soul of wine

This week in the Portland Press Herald I return to some reader comments in order to look at some concrete ways to improve our local wine culture. How to find good mid-priced wines on a restaurant’s wine list…how to ask questions of servers and get some good info, which of course assumes the server knows something. Which is often not the case, so this is a ringing call for restaurants to value this part of service enough to train their staff in understanding more about wine’s relationship to food. The point is to “treat wine less as a passively traded commodity and more as a pathway to rich experience.” Enjoy, and feel free to respond.