A friend of mine that sells wine in Massachusetts has told me more than once he admires my openness and flexibility for enjoying varied styles of wine. Fresh, aged, brooding, bright, acidic, chewy, earthy, fruity, dense, leesy, steel, wood, white, red, rosé, brett, sparkling…no matter. He’s right; with the caveats of passable vintage conditions, good […]
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 […]
Stalked and Mauled in Sonoma Tasting Rooms
Since California’s winery tasting rooms are regular touch points for consumers and producers, these spaces also serve as arenas for the collision of buyer and seller agendas. I am not witness to tasting room protocols much since my meetings with farmers and winemakers usually happen in vineyards, cellars, homes, and restaurants. I got a fresh […]
Permission to Drink Beautiful Aged Wines
A multitude of milestone celebrations produced a legion of guiltless permissions to pop corks on aged wines last month. Graduations, birthdays, and the annual Troquet summer cellar clearance converged. Birth year wines of graduating children, old bottles carried to my home by giddy parents on the precipices of new empty-nest lifestyles, Troquet wines on sale, and […]
Blind Tasting: Varied Styles of 2010 Northern Rhone Reds
One might assume having tasted ten Northern Rhone red wines from the same 2010 vintage and two new world 2010 Syrahs side-by-side, blind, that the Rhone wines showed as siblings while the two new world Syrahs tagged along as genetically distinct and adopted brothers. As our Boston tasting group discovered blind tasting the 2010 Northern Rhone […]
2011 Beaujolais: Your Third Wake-Up Call
Go ahead and excuse yourself if just the mere thought of Beaujolais’ currently released 2011 vintage does not generate anticipation nor enthusiasm. Burgundy’s neighboring Beaujolais region developed its regional brand through decades of proliferating simple, thin, early released, confection tinged quaffing juice as Nouveau Beaujolais. While Nouveau raged with palates willing to overlook queer and immature […]
Three Top California Cabernets and Taste Buds
Thirty five of us climbed a stairway to our balcony seating perched above Cole’s Chop House’s main dining room in downtown Napa. The wine service table was crowded with a military style line up of thirty bottles of three different California Cabernets; an admittedly and deliberately ignored wine category since a self-imposed hard stop in […]
Blind Wine Tasting and Coke
During the final week of every “old” year I head to the same, sun scorched lazy Puerto Rico beach to give my peripatetic brain enough space to subconsciously prioritize and ponder only the most important issues. Blind wine tasting made the cut this year, triggered by some catch up reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink. If […]
90 Plus Cellars Tasting Produces Nameless Pleasure
In every blind tasting there is secret hope for fresh discovery and the eradication of closely held biases like perpetually ignored regions, varieties, producers, or vintages. While the blind tasting experience is completely unrelated to luxurious enjoyment of wine with a meal, they serve as uniquely productive platforms for continuing wine education. Recently, I shared […]
Pair Wine With Children Not Food
It is easy to turn your back on wine media around Thanksgiving. Hundreds of wine and food writers boldly recommend thousands of wines to pair with millions of holiday ingredient and flavor tapestries. It all looks as delusional as amusement park revelers wagering on spinning arcade lottery wheels; the odds say your instincts for picking […]
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