Primae Classis

Literally, first class. A Latin designation used by the Hungarians since around 1700 to indicate a Tokay vineyard of first-class stature. The Tokay Aszú wines produced from grapes grown in such a vineyard would by extension be considered top flight.

What is tasseography?

A. The practice of determining the clarity of a wine by looking at it in a tastevin (shallow silver tasting cup).

B. The practice of reading tea leaves to divine a drinker’s future.

C. The historic Burgundian practice of smelling and tasting vineyard soils to determine their merit.

D. The 16th century practice of tracing important trade routes for ships that carried wine and goods (like coffee beans and cacao) that could be made into expensive beverages.

According to Atlas Obscura, the early 20th century was a time of great fascination with the occult. In particular, tasseography (the practice of reading tea leaves) became so popular that fortune-telling tea cups were manufactured. From the outside, these often looked like elegant, normal, porcelain tea cups. But on the inside, they contained arcane symbols. Depending on where your tea leaves landed and the symbols they touched, anyone so inclined could tell your fortune. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with wine. Nonetheless, we at WineSpeed are convinced that the appreciation of tea and the appreciation of wine are correlated, and that the two manifest enormous similarities in their dependencies on terroir.

“Age gives a wine a sense of beauty and satisfaction that it could never have had before when it was young. In our minds, we intuit that beauty and satisfaction as a feeling of completeness. Because so much of life is incomplete, an old wine is remarkable and moving.”

—Warren Winiarski
Founder of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars

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