Oeno-File, the Wine & Gastronomy Column

by Frank Ward

Archive for the ‘Oenophilia’ Category

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Wine & Health

Posted by Frank Ward on December 15, 2014

AvatarDecember 2014. When President John F. Kennedy once received a whole party of Nobel prize-winners in the Oval Office he told them that their presence represented the biggest concentration of human intellect in that building since President Thomas Jefferson had sat there alone during his own presidency, 1801-1809. Jefferson certainly was an exceptional man: lawyer, statesman, architect, oenophile, scholar, and all-round man of the enlightenment. [….]

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Tasting le Pin for Two Pins!

Posted by Frank Ward on March 5, 2014

AvatarMarch 2014. Together with Andrew Jefford, well-known wine writer, I am poised to taste two vintages of Château Le Pin, a Pomerol that, since its creation in the early 1980s, has achieved what’s called cult status. Collectors have shown themselves willing to pay several thousand pounds for a single bottle, especially for the 1982. The 1982 was, in fact, the very first vintage of this rare wine, made from a plot measuring a mere one-third of a hectare. The most amazing of all, the vines – mostly Merlot – in that first vintage were only four years old [….]

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Dinner With Friends

Posted by Frank Ward on February 7, 2014

AvatarFebruary 2014. We are three couples who meet regularly to eat dinner together and taste wines, each calculated to match the various dishes we try. The evenings seldom finish without our having tried at least eight or nine wines, all of them of distinction, even the few that prove to be over the top!. All are tasted blind. On blind tastings, a French wine producer once said to me: “la dégustation à l’aveugle est un exercice en l’humilité.” I made him chuckle by replying: “”Yes, and sometimes an exercise in humiliation!”.

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The Nectar of the Gods: Frank Ward on investing in wine

Posted by Frank Ward on December 5, 2013

There are two chief motives for investing in wine. Monetary gain is one; buying young, high-quality wines and waiting for them to improve, for the delectation of you and your friends, is the other. A bottle of good wine is a time capsule. Without moving an inch it makes a journey through time and becomes utterly transformed in the process. The aggressive tannins and acids in infant wine soften and harmonize slowly, transmuting into perfumes and flavours of astonishing beauty. […]

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More Writers on Wine : Tolstoy, Strindberg, Hemingway

Posted by Frank Ward on August 16, 2013

August 2013. Hugh Johnson, our foremost wine writer (and, indeed, one of the English language’s finest stylists), suggests that wine may have originated in the Caucasus – southern Russia – some 6000 years B.C. Close to 8000 years later the world’s greatest novelist, Leo Tolstoy, describes harvest time in a Cossack community in the region of the Terek River, in that part of the Caucasus close to Chechnya. Picking had started as early as August….

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Two Great Writers Comment on Wine

Posted by Frank Ward on November 24, 2012

The phylloxera epidemic was raging in all of the wine regions of France in the late 19th century, threatening their very existence. We read a lot about its devastating effect on viticulture and on wines, but precious little is written about the effects the wine-louse exerted on the lives of ordinary people in that era. In his fascinating book “Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes” (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson throws some light on this subject. 

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