| Appreciating Wine in Context | | | | By: Alder Yarrow | << back  Page 3 of 3 |
Of course, if there is one layer of context those of us who write about wine should generally try to avoid at all costs, it is this most personal of contexts. Emotion and personal attachment are generally thought to cloud the attempted objectivity of the wine review. This is the reason the most responsible of critics taste wine blind. Yet when the bags come off the wine bottles, and all is revealed, we fight a losing battle trying to ignore the stories that we know and love about wines. These stories, after all, make wine meaningful; these narratives of circumstance and pleasure capture all that is good about wine and everything that makes it more than just a beverage.
The Sensory Analysts may be content to tell the story of a wine with a few fruits, an architecture of adjectives, a finish of varying length and a number put up on a pedestal. In my stories of wine, and the stories I hope you will seek out and even tell on your own, such things are merely a sentence in a much larger tapestry of context, meaning and pleasure – just a footnote in a contextual narrative of characters, land, cultures, history, food and spirit.
About the Author:
Since January of 2004, Alder Yarrow has been publishing Vinography.Com, where he writes daily about wines, the wine world, and good restaurants around the globe. San Francisco Magazine calls Alder "the wine world's brightest cyberstar" and Vinography is is widely acknowledged to be the world's leading wine blog. The site, which Alder began as a way to collect his own personal notes about wine and food, has garnered praise from Food and Wine Magazine, Bon Appetit Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The LA Times, The Washington Post, FastCompany, and 7x7 Design Magazine, among others.
In both his writing, as well as his selected postings of news and miscellany from the world of wine, Alder tries to create an alternative to the traditional sources and styles of wine journalism, partially by focusing on the stories, the people, and the passion behind wine from a decidedly down-to-earth perspective. Vinography was recently honored for the second year in a row as the best blog on the Internet covering wine, beer, or spirits at the Food Blogging Awards. In addition to publishing Vinography, Alder is the resident wine columnist for the online magazine The Gilded Fork and has also written for Edible San Francisco and Epicurious.Com. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Ruth
Website URL: www.vinography.com
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