Something To Drink
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This Week’s Wine June 28, 2009
We’ve always been great fans of California’s Sonoma County, and not just because of its wines. We like the fact that it’s a little more relaxed than Napa, just across the mountains to the east. We are awed by Sonoma’s fertility and the great abundance of crops in addition to grapes. We enjoy fact that
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A Rose By Any Other Blend (Would Not Be A Rose)
Every now and then, bureaucrats wise up and realize they’ve made a mistake. On rare occasions, like now, they retract what they’ve done and allow things to proceed as they always have, properly and in an orderly manner. The European Agriculture Commission did that the other day, stepping back from a proposal that would have
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This Week’s Wine May 31, 2009
Jon Emmerich, leading us on a recent walk through some lush, bright green Napa Valley vineyards, stopped abruptly, pointed. A rabbit looked back at us, stared for a few seconds, turned and loped off. It was about four times the size of those who hang out in Clayton back yards, and it showed off large
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This Week’s Wine May 10, 2009
Proprietary labels aren’t new in the wine business. Remember Blue Nun? Or Hearty Burgundy? What was on those labels had no relationship to what was in the bottle. For centuries, most wines were named after the winemaker or the grape or its ancestral home. But sometime in the last decade, wknemakers and their marketing departments
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This Week’s Wine, May 3, 2009
Spring is a very good time to taste wine. Heck, any time is a very good time to taste wine, but since it’s spring, that’s the best time right now. Feelings may change as summer looms into view, but we can take the chance. And some recent comments, with no particular order to the listings,
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This Week’s Wine, April 26, 2009
People who write about wine are among the most fortunate of writers, and I’m quite grateful that the late Joseph Pulitzer sent word one day more than 35 years ago. "Since you’re spending my money on food and wine, and you write about the food, you might as well start writing about the wine, too,"
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This Week’s Wine March 22, 2009
What’s the difference between Champagne and Cremant? About 200 kilometers, and thousands of years of French bureaucracy and law. In France, Champagne refers solely to the sparkling wine made in the Champagne region. The very word conjures up more images about wine, and life, than any other word that deals with alcoholic beverages. French law,
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This Week’s Wine March 8, 2009
I’ve handled a lot of poker chips in my time, sometimes raking them in, most of the time throwing them into the pot, but I’ve never seen one on a wine bottle, serving as the label. It was a black chip, not to be removed, and it marked High Roller, a 2006 California Napa Valley
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This Week’s Wine February 15, 2009
What’s a pair of innocent wine-and-food writers to do? We recently journeyed to Wines of Wildwood, a shop we like even if it is in an area only a couple of miles from where we once thought dragons stuck their heads up over the edge of the earth and scouted for dinner. We were there
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This Week’s Wine January 18, 2009
Italian-American winemakers and grape growers, using the skills they learned in the old country, were pioneers in the California wine industry. The families, and the wines, go back through the 20th Century. Martini, Mondavi, Sebastiani, Parducci, Foppiano, Gallo and others were names to conjure with. In the early 1960s, when the Napa Valley was