Blogs
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Memorable food and wine, despite going (mostly) casual
Posted: May 16, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
On vacation, with stops in Paris, Lyon, Piemonte and Liguria, my wife and I mostly avoided high-profile restaurants and opted for less-expensive wines. Still we ate well and drank a satisfying array of local favorites.
Highlights included a Paul Bocuse project and the "best tajarin ever," at Trattoria Antica Torre in Barbaresco.
Blogs
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Tricky questions about "natural wines" intrude on my vacation
Posted: May 14, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Just back from two weeks in Europe, with stops in Paris, Lyon, Piemonte and Liguria. Intentionally, I scoped out relatively modest restaurants rather than anything trendy or luxe. (More about those in a future blog.) Thus, for the most part, my encounters with food and wine were blissfully free of attitude or pretension.
I promised my wife that I would not allow work to impinge on vacation. There was, however, one notable exception, when the volatile issue of "natural wines" reared its head and I had to deal with an awkward situation. I am an agnostic on natural wines, neither insisting upon drinking them nor avoiding them. For me the issue is always how good the wine is to drink, and all the better if it offers something beyond a pleasant way to wash down dinner.
April 30, 2012 Issue
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Features
Posted: April 30, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
April 30, 2012 Issue
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Features
Posted: April 30, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
April 30, 2012 Issue
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Features
Posted: April 30, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
April 30, 2012 Issue
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Books
Posted: April 30, 2012 By Thomas Matthews, Harvey Steiman, Kim Marcus
April 30, 2012 Issue
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Features
Some vintners are seeking lower alcohol levels in their wines, pushing back against history and nature
Posted: April 30, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Blogs
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Does it matter that self-styled experts are more sensitive to some tastes than consumers?
Posted: April 23, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Someone could write a treatise on why some researchers seem hell-bent on proving that wine experts are full of it. The most recent is a study by John E. Hayes of Pennsylvania State University and Gary Pickering of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Early news coverage was along the lines of "all those expert wine reviews are meaningless because most of us can't taste that stuff anyway.”
My colleague Ben O’Donnell reports on the actual paper. Having read the study, my take is that it falls in line with others of recent vintage that purport to show that experts can’t differentiate high-quality wine from rotgut, or that we always prefer a wine identified as more expensive.
Blogs
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Why the word can apply to smart, selective sommeliers
Posted: April 9, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
You may have noticed that some sommeliers and wine directors now refer to themselves as “curators” of their wine lists. Occasionally a restaurant or wine critic may compliment a short wine list as “well-curated,” if it brims with fascinating options.
Blogs
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Harvey Steiman At Large
Robert Oatley spreads it out in Australia, and it might be a plus
Posted: April 2, 2012 By Harvey Steiman
Over dinner the other night, Chris Hancock, the wily veteran of Australian wine, posed an intriguing question. We had been tasting the new line of signature wines from Robert Oatley, which for the first time included several bottlings from Western Australia and cooler regions in Victoria, in the southeast.
Hancock’s question was simple: “If you were starting a portfolio of Australian wines, what regions would you go to for the grapes?”
