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 [...]

Top Three Wines – Roagna, Huet, and A Donkey & Goat

The fact these three wines rose to the top of an epically long list of compelling wines place them in a class of their own.  One is from Sierra Foothills vineyards and a small young Berkeley, California winery while the other two are firmly ensconced in their old Barbaresco and Vouvray regions.  A bonus to last month’s wine [...]

Loire Chenin Blanc Tasting Makes Case To “Just Drink”

We kicked off our Boston blind tasting group’s 2011 season comparing a dozen chenin blancs mostly from the Loire Valley.  A fascination with blind tasting connects all the way back with my earliest attempts to learn about wine twenty five years ago. There is no easier way for for me to identify the unique characteristics [...]

Palate Press Uncorks Swartland Revolution

Earlier this summer (winter in South Africa’s Swartland wine growing subregion) I had the chance to mix it up with the drivers of the Swartland Revolution; the winemakers.  Ever since I began to comprehend the unusually high authenticity and quality levels of the upstart region’s wines, I started sharing information about individual pieces of the [...]

Top Three Wines of July: Swartland, Minervois, Santa Barbara

This month’s top wine wrap up spans three continents including Africa, Europe, and North America.  These are all remarkably compelling wines pushing farming and élevage to the edge of their regions’ traditional boundaries.  While they are all urgently recommended, securing a bottle or two of Testalonga El Bandito or A Tribute to Grace will require intense investigation and [...]

Swartland Perspective By David Sadie

While he shares what is arguably the most popular surname inside the Swartland, South Africa winemaking cadre, David Sadie is busying himself in Tulbagh without any family relation to the other Swartland Sadie, building a reputation all his own.  I met up with David in a quest to understand why Swartland is surfacing as the dominant [...]

Peeking In On Winemakers in Swartland, South Africa

South Africa’s emergent Swartland wine scene nested somewhere near the center of my cultural and intellectual wine curiosity ever since tasting a bottle of Sadie Family Vineyards’ Palladius more than a year ago. Understanding why Swartland consolidates a disproportionate share of the most interesting and compelling wines South Africa has to offer became a personal mission [...]

Top Three Wines of May: Loire Valley and Niagara, Ontario

May’s “Top Three Wines” headline does not contain a typo.  The reference to Ontario, Canada is purposeful. As a matter of fact, southern Ontario’s wine region (41°-44°) finds itself in a close latitudinal relationship with the Loire Valley (46°-47°), home turf for May’s other top wines.  A couple of this month’s finishers are certain discoveries, [...]

Controversy Corked: 2005 Joly Coulee de Serrant Savennieres

It’s a controversy I won’t take sides with and instead hope to convince you of its senselessness. Never mind the plethora of world class, fairly priced, old world wines anchoring my enthusiasm for the Loire Valley. Instead, let’s focus on magicians like Foucalt, Huet, and Joly that are flooding my deepening vortex of Loire fanaticism [...]

Top Three Wines of April: Alsace, Rhone, and Loire

With a clean sweep of “Top Wines of April”, I am reminded that if I could only drink wines from one country for the rest of my life, it would be France. These April winners prove that despite a weakened dollar and skyrocketing prices for in-demand Bordeaux, Burgundy, and top Rhones, it’s still entirely possible [...]

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