Pouring over wine lists before meals is the ultimate public foreplay. In advance of fine dining reverie, the hunt for favorites, values, rarities, ultimates, and classics is my secret little indulgence. It’s a moment of truth that determines the tone of an evening’s meal. I remember the same jittery excitement stepping into Coney Island’s Luna […]
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Wine Bottega and Clos Rougeard: Case for Social Media Wine Marketing
The ever present fragility of my inflated confidence born from half a life of wine enthusiasm can be awfully humbling. Every year I discover a winery, region, or pool of knowledge that showers self doubt on the veracity of my commitment for exploring and learning about wine; “How could I claim to know anything, really, […]
2005 Clos Rougeard Les Poyeux and Menton Boston
In both cases, drinking 2005 Clos Rougeard (click for review) and luxuriating over dinner at Barbara Lynch’s Menton (click for review) in Boston’s Fort Point extension last week were opportunities for critical return visits. I first tasted the entry level 2005 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny a couple of months back and made my one and only previous visit to […]
Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny 2005: Best Wine This Year
I am fortunate to taste more than one man’s fair share of special wine every month. Tonight, in the context of a business dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar with a young, smart, scrappy, web marketing guru from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we experienced the most compelling red wine I have tasted this year, and most probably one […]
Couly Dutheil Les Chanteaux Chinon Blanc
Have you ever had a wine that haunts you? More explicitly, did you ever taste a wine where its form and impression continually manifest themselves long after the wine is gone? Maybe it stayed in your presence days and weeks after the bottle was killed; so much so that you suspect its afterlife form will […]
Choosing a Restaurant Wine List Over Food
As the eight of us maneuvered on a street corner to hail two NYC yellow cabs, my son asked me why we were traveling from 66th and Central Park West to Williamsburg, Brooklyn for dinner. “Aren’t there any nice restaurants in Manhattan?” It was a fair question. I explained I had booked a table for […]
Crisis in Wine Enthusiasm Averted
It has been quite some time, four weeks to be exact, since I have written here about wine. That is the longest hiatus since WineZag launched in 2009. Extended and distant third world travel, ailing elderly family, and our children’s and their friends’ return home from university have shaped the silence. More to the point, the confluence […]
Not Your Everyday Wines
It was another week of wine discovery and while these were not everyday wines for most, they are more frequent indulgences for some lucky others. With wine discovery comes new and interesting friends, and this week did not disappoint. Here is a quick round up that spans Friuli, Austin, Etna, Prosecco Land, Saumur, and Sicily. […]
Noma: New Normal In Perfect Dining
It is important to walk to Noma over city bridges and along waterfront streets to embrace Copenhagen’s bone chilling winter. February Noma meals are miraculously conceived outdoors; natural bounties harvested, pickled, smoked, or dried in step with a harsh Scandinavian winter calendar. Only then are they skillfully nurtured into a series of intellectually compelling courses […]
Noma Copenhagen 2/20/13 Playlist
Noma is Copenhagen, Copenhagen is Noma. They are intertwined the way musicians reflect root and spontaneous influences. For us, we are in the middle of both; five days of frosty, windswept, Nordic Copenhagen and two meals at its geographic mirror called Noma. All of it feels severe and subtle, cozy and edgy, intellectual yet simple, […]