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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Sur Lie and Bottle Aged Muscadet in May

Years ago on a bright seventy degree afternoon, moments after tying off our boat in the Camargue’s picturesque Marseillan port, I fell in love with Muscadet and its Melon de Bourgogne grape lounging in a simple oyster restaurant’s tiny outdoor courtyard.  It was a magical few hours.  I was taken by the wine’s satiating freshness, crisp acidity, [...]

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 [...]

Oxidative Wine Styles: Zind Humbrecht and Rene & Agnes Mosse

I am trying to develop palate education around oxidative wine styles. There is plenty of available information about it, but distinguishing between one wine subjected to an oxidative wine making process and another wine that primarily oxidizes through bottle age, without any specific knowledge about the wine maker’s approach, is not always straight forward for [...]

Saumur, Champagne, and a Little Giant

I have been eating and shopping for wine in New York City this past week and will share a connected vignette of a Saumur-Champigny shopping find, a transported Champagne note, and a wine friendly restaurant.  This week’s quick holiday in New York, where my wine and personal roots run deepest, produced unfavorably opposite impressions on my wallet [...]

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 [...]

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