Like all great cities, eating and drinking in Chicago is a dual proposition. While the likes of Alinea, Moto, and Green Zebra ping away at culinary pleasure sensors, the city’s midwest soul food circuits beckon. I developed my own ritual patterns for Chicago’s simpler local eating more than twenty years ago, always making sure to […]
AN/2 & Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 at Barcelona
The world is better off for places like Barcelona. Wines such as Anima Negra AN/2 from Majorca’s red callet grape and Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 from Rioja’s white viura variety don’t make it onto just any wine list. But at Barcelona Restaurant and Wine Bar, ten minutes off of I-84 in (of all places?) West Hartford’s […]
Three-Step Classic Wine List Gameplan
Drawing up the perfect attack on a classic restaurant wine list creates the same adrenaline level NFL coaches experience prepping for Sunday games. At least it seems that way; it’s both exciting and nerve wracking knowing one or two calls can define a dinner’s outcome. Planning is required. Have we worked with the restaurant’s wine […]
Grower Champagne Makes Sense
The last few years taught me that Champagne is wine, not just bottled fireworks poised to explode on special occasions. Champagne’s food and aperitif friendliness are more interesting to me now than at any other time during my twenty seven year wine zag. I used to zag around Champagne while others zigged straight at it. I […]
Pleiades XX, Thackrey, & Local Three: Authentic Collision
Some wine is described to be authentic. I have been meaning to build a working definition of authenticity for my own clarification and finally managed to squash a prolonged streak of procrastination after discovering ($25 ****) Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades XX on Atlanta’s Local Three Kitchen & Bar wine list. This adjective that has blossomed into standard wine enthusiast fodder, bandied throughout critical wine […]
Wine Rock Star-Part 2
You don’t have to be a Rock Star to drink wine like one. Rock Star Winos beguile fame, demagnetize paparazzi, leave crowd-free wakes, and sign no autographs. Being a Rock Star Wino with the juice to indulge audiences in sensory, intellectual, and emotional celebration is unassuming and simple. So, if you read Wine Rock Star- […]
2011 Wine Highlights Part 2- Wine Community
When I launched WineZag in 2009, I did it under a founding motto of “wine is a lubricant for human connection that holds no bias.” The essence of my wine appreciation has always transcended the juice, gravitating to the center of human bonding and relationships that are accelerated by shared wine experiences; either during dinner […]
2011 Wine Highlights Part 1: Wine & Restaurants
While the best wine and food might still appear on my table over the next couple of weeks, 2011 is quickly shutting down like newly bottled Bordeaux and I catch myself reminiscing over the year that was in wine and food. These musings must not be mistaken for a quintessential nor ultimate reminiscence of global […]
Clos Rougeard 2007- A Wine List Automatic
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 […]
Erpacrife Nebbiolo-Best Sparkling Wine Ever?
Rarely do the polarizing forces du jour swirling around wine’s combustible circles, like new world vs. old world, traditional vs. modern, or natural vs. unnatural(?), create radically new standard bearers overnight. Each corner in the world of wine is too steeped in history, nature, method, and skill to be knocked out in a single round. So how […]
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