Oeno-File, the Wine & Gastronomy Column

by Frank Ward

Posts Tagged ‘Oenophilia’

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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