Wine

Among my wine tasting friends, my dislike of Italian wines has become legendary and solidified into a long-standing joke. If I say "it tastes Italian", it is synonymous with, "the wine is no good". Truth be told, I have opened up my horizons and discovered a number of different Italian wines I like, especially after several trips to Italy where I had no choice but drink their wines. As it so happens, traditional Italian wines do not show well in the company of French, and especially American ones in wine tastings. This is because they are made to be consumed[...]

In the Francophile culture of my wine tasting group a cardinal rule of wine collecting is that domestic wines, especially Napa, do not lend themselves to long term cellaring, and those who undertake such ventures are foolhardy. My wine mentors did have a few exceptions to this rule, e.g. pre-corporate Chalone Pinot Noir, Stony Hill Chardonnay, but these were almost all comprised of domestic products made in a French style. Napa Cabarnet in particular was considered particularly risky, since it is so expensive, and prone to spoilage with aging.In my early days of wine collecting back in the late 1990's,[...]

Do you have any friends or relatives who know some famous celebrity? If so, do they talk incessantly about it, and make you feel like you too are connected to this celebrity by association? Well, I do. My mother in law lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the ritziest cowboy spot in the U.S., which boasts of not one but two famous celebrities as its residents: Harrison Ford, the actor, and Dick Cheney ex Vice-President of the U.S. Ford keeps a low profile in Jackson. All we hear are occasional sightings at Albertson's, their local upscale supermarket. But when he was[...]

All wines grown around the world obey certain geographic rules. One of the most basic of these has to do with certain latitudes around the globe within which wines can be classified into specific climate zones. Vineyards can only be successfully planted around latitudes of 20 degreess (Yucatan, Cuba, Northern Egypt, Taiwan) to 50 degrees (Vancouver, Newfoundland, English Channel, Northernmost Japan). Farther north is is too cold, and near the equator it is too hot for commercially succesful winemaking. Thus one can plot two strips around the world between these latitudes, one in the Northern Hemisphere, another in the Southern,[...]

For those of you who have never played the game of guessing what the wine in a concealed bottle is, I wanted to share some of our tips on how to impress others with seemingly magical identification powers only master sommeliers posses. The trick is to not use just the nose and palate, but rather anything and everything that all five senses might reveal about the mystery wine. In this regard your eyes and fingers are almost as important as your nose and tongue.The most basic differentiation is between what we call sloped bottles versus shouldered bottles, as noted in[...]

Rose wines are the Rodney Dangerfield of the wine world. Does anyone give them respect? When I first joined my wine tasting group in the mid 90's, there were some that seemed to, because we actually had aged rose's show up in our Friday night tastings. But then they were brought by he same people who were aging Beaujolais Noveau who, fortunately have since ceased and desisted. We hardly ever get a rose in our main wine group. For those familiar with it, rose wine is a great summer sipping drink. Uncork and guzzle. Light in alcohol, unchallenging in flavor[...]