"I don't get it," said a friend, holding two green-colored bottles of wine in either hand. We are in a wine store on a sunny day in New York City, and the store is buzzing with customers, but not a...

I got home last night and decided that a bit of cooked up chorizo and some mushrooms in cream and garlic was the menu for dinner. The mushrooms need a splash of sherry or wine, so what better excuse to open a bottle. Plus I have some Tio Pepe copitas I bought back from Spain years ago, so Tio Pepe was the drink of choice...

Before there was Rolland and Accad, long before Helen Turley and Clark Smith, ages before Cotarella and Tachis, there was an influence in winemaking that probably has had as much authority, over time, as all the above combined. (And you can throw in all the high-ranking wine critics too). Were his techniques natural, or did he meddle? Recently I read this in one of the old books on wine that I inherited from a friend and mentor who recently passed away. The passage went like this: Q. In winemaking, what do you get if you dont intervene? A. Vinegar. The following are some excepts regarding winemaking, translated from his mater lingua . Seems that was the way in those days in sunny old Frascati, i.e. Tusculum. Have some fun; nothing new under the sun?  read more »

Cocktail Week continues with another great use for gin. The Negroni is a classic Italian cocktail from the early decades of the last century, named after Count Camillo Negroni who requested that gin be added to the Americano. It's a fairly simple recipe: equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet red vermouth, stirred and served with a twist of orange peel. This cocktail is traditionally poured over ice in a tumbler, though often in martini glasses in the US.  read more »

It seems to be difficult to find good red wine in Bavaria - I drank a lot of very good "dunkel weiss bier" (dark wheat beer) but had bad luck with the "rot wein" (red wine) - it was pretty rotten!! The best I could find in the area we were in (Garmisch) was the Dominio del Ugarte, Rioja, 2001 - this was a run of the mill "good" rioja that stood head and shoulders above anything else we tried, especially the "local" German/Austrian reds. It was so much better than the other options that our group cleaned the restaurant out of it's stock. Some restaurants had only ONE choice of red wine, and this was often undrinkable. Really undrinkable...  read more »

For you spinach lovers, and even the not-so spinach lovers, here's a recipe that will get everyone eating their spinach. Chef Caren , of Green Gables Inn in Walla Walla, sent me this recipe for Spinach ala Caren. I love this recipe she created, as she uses Walla Walla ingredients as well as featuring Riesling from Trust Cellars .  read more »

Hello there,

I'm new to this community, but have been lurking for awhile and enjoying all of the wine related posts. If it's okay, I'd like to share a wine review from my site LifeEpicurean.com. I don't mean this as any sort of solicitation, so it's hidden behind a cut. Thanks for reading!

The Louis Latour site tells us that the '02 vintage was a great season, giving you the cooler summer and a lot of sunshine in the later part of the season, giving the fruit a lot of concentration in the sweetness it would later yield. As Montrachet goes, an abundance of sweetness is never what one looks for, but it is never unwelcome, if it could be balanced with a certain amount of spice and clove to compliment, even challenge the dominance of the sugars. With that in mind, we took a look, and a drink, of the 2002 Puligny Montrachet half bottle by Louis Latour, to see if it really did fare as well as the fruit would suggest. We were not disappointed.  read more »

15 Gold Medals were awarded at the 2007 Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show.

Before I get to some of the outstanding wineries we visited let me thank David and Russ for leaving comments on my first Paso Robles post. Be sure to read them. The picture on the left is the vineyard directly in front of the L'Aventure Winery where Bordeaux expatriate Stephan Asseo does his magic. The impressive, immaculately kept vineyards are a promise of what you can expect when you taste his wines.  read more »

This work-in-progress represents champagnes (and, to be accurate, sparkling wines from other regions) that I have tried and rated throughout 2008. Individual champagnes are listed below with ratings and price codes (see key at right). Each one is linked to more detailed review. The posting will be updated as the year progresses.
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