Instagram story viewer> @sommpuzzles> Posts

SommPuzzles

@sommpuzzles

3.8K

followers

2111

following

♦ ♥ Study games for wine pros.
~🧩🍾🏺🍷🍇~
♣ ♠ Check out our store⤵️

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

What will be the first wine noted in your 2026 Grid Book? Yes, the new Grid Books are in, ready for your 2026.

We may be posting a bit about them over the next several weeks, including some examinations of how the 2026es are an improvement over the 2025 vintage. As ever, our shop link is in the bio! by @sommpuzzles

3

6

9 months ago

Many Americans have memories of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents deflecting questions from younger kin about the /old country/, wherever that may have been.

"Where is our family from, nonna?"

"Our family is from America," would be the common reply.

Today is the birthday of Marie (née) Attianese, the grandmother of the founder of SP, a woman of Sicilian (and possibly Campanian and Apuglian) descent. Her grandfather, Nicolo, was FOB in 1897. He was later, in 1908, sponsored for naturalization by friend, Vito, whereafter they may very well have gone to Vito's 140 Mulberry Street apartment for a celebratory meal.

While Marie had become familiar with Italy as an infrequent tourist, pointing outside of the geographic United States in discussion of ancestry was often taboo. In all likelihood, her parents discouraged her from associating herself with any culture or nation other than the one into which her family had striven to assimilate.

Indeed, this "We are American" defense is particularly common among Italian and Sicilian families who had emigrated from Italy after years of post-Napoleonic brawling about this "Italy," about a somehow-unified nation. Most of these ancestors left the Peninsula after the Risorgimento, too-little remembered as the conquest of southern Italic states by a swashbuckling Niçois (Garibaldi).

Today is also the birthday of Victor Emmanuel III, a name that can be found on Nicolo’s naturalization record. He was the king allegiances to whom turn-of-century Italian immigrants, by a stroke of pen, forsook. Ironically, he was both a figure-head of unified Italy and an erstwhile "Principe di Napoli" or "Prince of Naples," a kingdom earlier annexed by those SPQR-minded irridentists.

These histories, their apparent contradictions, the related battles over arable southern land, vineland, ancient traditions, were reduced to ugly memories about poverty and taxation without representation. While it is a great privilege to inherit the fruits of such struggles, much was lost in a legacy of forced-forgetting.

Not to have lived Sicilia! This 11 November, on an island, we redouble our efforts to reengage, retaste, relive. by @sommpuzzles

3

2

a year ago

Join us for an overview of some of the world's most inimitable and dynamic wines and wine styles:

This Saturday in Domino Square, under the Williamsburg Bridge, we look forward to tasting a diverse array of wines from alpine and Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, we'll be learning how the producers and oenologists joining us at #KARAKTERRE 16 (@wearekarakterre) have been faring over the past year.

To those of you with tickets, come visit us at the @SommPuzzles booth in between sips (where you can pick up #WineRummy decks and #GridBooks at a festival-bundle discount).

For more information about the festivities, visit www.karakterre.com. taken in One Domino Square by @sommpuzzles

3

1

a year ago

If you are in NYC this weekend and aren't already obligated on Saturday, it is not yet too late to acquire tickets for KARAKTERRE 16 (@wearekarakterre), being held in Domino Square, BK, NYC.

Go to www.karakterre.com for your tickets. Once you've tried some wine, find the @SommPuzzles booth, where you can shop our two main products in person, #WineRummy playing cards and #GridBooks, /your daybook for tasting/.

(Thanks in advance to @markokovac, @wonderfool et al. for another promising symposium!) by @sommpuzzles

3

0

a year ago

Salt, iodine, earth, oak tannins, grape tannins, eugenol, mineral, TDN, fermentation aromas, VA, reductive compounds, sorbitol, fresh fat, aged fat, seared aged fat, peonies, oxidation, odorant habituation, sotolon, thiols, rotundone, black currants, terpenes, pyrazines, smoke, geraniol, soy umami...

Pairing frameworks—chemical, gastronomic, culinary, perfumistic, olfactory-neurobiological—are, ultimately, endless in number. An extensive tasting curriculum vitae will expedite any pairing deliberations.

Even still, it is nice to be swept-up in a crazy idea, to have the dish poke-out a strange flavor and announce an unexpected affinity or partnership or direction or aromatic motif—in such moments, orthodoxies can be rearranged and classics can be recharted, refound.

Such conceits emerge all the more readily when the food is as kinetic, as ruthlessly gratifying, as it is at, say, @restaurant_leservan. taken in Le Servan by @sommpuzzles

3

1

a year ago

This year, on Saturday, @SommPuzzles will be at @wearekarakterre as a vendor. Attendees will be able to purchase #GridBooks and #WineRummy playing cards, and will also have exclusive access to discounted "Student" and "Tasting Group" bundles.

Stop by, check out our wine games and study tools, and give us a clink (though we'll have to apply a soft touch...they'll be @zaltoglas Balance glasses, after all). taken in Domino Park by @sommpuzzles

3

1

a year ago

In Montalcino, @coldorcia is an example of the older acid-driven long-lived style of Brunello, met with, in many vintages, a volume and vigorous finesse that lets the wines thrive even in their youth and adolescence.

University-aided clone-selection, an investment in organic and regenerative agriculture, and sensitive vine-to-barrel winemaking, together set an example for how old estates can retool for new value-systems while managing schisms in oenological opinion.

The 2025 Brunello harvest in Montalcino is finished and it seems that, by most predictions, cool nights and occasional oscillations in Tuscan weather have left these grapes in promising condition.

If it weren't for the early rains, 2025 might have been a warm vintage, especially considering reports of accelerated phenology. Let's follow how these green-harvested yields pan-out, as we play #WineRummy and record the earlier vintages in our #GridBooks. by @sommpuzzles

3

2

a year ago

One could argue that, as wine sales volumes continue to slump and sink according to nearly all sources, the wine-consumer's palate is broadening: in effect, people who are buying wine are buying less of the same old plonk.

Those of us who won't stop consummating meals with wine, generally, are part of a movement of enrichment. While many organizations must continue to shoulder rough macro trends, oenophiles are getting in-touch with soils, educating themselves on ecological issues, learning about lesser-imported regions and contributing to wine tourism revenues—all of this can begin at a bottle shop or restaurant.

Premiumization—where a consumer may be buying less wine in volume but is, ultimately, buying higher-priced wine—is a statistical factor often superscribed by incessant complaints about volume numbers. Plenty of sources suggest this dynamic has resulted, over the past several years, in higher net revenues. Recall, also, that "premium" wines may be statistically associated with bottles of wine exceeding only $10 or $20.

Even as premiumization trade-ups will likely be seen to have softened over 2025, ferment in the wine media landscape, the fervency of viticulturalists, the evangelisms and proliferations of wine clubs, the excess of those announcing themselves as "gastronauts" or "wine-lovers," the importing of wines from Armenia, Georgia, under-recognized portions of Iberia, Croatia, Slovakia, Sicilia... One could indeed argue that roots are growing deeper, perspectives more varied and palates more discerning. by @sommpuzzles

3

4

a year ago

Prior to @verrevole opening its doors in c. 2000, caves-à-manger in Paris (let alone anywhere else) were a quite-rare thing, indeed. Today, the category—for which there is no US-equivalent, as wine bars do not sell bottles—has proliferated across la Ville.

Through most of the 20th century, the Parisian table—usually set in some sort of casual bistro—would have been crimsoned with carafes of négociant-sourced vins des pays.

In the '80s and '90s, as nouvelle cuisine encouraged a revaluation of Parisian culinary norms, wine culture likewise developed new sensibilities. Diners themselves began learning producer names at establishments like @williswinebarparis and @juvenileswinebar (these two, still flourishing today, are some of the SP Team's favorite places in Paris).

Around 2000, those who had spent their youths moshing at punk shows, or reading Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Philip K. Dick, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze—they were perhaps indisposed to deferring to establishment tastes. All inheritances were under scrutiny and this included one's wines.

Younger vignerons were auditing the biological stewardship of their soils. The picture-resolution of viticultural inputs and the threats of "silver bullet" agricultural practices became more obvious to end-consumers. Story, terroir—what corporate media often glibly and dismissively refer to as "narrative"—helped refresh the conviviality of the Parisian bistro.

Here, 25 years after @verrevole tore the paper off the windows, Paris (and NYC and other metropoli) are enjoying a period of menu-integration, where more and more prestige producers are remediating the soil and seeking lower-intervention means of managing grape vines and winemaking.

The bistronomie of caves-à-manger like @verrevole, @septimeparis, @la.buvette.paris and others continue to help people gather, wonder and taste, whatever the customs of earlier decades. What will emerge from the current interval of wine dinners and popups is difficult to say, with the cave-à-manger ethos having already become less of a scene and more of a standard. taken in Le Verre Volé by @sommpuzzles

3

1

a year ago

Catalunya has 12 DOs, spanning a nocturnally-cool Mediterranean coast to arid inland mountains. It is a stalwart region of tradition, but also a laboratory for outlier winemaking.

Xarel·lo, along with finer-bodied Parellada and versatile Macabeo (elsewhere, "Viura," "Maccabéo," "Maccabeu"), combine to make one of the world's great sparkling wines, Cava.

Can you and your wine colleagues name some of the other and perhaps-rarer varieties of this Iberian Riviera region? Likewise, if you draw or are delt the "Food Pairing" card, perhaps you can cite some of your more prominent gastronomic memories as they relate to the wines from this region. by @sommpuzzles

3

1

a year ago

When considering wine-pairing options, what could take precedence over matching for weight, intensity and structural prominences? While this rule may ballast a pairing, it can often lead to clichés.

Occasionally unexpected aromatic accents can play in the differential space, structural gaps between what is eaten and what is sipped. Indeed these revisions of and updates to tradition can provoke extra attentiveness and make for an enthralling meal. taken in Aska by @sommpuzzles

3

2

a year ago

Mavrud, possibly related to Mourvedre, is native to the Balkans, where it thrives in its native Thracian growing zones.

It is a powerful grape with substantial aging potential. Consider introducing some details about this grape to your colleagues during the next game of #WineRummy poker or war. by @sommpuzzles

3

3

a year ago