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Wine Society of San Diego: The Art of Wine
Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and WineOsias Beert the Elder Can wines be works of art? Some wines are beautiful. Some stimulate the imagination. Some are deeply meaningful–their flavors and textures...
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Do Food and Wine Provoke Wonder?
Jesse Prinz, at the new blog Aesthetics for Birds, argues that wonder is the primary emotion in our response to art, and the ability to provoke wonder, he claims, is an essential component in the...
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Can Wines Be Works of Art?
Most philosophers would say no. Works of art are artifacts designed by human beings to express or represent something. Wines on the other hand are made from grapes the quality of which is determined...
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Why Care About the Art of Food and Wine?
Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Still Life with Fruit and Ham, 1648-49 Our capacity for generosity rests on inspiration, and beauty is among the things that inspire us most of all. As life in our increasingly...
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A Racist Winemaker–Would You Drink His Wines?
As Alder Yarrow reported over the weekend, Italian winemaker Fulvio Bressan spewed a despicable, racist rant on Facebook directed at Italy’s first African-Italian government minister, Cécile Kyenge....
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Has Science Compromised the Art of Winemaking?
Winemaking has undergone a scientific revolution over the past 30 yrs. Young winemakers now graduate from university programs laden with chemistry courses. Sugar levels in the vineyard can be...
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The War Against Warts: Can Unique Wines Survive the Rise of the Machines?
This post by Dr. Vino got me thinking about where our mad dash toward a machine-generated world is headed. The intrepid reporter ventures to Napa Valley to check out an optical sorting machine,...
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Wine and Spirituality
Edible Arts is on a brief hiatus. Meanwhile, enjoy this post from the past. The spiritual dimension of wine has a long history. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was said to inhabit the soul with the...
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Vulgar Wines (or can excess be beautiful?)
from Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights Edible Arts is on a brief hiatus. Please enjoy this post from June 2012. Fredric Koeppel’s recent post “Wine and Vulgarity”was interesting and thought...
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Hype, High-End Wines, and Originality
Last week Steve Heimoff defended the hype surrounding famous high end wines such as Premier Crus from Bordeaux. What critics of expensive wine fail to understand is that the wine drinking experience...
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Wine, Enchantment and the Art of Performance
My reconnection with an Artesa Pinot Noir–the wine responsible for my “aha” moment when I recognized wine could be extraordinary–got me thinking about how we assess the real value of wine. Of course,...
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What Can Music Tell Us about Wine?
Now that food and wine pairings have become standard fare, we need something else to puzzle and fret over when preparing a dinner—and we scribblers need something else to write about. For the past few...
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The Idea of Wine
This post by From Vinho Verde to Barolo With Love got me thinking, once again, about why wine is fascinating. It seems that often those who love wine, also love food, and also love to travel. Because...
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Wine: Will Chemistry Destroy the Romance?
What do we seek to know when we gain wine knowledge? We learn to distinguish the taste of Cabernet from Zinfandel, recognize the different flavor profiles of French and American oak, uncover details...
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What is Good Taste?
I suspect most people would say “good taste” is an ability to discern what other people in your social group (or the social group you aspire to) find attractive. Since most people cannot say much about...
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Should the Wine Critic Be Blind?
Blind tasting, in which the person tasting the wine is prevented from knowing the producer and/or price and in some cases the variety and region, is thought to be the gold-standard of wine criticism...
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Why is Wine Extraordinary?
It is not just a beverage but a revelation, almost a spiritual experience for some people. For others, wine is a subject that commands years of deep and sustained attention. Why? David White asks a...
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What is Good Taste? (and another bottle of Pinot)
A few weeks ago I posed the question what is good taste, without making much progress on the topic. It can’t be merely a sense for what is appropriate given contemporary social conventions because...
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Ideology and Wine: Why Arguments are Good for the Soul
The pop and sizzle of wine’s ideological battles reminds us that wine is not just a beverage. A few weeks ago Robert Parker took a swipe at what he calls the anti-flavor elite—sommeliers who promote...
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Wine Critics and Their Biases
Wine writer Jamie Goode raises a key question about wine criticism—should critics allow personal style preferences to influence their judgment? He thinks style preferences inevitably color a critic’s...
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