Elden Wine

Based in Burgundy and specializing in small-production wines little known outside of France.

Our services include:

• Elden Selections, a twice-yearly newsletter keeping you up-to-date with the complex world of Burgundy.
• Personal Importation We help you become the importer.
• The Burgundy Wine Institute, in collaboration with the BIVB Ecole des Vins, is a glass-in-hand exploration of the Burgundy vineyards.
• Past Issues of ‘Elden Selections’ back to 1996. With a Search function.
• Winemaker Profiles ‘Get to Know the Growers’.
• Ask the Winemakers We can put you in touch with the Producers… just ask!
• Tasting Notes from our regular cellar and in-house tastings.
• Members Forum Password access to special wines and older vintages, as well as our ‘Club House’ Forum.
• Elden France Introductory mixed sample cases for those of you living in Europe.
• At Home in Burgundy What’s great wine without great food? Recipes from Ellie’s book.

If you would like to receive a paper copy of ‘Elden Selections’, just send your mailing address to eldenwine@gmail.com

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Spring 2009

IT’S ALIVE !

Printable PDF Version

Some people look at you funny when you suggest that wine is alive. For many, ‘life’ means plants and animals (with humans getting bonus points).  Wine is a product of plants and animals…okay…but is it alive?  The last issue of ‘Elden Selections’ was entitled ‘It’s Only Natural’.  The premise there was that while grapes come from Nature, making wine is manipulation.  Hence if we want to call wine ‘natural’, the manipulations themselves must also somehow be so. Inexorable logic then led me to say things about mass-production wines that I really do not believe, and I’ve felt lousy about it ever since.  So I am here to set the record straight: wine is alive (…though most winemakers do their best to kill it).  At this point, those folks who look at you funny are saying ‘Prove it.’  And I wish I could.  But when the question is ‘what is life?’, and they’re expecting an answer, QED, I have to admit that I can’t. I like a good proof as much as the next guy, and I’m consumed enough by logic to want to try.  But most proofs are founded on principles that are not themselves necessarily logical.  When Euclid lays down definitions before beginning his geometry, it’s because there are certain things you just have to accept before the logic can kick in. ‘A point is that which has no part’, he insists.  What the heck does that mean?  Don’t you think ‘no part’ is a strange starting place for a fellow whose project is to measure space?  Something doesn’t make sense.  And I’m not convinced that it’s supposed to.  I contend that somewhere along the line, icy intellectualism anaesthetized a part of us that just knew stuff, stuff we can’t really ‘know’.  We can talk about this in a number of ways, but science and logic will get us no where.  So this attempt to convince you that wine is alive may well mean more funny looks, but we might as well get started.  Given: reality is; everything else is just perception.   Read the rest of this newsletter >>

Posted by Dennis December 2007