Wine Fictions

 When you come across the selection a wine shop has to offer you also come across a whole market philosophy and how the owners/managers position themselves towards the wine world. This can be a political statement, a specific way of interpreting what is relevant in the wine world, an attempt to understand and perceive what a certain kind of customers want and to attract them, or to simply try to follow the latest trends.  I am sure there are many other approaches on how to create a portfolium that can fit in a shop, but that is not the main subject I want to write about. Recently, I have been looking more attentively to what kind of wine people in Germany are selling on Ebay and I have to confess that I find it tremendously fascinating to dive into personal collections or, as it often happens, the personal collection of someone who has recently died.  By going through it, I have the feeling of immersing in very personal stories as well as reliving a piece of history. Cert...

 As I start writing this post two of my work colleagues are writing the WSET 3 exam.  I have also tried  to write it twice but failed both times, only managing to approve the practical part, meaning that the only thing I can really do is drinking. But with distinction. If on my first attempt I was basically not prepared at all and it was only obvious that I would fail, on the second one I was almost sure I would pass. But I did not.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a mistake to write it in German or whether the reason of it all was just my general incompetence.  What I know is that two weeks before the exam I was already dreaming about maps of South Africa and its different wine regions or the specificities of Australia's weather. And what about Chile? Which subregion is it most adequate to produce a premium Carmenère?   Talking to one of my colleagues he was complaining about the importance of some of the contents we have to learn. One of ...

 "She also knew that she herself probably read more than was healthy for her, set too much store by reading, had a kind of neurotic obsession with literature and its supposed moral benefits."  When I have reached page 52 of Jonathan Coe 's Middle England I was confronted with a cruel reality that may affect me as well. Unsure about my rather obsessive behaviour and how it seems to get even more obsessive as I am getting older I have run to my girlfriend and asked whether I was, by any chance, close to such a state. She coldly said I was already stranded there. For a long time. And with wine as well. I am not going to pretend that I got shocked with the answer as I was already suspecting that something similar would be coming.   It is, somehow, true, I have to recognize. The diversity of offers in what respects the book and the wine market are, to a certain extent, very similar. You have an almost non-ending offer of styles, different quality levels (in this case boo...