Wine

I have decided to take a short detour from wine every once in a while, to the closely related subject of food. Last night we had a jolting but instructive experience at a San Francisco restaurant I have come to know well, that exemplifies  culinary trends in the city.Troya has been my favorite Turkish restaurant of the many that have sprouted all over the Bay Area. In business for a decade, initially as a neighborhood place in a busy corner of Clement Street in the Richmond district, Troya has always featured Turkish cuisine with a decidedly San Francisco slant.They have[...]

There are times when the most memorable wine experiences occur in surprisingly unassuming circumstances. I was reminded of such a highlight from a recent 2012 Italian vacation that involved a bottle of Amarone.It was towards the end of a Po Valley biking trip in Northern Italy, where we found ourselves smack in the center of the Veneto appellation. Here Valpolicella was the main red wine and Amarone reigned supreme as rare and expensive, an elite product of the region. Intensely concentrated, raisiny, with high alcohol content, Amarone had never been on my list of favorites. Nevertheless, with my curiosity peaked[...]

Wine Spectator, an influential U.S. monthly, issues a yearly list of wine friendly restaurants. Entitled The Best Wine Lists of 2014, this year's edition just appeared. It is a massive compilation, currently  over three thousand, of mostly U.S. restaurants, often including some highly respected ones in major cities, wine destinations, and lesser known establishments with local reputations. Foreign countries are also included. The listed restaurants have only one common feature: exceptional wine lists. As I browsed through it I was taken aback by a listing of 21 Turkish restaurants, all in Istanbul except for two. It was larger than France[...]

"This is a syrah oriented wine group," said Todd, a relative newcomer to our Friday night tastings. It was a surprising revelation.A large tasting had just ended, seventeen bottles sampled by sixteen of us. Since our tastings are free-style, no pre-announced themes, no formal invitations or RSVP's, there is a certain unpredictability to Friday nights. Yet, as it turns out, there are also some predictable trends.On this occasion we had six syrah based wines, the most common varietal that appeared,  Cabarnet Sauvignon coming second (two Napa, two Bordeaux). There were no pinot noirs.I now realized that indeed, in recent years[...]

"Bad news," I said to a friend and fellow Bordeaux-lover, "Larcis Ducasse has been elevated to  Premier Grand Cru Classe status." It had caught my eye in Wine Spectator where it was mentioned on passing. My friend sighed and nodded in agreement. Here goes another one, we both thought, a gem we had grown to love, that we purchased at reasonable prices, was surely poised for the stratosphere, now that it joined the rarefied circle in which the best of St. Emillion resides.This wine first caught my fancy with its 1999 vintage which was ready to drink some seven, eight[...]

A recent Wall Street Journal article (5/31/2014) discussed the pros and cons of wine investing in a rather dry, technical exposition. Investing in wine? asked the headline. Sip, don't gulp.It went on to explain what a fickle investment wine is. While wine prices have beat the inflation rate by an average 5.3% per year (in records that go all the way back to 1899), investment returns on wine have been "lumpy and inconsistent", falling very low in the aftermath of the Great Depression, rising very high during the Nazi occupation of France. and in recent decades, with the entry of[...]