The King of Luckytown There are 16 apricots in a blue and grey bowl on the kitchen counter this evening, in varying states of ripeness. Three more rest near the kitchen sink, where they’ll soon be trimmed around the spots where the birds and squirrels and bugs went after them before I could pick them. […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Nine (June 24, 2002)
Rhônesome and Ramblin’: In Search Of A Linear Narrative Fanny Klein brought us coffee. She must have taken pity on us, that morning after. Fanny had agreed to be our translator for Sunday evening and Monday, giving me a chance to get my French “legs” under me, before I became our only link to any […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Eight (May 21, 2002)
Ramblin’ Blues: In search of the World’s Greatest Pizza Over a period of 5 days in June of 1996, I visited winegrowers in the Rhone valley with the estimable Robert Mayberry, who is, among other things, the author of a most useful and comprehensive reference work titled: The Wines Of The Rhone Valley (Rowman & […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Six (April 18, 2002)
The View from Here What follows here is the (edited) text of an essay I wrote back in 1995, as the result of an invitation to address a dinner gathering at Manhattan’s Savoy restaurant, on the subject of whether it’s possible, in an era dominated by mass-production and homogenization, to produce “soulful” wines. The impetus […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Seven (April 25, 2002)
Ramblin’ Fever (On the trail of the Sacred Energy) It’s only 9am and already there’s a filled shopping bag swinging from the hand of a slender young woman walking south on Michigan Avenue. South and North, buses and taxicabs glide past by the dozen, to the steady rhythm of red and green. The daffodil beds […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Five (March 12, 2002)
I Started Out on Burgundy The last time I was in New York was approximately a year ago; I go every March to pour wine at the Spring Tasting held by my distributor there. It’s a bustling, hectic event, featuring several hundred of the highest-powered wine retailers and sommeliers in the metropolitan New York area […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Four (January 21, 2002)
The Devil Made Me Do It Back in the Summer of 1988 I got interviewed for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the first time I’d been asked (for public consumption) for my thoughts on anything, and when they sent a photographer out to shoot something for the story, I have to […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Three (December 26, 2001)
All is Calm, All is Bright Our house is such a mess. It’s two nights before Christmas, and my 5 and 1/2 year-old grandson Noah is decorating a gingerbread house with Cornelia. There’s powdered sugar everywhere. Cornelia has offered Noah a candy cane to eat, but he’s really serious about this decorating stuff, so he […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-Two (November 8, 2001)
I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas Anymore, Toto It’s a Friday afternoon in late September. I’m in line at a checkout counter at Longs Drugs, waiting to pay for my tube of sunscreen and 2 large bottles of water, before heading down to Paso Robles, yet again, in the perpetual pursuit of harvest epiphany, when […]
Organolepticians Number Twenty-One (September 17, 2001)
911 COMES CALLING (I’ll Take Any Good News I Can Find) The air went out of everything pretty fast last Tuesday, and it doesn’t give me a good feeling, this harvest that came in. Now it’s hard to keep my mind on this work, this winemaking. Local sports talk show man, Gary Radnich, (for whom […]