2011 Wine Highlights Part 1: Wine & Restaurants

Tweet 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 [...]

Top Three Wines: Monbousquet, Raquillet, & Mullineux

Tweet Top wines this month bring together strange bedfellows including a Southern Hemisphere syrah from the long ignored vineyards in South Africa’s Swartland Cape Winelands outpost, a brilliant Burgundy from the stepchild Côte Chalonnaise village of Mercurey, and Bordeaux from a refocused producer working right bank Saint-Émilion vineyards. Each one of these wines represents strong value [...]

Burgundy Value Not Oxymoron in Mercurey

Tweet The region’s wines are monuments to fine drinking at their pinnacle but inconsistent, expensive, and hardIy easy to understand with intricate layers of sub regions, villages, vineyard divisions, and winemakers.  So not buying or drinking Burgundy with any regularity, the fact that Mercurey was a pre-phylloxera, top Burgundy production village before sinking in popularity [...]

A Taste of Loire, Burgundy, and Bordeaux: Replaying Four Remarkable Wines

Tweet Louis needed to miss our 2000 Bordeaux tasting.  Instead, he was happily conflicted by a commitment to host dinner at his home for a group of thirty like-minded, active community members dedicated to the preservation and improvement of a local school system’s already profound results.   Louis was intending to pair each of the [...]

Questioning the Sensibility of Bordeaux’s New Found Irrelevance

Tweet Eric Asimov helped me feel old, out of the loop,  and crusty today simply because I prefer Bordeaux.  Please do not crucify me en masse, and allow me to cling to a hard earned 51-year-old point of view that many of the world’s finest wines are products of Bordeaux as you join me on a [...]

Venerable Value Trove or Flash in the Pan?

Tweet US consumers just might develop whiplash keeping up with declarations of new regional sources for quality wine values.  Rewind the last ten years and value arrows have stopped on Spain, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Languedoc, Beaujolais, Chile, Loire, and more.  And, there appears to be no let-up. Trying to make sense of the shifting landscape, each new pronouncement of dominance in the global value segment falls neatly into one [...]