All posts tagged: wine

On wine snobs

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Image: Caricature of a Snob in The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray Excerpted from:  Drinking with Proust Snobbishness is like Death in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never have heard, ‘beating with equal foot at poor men’s doors, and kicking at the gates of Emperors.63 Who or what is a wine-snob? I imagine a smug-looking man, a Silicon Valley hotshot, twirling his glass of Napa Cabernet, pausing to harvest its aromas into a hawkish sense organ before pronouncing upon the wine’s provenance and quality. “It’s a bargain at 220$!” he murmurs indistinctly and twitches disdainfully as we venture to give our opinion to the contrary. The word snob became popular in the nineteenth century when William Makepeace Thackeray published a series of articles in Punch magazine, the so-called snob papers. These papers read like tasting notes, not on wine, but on Victorian society. In one of these papers, Thackeray provides the first authoritative account of the wine snob. He introduces us to a snob called Waggle and describes the activities and attitudes that are a snob’s …

The bits in wine

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From the archives. Shortlisted  for the Young Wine Writer of the Year Award  in 2012. See also the follow-on article:  “On the Information Content of Wine Notes: Some New Algorithms?“. During a recent comparative tasting for an Italian wine award, a young Nebbiolo – ‘red as copper, a spirit from the forest’ – stood its ground against a seasoned Chianti, ‘searing red ink with walnut shells melted into its sultry and sulky stream’. However, it was a racy Sangiovese that clinched victory. Swirling, sniffing and gulping with enthusiasm, one of the judges with his alarmed wine-writer wife in tow, declared: ‘she glimpses at me, shiny black leather, disappearing in the dark to a raven muss of hair. She’s been eating morello cherries and chocolate’ – the Sangiovese, that is. If the wine descriptions seem suspicious, it is because the Italian award never happened. The writing has been cobbled together. A dash of Australian wine journalism, a drop from an English baronet wine buff’s pen and a mystery ingredient: one of the three wine notes is an outright fraud. Fraud is a constant in …

Marktwirt

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A restaurant called Marktwirt is just a hundred steps or so northwest from the centre of the Viktualienmarkt. The Viktualienmarkt itself hosts a few shops with serious assortments of wine and cheese. It’s also hard to miss the Nymphenburg Sekt Cafe. Nymphenburg Sekt is a Bavarian sparkling wine producer. I do not know of any serious vineyards around Munich.  There are certainly no grapes growing around the former hunting grounds of the Bavarian nobility in Nymphenburg. Nymphenburg Sekt admits on its website that their stuff is made from grapes (do they mean bulk wine?) collected from all around Europe. The Sekt Crystal Cabinet is competitively priced and trocken. Trocken is the German for dry, which is the third-sweetest type of sparkling wine (17-32 g or residual sugar per litre), which means you’ll find it rather sweet. Cabinet is a label word that doesn’t mean anything. The premium sparkling wine from the house of Nymphenburg is called Koenig Ludwig II. Koenig Ludwig II was the eccentric King of Bavaria from 1864-1886. Among other things, he is responsible for the fairy-tale Schloss Neuschwanstein, which inspired the castle of the beast in Disney’s …

Korked

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Are there good wine bars in Munich? Why would you expect any? When a wine map of Germany includes Munich it’s only because Germany’s second smallest wine region in Saxony is also on the map. And since that’s also so far-out to the east it makes sense to include Munich, straight down 400 km to the south. The two closest wine regions to Munich are Baden and Württemberg. It’s not clear which of the two is closer. Esslingen in Württemberg is about 200 km away to the north-west. Meersburg of Baden is about 200 km away to the south-west. London and Paris have vineyards close by. Stanlake Park is an hour by train from Paddington (ca. 50 km) while Paris has its own vineyards (Clos Montmartre). In the 16th century, Munich’s rulers from the House of Wittelsbach brought in wine — 40,000 litres or so — from Regensburg (ca. 100 km north). Regensburg had a serious wine-scene at the time developing out of vineyards held by local monasteries. Many of these were destroyed during the 30-years war (1618-1648). After the war beer replaced wine as …

Essay Collection: Thinking, Hard and Soft

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Steersmanship requires connected thought. As information technology weaves itself into life, what happens to our sense of time? Can organic activity be digitised? The essays in Thinking, Hard and Soft range from Proust, Homer and Zhuangzi to Cybernetics and AI, all washed down with a healthy dose of wine. Available on Leanpub. Here is what some readers have said about “Thinking, Hard and Soft” so far: “Thought provoking. An example of how mankind can muddle through the opposition and find a way to do the right thing in the end.” Simon Dakin, Business Systems and Information Manager “Very well written… Very few people publishing in LinkedIn can write like this. And that’s probably a large understatement… a rare ability to fuse philosophy, science, technology, history and original thought…” Stephen Cummins, CEO & Founder AppSelekt, CSO Academic Innovations “Beautiful!” Douglas Levin, Professional Sommelier & Wine Writer