another wine blog

With the Super Bowl right around the corner many of us are in the process of planning a party. While most fans don’t really have a dog in this race any more, we still all crowd around the television like this is a life or death event, and for some of the advertisers who often [...]

The author of this article makes some very good points about reading the label when being served in a restaurant. Often we assume that the various acts that make up wine service are just formalities, or are out-dated traditions. This is a good reminder that they are practical and serve a very real purpose.
If the [...]

Time and again we see headlines about how wine experts have been fooled by this or that. A few weeks ago it was that price influences how a wine tastes. More recently it has been that some experts couldn’t even tell the difference between red wine and white wine. Oh, these foolish wine drinkers! Has [...]

Italy is region that I do not know enough about with respect to either its wines or its geography. The one thing that I do know is that I like Italian wine quite a bit, and every glass I taste always causes me to make an empty promise to myself to learn more. This article [...]

This article shows how the right person can change the entire direction of a restaurant. I love the following concept.
If you’ve ordered a bottle of wine that you don’t like at Johnny Delmonico’s, Craig Madigan would like you to please send it back.

Regardless of whether it’s bad or good, Madigan, the restaurant’s relatively new sommelier, [...]

I can’t say that I have tried any of the wines these folks are recommending, but the price is right and they are from my adopted home town. I’d say they might be worth a try.
“Wines blow my mind when the purity of the grape is in the glass, and when the winemaker knows that [...]

It is not often I wish that I lived in west Texas, but this sounds like a great reason to visit.

“Picasso, Renoir, Bonnard, Maillol, Daumier, and many of the other artists featured in this exhibition saw wine and probably drank it daily,” Lindell said in the exhibition’s notes. “Thus, including wine in their art means [...]

Ever wonder how Wine Spectator goes about tasting and rating their wines? They have posted a very nice video on their site to let you in on the secret.

The conventional wisdom is that you should always cook with wine that you would drink. I think that is complete nonsense. The aforementioned conventional wisdom probably sprang from the days when folks would buy bottles labelled cooking wine. I don’t even know if they sell such a thing anymore. I typically have a few open [...]

Wine experts usually exhort their readers to branch out and try new styles. Usually this is an effort to move people out of their cabernet and chardonnay ruts. Often times the recommendation for chardonnay drinkers is to try viognier. While I definitely agree with this advice, the information in this article on the varietal makes [...]

I have been trying to avoid this topic, hoping it would go away, but it just won’t.
Recently there have been a spate of articles claiming that the price of a wine has an effect on the drinker’s perception of how good it is. Reading the research study findings does not exactly bear out this conclusion, [...]

Last night I got lucky by pairing a delicious and unusual port that I had never before tasted with a chocolate mousse to great effect. The recipe for the mousse will follow, but first some information about the port. The wine was a Petit Syrah port from Imagery Winery in Sonoma.

It seems that wine sales are up again this year, and especially so among younger adults. This is especially striking given these numbers from this article:
The number of U.S adults who call themselves wine drinkers has risen 53 percent since 2000, from 49 million to 75 million. Over the same period, the number of people [...]

If you are a fan of Sonoma wines, like I am, this is a very nice write-up of a recent tasting held in Napa. Some of these sound spectacular, especially at the listed prices.

Let me preface these comments by saying that I love wine clubs. I am such a fan of my favorite one that I link to their site in my sidebar, and seem to mention them in about every 3rd post. I have discovered many excellent wines through wine clubs. However, there is an uncontrollable downside [...]

Petit Courbu is not a grape that you hear about every day. In fact, it isn’t a grape that very many folks ever hear about. A search of Wikipedia only brings us a listing for Courbu, of which it is a variety, but which doesn’t even merit an entry.
The fine folks at Ferry Plaza Wine [...]

The author of this article posits that the movie “Sideways” has had a long lasting effect on the way we view and buy wine. Pretty hard to argue with him on that point, or on any other in this well written piece. In fact, this was a refreshing read for me. Since starting this site [...]

I’m not really quite sure what to make of the information in this article. I’m all for being able to get good table wine at a low price, and if California makers want to bring in some decent Chilean juice to make that happen, there isn’t much that comes to mind to complain about. On [...]

This is an excellent article on Pinot Noir, and some winemakers who are striving to put it on all of our tables. Having tried some of these, I like what they are doing. Sure, they aren’t spectacular examples of the variety, but they are certainly very drinkable. I wish them all the luck in the [...]

How much dirt is in your wine?
They observed during the course of the growing season that, in almost all vineyards, there will inevitably be various human impacts to the soil — from tractors and other mechanical equipment making trips hither and yon, to vineyard workers who kick up dust as they walk through the vine [...]