30 different grape varieties, [...]

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Grand Wines: A wine-changing experience

April 9, 2011

We’re all products of our life experiences. Good or bad, memorable or quickly forgotten, every experience affects your life in some way. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a wine-tasting experience that has expanded and altered my view of wine—well, at least the upper echelon of French wine. It wasn’t really a “Eureka” [...]

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Choosing the best wines in southwest France:
Why sense and sensibility only takes you so far

February 27, 2011

Each year, the professional winemakers association for southwestern France (Les Vignerons du sud-ouest), along with the Conseil régional Midi-Pyrénées (the region’s development authority), organizes a competition among the area’s 24 wine appellations. This year’s Concours des Vins du Sud-Ouest, which was held on February 14, featured over 1,000 wines in categories ranging from dry white [...]

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