Posts by Chris

Readers of this blog, and those who have heard me speak at conferences, will know that my relationship with the language wine people use is complicated. There are often reasons for the words we use, but those reasons are not always self-evident. Nor do we do a very good job of making this known, and explaining what those words are intended to convey. In many ways, and many times, wine language is coterminous with, but not equal to,...

Last week however many (I didn’t count this time) of us gathered at the Royal National Hotel in London to take our WSET Diploma Unit 1 Case Study exam. This, basically, is an essay. Or, in our case, four shorter essays. About a month before the exam, we were given the general topic: social media and the wine industry. We were expected to revise and read up on whatever we could get our hands on. On the day of the exam, we went in and...

Well, according to the WSET Unit 6 (fortified wines) exam results, anyway. My pride is somewhat assuaged by the fact that at least I passed the theory section. (One can insert here all the jokes about academics being useless in the real world.)I’m still debating spending the money WSET charges to get the feedback on the tasting section. It might be interesting to see how close I was to what they thought the fortified wines should...

Two years ago, both halves of Anthroenology and paid a visit to Domaine Wachau to chat with some of the people there. At the end, we had a small tasting. The woman doing it was going to skip over the Grüner Veltliner Steinfeder, saying they didn’t export it, and it was really just for local consumption. Julia asked if we could try it, and so we did. I ended up bringing home a bottle.So, what is Steinfeder? It is a somewhat peculiar...

Anthreoenology is pleased to announce we have received a grant from the University of Cambridge to enable us to undertake a longer period of fieldwork during the 2016 harvest period.For those unfamiliar with how academia and research works, this is doubly good news. Not only does it allow us to spend more time on research, but each grant received makes it a bit easier to get future grants. Funding bodies in general don’t like to...