Tonight is a Good Night to Drink Wine

The latest edition of the wonderful Cellier Magazine (published in both French and English by the SAQ – Société des Alcools du Québec) has a fascinating article about good days and bad days to drink wine. No, I mean good and bad days for the wine.

Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of Biodynamic wines, without necessarily won over by the whole of Biodynamic philosophy.

I’ve heard before that Biodynamics proposes wines will taste better on certain days. According to the Biodynamic calendar, wines are open and show best on “fruit days” and “flower days”. In contrast, wines are closed and flat on “root days”. Older wines show best on “leaf days”.

Go ahead and scoff but, as the Cellier article points out, two huge English wine retailers – Marks & Spencer and Tesco – have wine tastings only on “fruit days”.

The downside? The Biodynamic calendar determines these days by the moon’s phases and astrological influences, so it’s certainly out there. And, unfortunately, the days run in bunches. So, this month, root days (bad) run from the first to the third – whew, that’s out of the way – and then the 10th, 11th, 20th, 21st, 29th and 30th. Maybe that’s Mother Nature’s way of telling us to dry out?

You can buy a Biodynamic wine-drinking calendar (When Wine Tastes Best – 2011) for about $8 from Amazon.ca and there are free Biodynamic calendars on-line (the article cites two sources).

Codswallop? Could be…but who knows? Maybe I’ll start checking the correlation between my less than stellar (yes, pun intended) wine experiences with Biodynamic root days.

And for a sceptic’s view on the moon's effect on wine appreciation, check out Alder Yarrow’s post.

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