I love finding great bottles of wine for as little money as possible. Duh! Here is a very good article with great tips on how to do just that. It has some information specific to the Bay Area, but a lot of it applies everywhere. This is another instance where a little knowledge pays off at the [...]

Holidays are a time when we take stock of how we have been blessed in life. Today leads me to think about how I am blessed by having my own mother, the stepmother of my children, and her mother all in my life to celebrate. My mother raised me, taught me to be an individual, and [...]

Everyone knows how to taste, right? It is one of the five senses that we are born with, so it stands to reason that there is not much to be learned. While it is true that tasting is something that we do naturally, it is also true that it is something that we can learn [...]

Arneis is a grape that I was completely unfamiliar with until this single varietal from the Willamette Valley showed up on my doorstop courtesy of one of my favorite wine clubs. Arneis means “little rascal” in the Northern Italian dialect of Piedmontese, and gets its name due to having a reputation as being hard to grow. [...]

Don’t you hate when the wine you are drinking really opens up when you are drinking the last glass of the bottle, leaving you to ponder how much better each glass could have been? Share This

This is one of the easiest sides to make, but always seems to impress. Not only does it work especially well as an accompaniment for BBQ and grilled food, which comes in handy this time of year, but it also works well with a variety of wines and beers. Start with nice bunch of fresh green [...]

For my money, Côtes du Rhône wines are some of the best values going. The better ones can deliver almost everything their much more expensive cousins do. The problem is that there are quite a few that do not deliver much of anything. The trick is in finding the really good ones. While I [...]

The folks at TheDieline.com have a post about Oxford Landing’s South Australian Shiraz. They don’t review the wine, and having never tasted it myself, I don’t know if it is any good or not.  In fact, the post isn’t about the wine at all, but the way that the label is made. The label features a [...]

Cono Sur is a very cleverly named winery in Chile that combines a play on the word “connoisseur” with the Spanish for “Southern Cone” which references the shape of South America. I first tasted this wine at a presentation with Master Sommelier Bob Bath entitled “How to Blind-Taste Like a Master Sommelier.” Everyone at our table [...]

CNN Money has a very good article on the trading of Bordeaux futures. This is something that I had heard of, but had only a vague idea of how it worked. The article does a nice job of explaining how it works. During April tasting week the wine is still maturing in vats and oak barrels. [...]