Welcome to the 21st century! Valpolicella was one of my first wines, along with Chianti, drunk with pizzas as a student in Milwaukee – the cheaper the better. You can’t really blame the Verona area, home to these wines, for my youthful folly in drinking some of the worst of its products. This was 40 […]
Travels
When I travel, I drink wine. In fact, I usually organize my travels around learning about it because wine isn't a beverage, it's a culture.
Treat yourself to Verona
Plan ahead for springtime in Verona Here’s the perfect April treat: Verona, Italy. The medieval city, in the province of the same name, sits in the region of Veneto and is an easy train trip away from Switzerland. The food and wine are wonderful, there’s a wealth of art and architecture and history and the […]
Recent wine fun, Best of Swiss Wine Tourism
Prologue: cycling, diplomats, wine in Spain I haven’t been writing here much lately. This summer has been devoted mainly to three things: renovating a garden, building up physical strength following three major orthopaedic surgeries in 15 months and working on a collection of essays and another of short stories. But there has been, happily, time […]
Swiss wine tourism comes of age
This could be a watershed year for Swiss wine, the year when wine tourism comes of age. Lausanne in March became one of the world’s 10 Great Wine Capitals, a network of wine centres that is behind the five-year-old International Best of Wine Tourism awards. Switzerland’s first awards, whose winners compete in the international awards, […]
Armenian and Turkish fine wines
An introduction to wines from the cradle of civilization The Valais Wine Museum in Sierre held a very special conference with wine-tasting 27 May, “L’Orient des vins”, that focused on Armenian and Turkish wines. José Vouillamoz, co-author of Wine Grapes, talked about grape domestication – where, how, why, and Jean-Luc Etievent of the Wine Mosaic […]