Journal
Stories and reflections on wine, the people who make it, the places we gather, and the ideas that connect them. A journal of curiosity, discovery and the pleasures of the table.
For years I read about the peacock’s tail. Then a Condrieu showed me
For years I carried a French phrase about the finish of great wine without understanding it. One evening in Hong Kong, a Condrieu explained it after I had swallowed.
Sixteen degrees of alcohol, and the word I keep writing in the margin
Every year the Valpolicella consortium asks me to taste the new Amarone. On paper, these wines should be exhausting. Lately one word keeps appearing in my notes.
I put a piece of Etna lava in my mouth. It tasted of rock.
On Etna, I once picked up a fragment of lava and put it on my tongue. It tasted of rock. What soil really gives a wine turned out to be more interesting.
How do you judge a wine you have never tasted before?
The flight in front of us held wines none of the judges had ever tasted. How do you score what you cannot compare? Four questions proved enough.
A Chablis my student found thin, and what it taught us both
A student in Hong Kong told me a celebrated Chablis tasted thin. Nothing was wrong with her palate. She was simply measuring the wine before she had understood it.
Reading Wine: A question carried through twenty years of teaching becomes a book on telling style from quality
Knowing a wine and reading one are not the same thing. In Reading Wine, Jean Charles Viens offers a practical framework for understanding style and quality—for clearer judgement, fairer tasting and greater pleasure.