Clive Coates in The New Yorker

[bloviatrix]

This week's Talk of the Town includes a small profile on Clive Coates.

A Bottle of Wine

Coates is the publisher and scribe of The Vine, a slim, elegant monthly volume of tasting notes and vineyard profiles. In a field characterized by effusiveness—“an explosive nose of dried herbs, ground pepper, new saddle leather, rose petals, black raspberries and cherries,” as Parker wrote of a Zinfandel not long ago—The Vine is notable for its taut descriptions, in which the adjectives rarely get more florid than “ripe” or “classy,” and the superlatives range from “good plus” to “very fine indeed.”