Eugene Weekly

Memorial Day has passed, so it’s OK to drink white. But, “The first duty of a wine is to be red.” That quip has been attributed to various wags, most enduringly to Alec Waugh, English novelist, who added, “the second is to be a Burgundy,” by which he meant pinot noir (not an unreasonable amendment, according to pinotphiles). Wine scholars have argued that Waugh was merely repeating an eno-adage that originated in the Middle Ages, or maybe with the antique Greeks. Whatever the actual source, a lot of bad attitudes about white wine have ensued. Continue reading →

Red or white? How about both? Memorial Day Weekend is a big deal for Oregon’s viticulture industry and wine aficionados alike, and boy do Lane County and Corvallis have a lot to offer. Let’s get down to it. Continue reading →

As usual, we begin this month’s wine column with a digression, about thinking and the emergence of taste, eventually returning to wine: In classes I taught at LCC, we had a rule: no use of cell phones during class (exceptions for possible emergencies). One morning, I was filling the whiteboard with notes and noticed a student in the back row looking down at his cupped hands. My students might think I’m a bit dim about their current stratagems but I knew what was going on. “Kyle,” I said, “are you on your cell?” Continue reading →

Every year, Oregon’s April just hammers me. I’ll toddle briskly through winter’s months, savoring the rains, blissfully indulging an interior life, inside our house and inside my own skull. I revel in the rains, regard them as profound blessings, in their various forms, from the feathermist, so light it won’t dimple the meniscus on a pond but will leave a walker soaked, to the guttergusher that floods fields and leaps river banks. I fret when, as recently, we enter a dry spell. Continue reading →

I guess I let myself feel complacent, thinking that after the last election, when Obama and the Dems turned back the wingnuts, and D’Faz thrashed Tea-Partier Art Robinson, I could maybe relax a little, stop lathering about politics and concentrate on the pleasures of life: I’d think and write about my beamish grandkids, our bursting garden and, of course, bounties in wine. Continue reading →