Many wine writers also have a day job. If wine isn’t your job, what is and for whom? [Natalie] Before I started writing about wine, I was in high tech marketing for a California-based supercomputer company. I’d probably be doing that or anything to do with writing. When did you start writing about wine? [Natalie] Although I had taken a sommelier course for fun, the thought of writing about my hobby didn’t occur to me until I hadn’t slept soundly for three weeks. Shortly after our son Rian was born in November 1998, my life took on a biological beat: […]
Taste Wine
Wine Writers
Natalie MacLean first had the idea to write about wine on a seemingly innocuous trip to the grocery store back in 1999. Groggy and sleep-deprived — she was on maternity leave at the time — she picked up a local food magazine and started flipping through it. That’s when it hit her. “They had all this beautiful food photography, recipes and so on, but no wine,” MacLean told CityLine.ca in a recent phone interview from her home in Ottawa. “I thought, well, I’ve taken a sommelier course. I know about the Internet, so I pitched them a story about wine […]
Internet & Wine 4
Excerpted from The Oregonian Uncork these wine Web sites for fun, useful info I recently received a press release extolling the new wine-matching function at Epicurious.com, the culinary Web portal for magazines such as Bon Appétit and Gourmet. Intrigued, I checked out the site. Lo and behold, there they were: long lists of specific wine recommendations, powered by the new wine site snooth.com. I found this function fascinating. And pretty much useless. Click on one of the suggested recipes — Grilled Fish Tostadas With Pineapple-Jícama Salsa, for example — and you’ll pull up wine suggestions such as: “Peter Brum Liebfraumilch […]
Wine Books
Updated with more lists from you, our dear readers! We got a deluge of entries for our summer giveaway and as promised we’re posting some of our favorite entries. We’re hoping that some of these entries spark you to add a few more books to your summer reading list. We’ll add a few more of your summer reading lists tomorrow and announce the winner of our summer grab bag. Without further ado: Sharon made us laugh with her entry. 1. Honey I’ve Wrecked The Kids by Alyson Schafer 2. Red, White and Drunk All Over by Natalie Maclean 3. Twilight […]
Ordering Wine
OK, so you don’t know a box wine from a baby brunello and that big dinner with colleagues/clients/current object of obsession is just a day away. You want to be dining and wining but will likely be dining and whining … especially if all you can say to the waiter is, “Got any wine coolers?” You could sign up for Wine Appreciation 101, but frankly, who has the time? Enter your friend, The Faker, who called on Tribune wine critic Bill Daley for his cheat sheet on pro-style ordering. Follow his script, look like you know your way around a […]
Wine Tastings
Several years ago I organized a wine tasting night, hoping to take advantage of my neighbor’s expertise in that area. Everyone brought a bottle of red wine, each one wrapped in a brown paper bag so we could taste without being influenced by the label or price. The least expensive bottle on the table, a California Zinfandel, won raves. It surprised those of us who splurged on a $20 bottle – about twice the price of the winner – thinking that more expensive meant better quality. That’s only one of a few good reasons wine tastings exist. Milwaukee native Michael […]
Internet & Wine 3
As my close friends know painfully well, I’m not exactly good at making decisions. At the wine store, I’m the customer who gets asked “Can I help you?” twice by the same salesperson because I’ve meandered between shelves for so long that they have forgotten our first encounter. Then I usually say something brilliant like, “Can you help me find a red wine that tastes…you know, tasty…um, like the one I bought a few weeks ago…I think it was French…?” It’s not that I’m a complete oeno-idiot. I know most of the major regions and varietals, and my palate can […]
Internet & Wine 2
As the kids go back to school and newly arrived overseas students crowd into Haidian, there’s a buzz of learning is in the air. As the Beijing wine world continues to expand, more and more Beijingers want to learn something about the pleasures of the grape. Just as a course in music appreciation can help you sort what’s Baroque from what’s not, a bit of wine knowledge makes it easier to tell your Cabernet Sauvignon from Cabernet Franc or, as you advance into the murky world of wine labels, your Pouilly-Fumé from Pouilly-Fuissé. Here in Beijing, probably the easiest way […]
Internet & Wine
Lucky for me, Red, White and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean was one of the first books I picked up when I started thinking about doing a wine blog. For MacLean, writing about wine is not an academic exercise, a parsing of the chemical responses upon the tongue, a conjugation of fruit groups or a diagram of geographical factors. Important though they are to figuring out how and why certain flavors and aromas play out on the senses, those elements alone are a flat description of a particular wine’s character. As MacLean explains in the chapter “The Making of […]
Corked Wine
Corked doesn’t refer to bits of cork floating in your wine glass. Natural corks, made from the bark of cork trees grown in Spain and Portugal, can contain a chemical compound called “2, 4, 6 trichloranisole” or TCA. The wine interacts with TCA to create the taint and it’s estimated that 5-10% of natural corks are faulty this way, though that’s improving with more careful practices and better technology. Even a mild case of taint from natural corks strips wine of its expressive aromas and a severe one makes it smell like moldy cardboard. This defect is why screwcaps are […]
