I’ve been planning for ages to do a post on the unintended consequences of legal definitions. It turns out procrastination means that the world has caught up with my intentions. In late March, INAO – the French organisation that oversees agricultural products (including wine) with geographical indicators – introduced a new category for wine. A previous post had touched on the argument for a legal definition of ‘natural wine.’ The...
Read MoreAnthroenology is involved in two different wine events this October. In the first, The Less Sociable Half will be doing an Insects & Wine evening with Charlotte Payne, hosted by Cambridge Wine Merchants. You can order tickets here on Eventbrite here. Later in October (the 26th, to be precise) both halves of Anthroenology will be at a natural wine tasting at 169West in Zurich. This is being hosted by an Cambridge and...
Read MoreIt’s a forthcoming book, edited by Jacqueline Dutton and Peter Howland, and will be published by Routledge, hopefully in 2019. I’m pleased and excited to announce that I’ll have a chapter in the book. My chapter is currently entitled ‘Utopia regained: nature and the taste of terroir.’ The proposed abstract for my chapter follows. As in all things academic, who knows what the final chapter will look like?...
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We’ve just put up a guest post over on Insects & Wine, with the wonderful title of ‘Sophisticated and whimsical, elegant and messy,’ (for which I claim no credit). It’s a great summary of the Insects & Wine pairing evening we hosted at the end of November at Trinity College, Cambridge, written by Sioned Cox, one of the attendees, who was also one of the people who helped out with the preparation for the...
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Pét Nat. It is short for pétillant naturel (naturally sparkling), a particular type of sparkling wine. I’ve only come across it in the last year or so, although I’ve found references on the web going back a few years earlier. It doesn’t seem to generate much coverage in the press, except for noting it’s a new trend, and apparently big with hipsters. But what is it? Pét Nat is wine that finishes fermenting in the bottle. It undergoes...
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Sometimes it is. Or at least –ish. Often it isn’t, being more of a golden yellow, or amber, or some other colour, as the photo suggests. But the colour isn’t all that interesting, except for what it is indicative of.So what is ‘orange wine’? In addition to not always being orange, it also isn’t made from oranges, as I’ve been asked more than once. Orange wine is, essentially, a white wine made in the manner of a red one. By this...
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