A Pigeon and a Pinot Noir
Twenty-first-century wines of Merry Edwards meet the nineteenth-century illustrations of Pauline Knip
Pigeons and wine? What’s going on here?
Writing about wine means confronting the difficulties of animating the experience for readers, making it alive and vivid in their minds. We must write text, but we can also use visuals to advance understanding. Bottle shots are de facto but boring, and anyway say little about the qualities of the stuff inside.
Lately I’ve been dabbling with other modes to illustrate my notes; you can find examples here, here, and here. For those articles I relied on my own fine art paintings, selecting an existing image that mirrors the wine’s sensibilities, or creating bespoke images after tasting.
But I wanted to venture further afield, to experiment with fresh imagery that somehow felt resonant with the wines. After a recent tasting of Merry Edwards Pinots, I stumbled on a folio of images made by a nineteenth-century artist, Pauline Knip. I had my material.
