another wine blog

That’s what my youngest son thinks, at least. Being 13, he may be a bit prone to hyperbole, but I am pretty sure it is at least in the top 100. I had a fairly cheap late harvest Riesling with this, and it was a fantastic summery meal. This is a variation on a salad [...]

For the record I do not care for pilsners. They remind me of the crap I used to steal from my dad’s refrigerator. They tend to be blank on the nose, weak at the front and have a nasty finish. Add in their low alcohol content which provides little to no mouthfeel and I don’t [...]

A couple of days ago I recommended Polka Dot Riesling as a good wine to eat while cooking barbecue, yesterday I used it to make a nice cold, refreshing sangria to drink WHILE I was barbecuing. This white sangria tastes like a crisp, tart lemonade, but much less sweet.
Start by chilling a bottle of a [...]

Sometimes life becomes too routine, it feels like you are stuck in a rut. Perhaps the rut seems to be approaching chasm status. The work week can’t get over fast enough and the weekend is over before you know it was even here. Sunday brings a sense of dread because you can hear Monday scratching [...]

Despite it being a day for solemn remembrance, especially in the times we find ourselves, Memorial Day weekend, for many, also signals the opening of the BBQ and grilling season for many folks. Being in Texas, that season never ends, but for a lot of people this is the weekend when they break out the [...]

Here just some random items and thoughts.

For all of the reputation that wine drinkers have as being snobs, attending wine events always seems to lead to meeting the friendliest people on the planet. Rooms full of strangers quickly become rooms full of friends once the wine starts to flow. There are people that I have [...]

Anyone in Houston on Friday night should go visit my friend Kwjuana Thomas of New Age Wine for a night of Spanish Wines at Bar Boheme. Tell her Joe sent you! Kwjuana really knows her stuff and always pours some nice wines. I don’t usually plug local events, but I am a fan and had [...]

The good folks over at Drinkplanner.com are at it again. This blog is a daily read for me. This time they have more great advice with Ask DrinkPlanner: Manly Shots
My favorite:
5. Absinthe - If you care at all for your well-being, you will never drink this. It’s not even meant to be drank as a [...]

Over the weekend my wife and I attended a wine stroll in Galveston on the Strand. It was a wonderful event. The Strand is a beautiful district that combines ultra-touristy shops, history, and increasingly, some of the best restaurants in the state of Texas. The last claim was born out by a chance meeting as [...]

A researcher in England has concluded that the music we listen to while drinking wine can influence our perception of the taste. Adrian North, head of Applied Psychology at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, claims that, based on the cognitive priming theory, the style of music one listens to while imbibing “primes” the brain to [...]

This week Robert Mondavi died. Mondavi was very influential in the creation of America’s wine industry as we know it today. His early success developing techniques for both wine making and marketing for American, and later global, tastes allowed him to later donate millions of dollars to institutions such as UC Davis that also assisted [...]

I was randomly surfing around the Web when I stumbled across a blog named “Drinkplanner.com” and a post entitled “The 10 Commandments For Drinking Like a Man” that amused the hell out of me.
Despite the title most of these rules are good advice for anyone. Here are some of my favorite excerpts, but you should [...]

Since the Big Three, Wine Enthusiast, Wine Spectator, and Eric Asimov, have all written about this, it MUST be HUGE news in the world of wine. Personally, while I have enjoyed it a time or two, I don’t get the opportunity to drink much Brunello di Montalcino so I am not as up in arms [...]

I love finding great bottles of wine for as little money as possible. Duh!
Here is a very good article with great tips on how to do just that. It has some information specific to the Bay Area, but a lot of it applies everywhere.
This is another instance where a little knowledge pays off at the [...]

Holidays are a time when we take stock of how we have been blessed in life. Today leads me to think about how I am blessed by having my own mother, the stepmother of my children, and her mother all in my life to celebrate.
My mother raised me, taught me to be an individual, and [...]

Everyone knows how to taste, right? It is one of the five senses that we are born with, so it stands to reason that there is not much to be learned. While it is true that tasting is something that we do naturally, it is also true that it is something that we can learn [...]

Arneis is a grape that I was completely unfamiliar with until this single varietal from the Willamette Valley showed up on my doorstop courtesy of one of my favorite wine clubs.
Arneis means “little rascal” in the Northern Italian dialect of Piedmontese, and gets its name due to having a reputation as being hard to grow. [...]

Don’t you hate when the wine you are drinking really opens up when you are drinking the last glass of the bottle, leaving you to ponder how much better each glass could have been?

This is one of the easiest sides to make, but always seems to impress. Not only does it work especially well as an accompaniment for BBQ and grilled food, which comes in handy this time of year, but it also works well with a variety of wines and beers.
Start with nice bunch of fresh green [...]

For my money, Côtes du Rhône wines are some of the best values going. The better ones can deliver almost everything their much more expensive cousins do. The problem is that there are quite a few that do not deliver much of anything. The trick is in finding the really good ones. While I [...]