What a thrill for me to lead my first seminar on the UniSG campus this morning! My first seminar in the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program seemed to fly by as the students and I discussed the power of social media in marketing wine; the subjective and self-referential nature of wine writing and wine … …read more
Wine blogging: A closer look at the anatomy of a wine blog post. Click here to learn more about the Master’s in Italian Wine Culture program at UniSG where I begin teaching this week. Above: Taking a photograph of grapes (like these Chardonnay grapes) is a form of enography or wine writing. Some would argue … …read more
The criteria Italians adopt when deciding where and what to eat move along a double binary. They appear stretched between the need to maximize convenience and fit within their daily budget, and the desire to exercise their expertise as consumers, looking for food that meets their expectations.
As I continue to prepare for the seminars on English-language wine writing and wine blogging that I will be leading next week and the following (as part of the UniSG Master’s in Wine Culture program), I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of truth in wine (writing) and how we perceive absolute truths in … …read more
“At best,” writes Eric Asimov in How to Love Wine: a memoir and manifesto (New York, William Morrow, 2012), “tasting notes are a waste of time. At worst, they are pernicious. It’s disturbing to imagine wine writers wracking their brains to decide whether a particular aroma reminds them of braised fig, roasted fig, fig sauce, … …read more
Without giving away the store (as we say in English), I wanted to preview three of the wine books that I’ve asked my students to read for my seminars on Wine Writing and Wine Blogging next month at UNISG (one of the courses open to candidates in the Master in Wine Culture study program). The … …read more
Above: The Kiddush, the Jewish prayer over the wine. “Praise to You, Adonai our G-d, Sovereign of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine.” Today is the second-to-last day of “the Days of Awe,” the ten days that follow Rosh Hashanah, literally, the “head of the year” or the new year, the Jewish … …read more
As I gear up to teach my class in the UNISG Master in Italian Wine Culture this fall, I wanted to give a preview of some of the topics and reading materials we’ll be covering and discussing (the etching of the wine-loving toad above comes from one of the books on our reading list, The … …read more
And so it begins… A few months ago, I was contacted by my good friend Michele Antonio Fino, the director of two masters programs at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (Piedmont): Wine Culture and Food Culture and Communications. Michele had already recruited me as an instructor in the Wine Culture program. And I … …read more
The process of fermentation is known, each chemical reaction is studied. We know our good old bacteria, the Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Lactobacillus bulgaricus. But how much do we know about the world of microbes – the microcosmos – and how we are connected with it?