January is a time for dormant vines, hushed wineries, and touring wine makers. It signals a season of invitations to trade and press dinners, events, and tastings that can stress even the loosest calendar. I managed to squeeze in a Vega Sicilia tasting hosted by Spain’s Ribera del Duero viticultural region, or DO. Spain’s de […]
Wine Style Experiment Offers Palate Redemption
Raging self doubt and curiosity fuels an unremitting panoply of cross examinations intended to dig up the root cause of my shifting preference in wine style. Have I fallen victim to trend and popular fashion? Is my palate simply evolving? Or, have I discovered regions and varietals I once dismissed without fair chance? Did I subconsciously succumb to a new breed […]
2008 Clos Erasmus Laurel Delivers Egoless Second Label Quality
Second labels, or second wines, hold a secure place in my world of wine. They can be excellent, delivering chateaux or house styles sans incremental touches of their primary labels’ magic or inflated price tags. Estate bottling, declassified barrels, blended younger vines, and vineyards in close proximity to primary estate boundaries are just some strategies […]
Top Three Wines of December
France scores a smooth hat trick in the WineZag “Top Three Wines” December round up. This holiday month provided ample opportunity to drink a lot of great, and not so great, wine with boastful price tags and venerable credentials. These WineZag “top three” wines are especially worthy, all offering pinnacle palate moments that stand out […]
Beaujolais Tasting Recipe: Sweet & Sour Onion Sage Bruschetta
Wine needs appropriate food to dance with with even in critically serious tasting situations. It’s one of a few life rules to steadily honor. As such, I reflexively succumb to a ceremonial tasting day duty, before each of our group’s monthly blind tasting soirees, of preparing a few things that are different and hopefully more […]
Bottles Restaurant: Wine Lover Oasis in Puerto Rico
Bottles 5 Tabonuco Street Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00968 (787) 775-1210 or (787) 775-0604 Respectable wine service on the Northern shores of Puerto Rico has been as rare as white Christmases on this Isla del Encanto. I have exhausted all possibilities over 25 years of habitual Isla Verde retreats. The hunt turns up poorly stored, warm, overpriced […]
Rostaing Class, Quality, and Value From Nimes
As a year of proximity to my wine cellar ended on Christmas morning sitting on the tarmac waiting to escape to Puerto Rico’s northern shoreline, I could not stop thinking about the wine that rocked my palate the night before with the very Italian meal produced by my very Sicilian wife. I recommend wines from […]
2009 Beaujolais Tasting Highlights and Controversy
Seventeen tasters eagerly participated in our highly anticipated 2009 blind Beaujolais tasting. While the air in my home was continually pierced by clinking glassware, the halls of Boston University’s Elizabeth Bishop Wine Resource Center were most definitely hushed while several of its students, graduates, and instructors were firmly planted around our tasting table dissecting glass after […]
Top Three Wines of November
The “Top Three Wines” of November includes one remarkable New World Mourvedre from California’s Central Coast sandwiched in between two Old World Bordeaux and Rioja showcase wines. I was unfamiliar with the claret from Saint-Estephe and the Rhone Ranger from Paso Robles until tasting them last month; both excellent new discoveries. Unfortunately, the oddball auction […]
1990 Cru Bourgeois Saint-Estephe For Breakfast
It’s a safe bet that we are not drinking 1990 Saint-Estephe, or for that matter any Bordeaux, at my breakfast table on Sundays at 10:00am. This could be a meaningful oversight, but we just don’t. That loose rule was recently broken with some good friends who produced a bottle of 1990 Chateau Le Terme (which […]
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