Top Three Wines of January: Spain and Bordeaux

Anointing three top January wines cast a cloudy challenge on WineZag’s monthly ritual.  The first thirty-one days of this new year provided ample opportunity to taste a surfeit of over-the-top wines that unavoidably skew the aggregate three bottle price skyward, approaching $450. Plaguing fact of wine enthusiasm: Great wine can be expensive and detours are occasionally [...]

Revisiting Cambridge’s T.W. Food

Walden Street floats in unremarkable limbo somewhere between Harvard’s and Fresh Pond’s respective square and roundabout.  I managed to discover the street in the autumn of 2007 checking out Tim Wiechmann’s newly opened T.W. Food, and immediately returned for a second confirming fix of Wiechmann’s brilliant and individually styled french country cuisine.  Because it was [...]

Drink Ribera With a Vega Sicilia Kicker

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

New Wine Writers Missing in Action?

In May of 2009, WineZag was just one of many new wine blogs launching into the vast wine blogosphere.  It was the year of Hardy Wallace and the Murphy-Goode “Goode Job” contest, where wine blogger credibility inched higher and traditional wine critics and journalists took note paying sometimes reluctant and other times embracing homage to [...]

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