by Ron Kapon
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles may be the finalists, but the winner is Las Vegas. There are 120 Master Sommeliers in the world (wine knowledge and blind tastings are part of the rigorous exam). 74 of them live in the USA; 13 of whom work in Las Vegas. There are celebrity chefs who promote their TV shows, books, clothing lines, pizza etc and rarely turn on a stove. I have eliminated the two most prominent examples from this discussion. If you put your name on a restaurant you should be there working at least half the time. There are 76 Wine Spectator Grand Award winning restaurants world-wide and 4 are in Las Vegas; 28 of the 700 Best of Award of Excellence restaurants are also in Las Vegas. Follow along with me as I sliced, diced and slurped my way through five d...
by Jonathon Alsop
Beaujolais hits the trifecta for Old World wine: it's the name of a grape, a wine, and a geographical region in France, all at the same time. Beaujolais the grape goes by other names confusingly -- gamay, for instance; the region is further broken down into regions and neighborhoods like Morgon, Fleurie, Saint Amour and at least a dozen others that would be hard to keep in your head unless you lived there. Beaujolais the wine is famous for essentially two things in the US: a version of itself called "nouveau" -- French for new -- a wine that's made and released the same year within weeks of harvest, and low prices. Really low prices. Order-now-and-save low prices. Very top of the Beaujolais food chain is about $25, the middle or bottom tier of wines in many other more famous French re...
by Marisa Dvari
“Delicate and delicious!” declares the haughty French hostess of a BYOB tasting party for wine professionals in NYC, sipping a wine from Bordeaux. “Especially when you contrast it to the California wine,” she snips, rudely pointing at the award winning Napa Cabernet Sauvignon, standing forlorn on the table in front of me. As a native Californian, such was my crude awakening to the pervasive prejudice against California wines on the East Coast. Many upscale wine stores in the East carry very few California wines, and of those that do, you’d rarely see Napa Valley wines advertised in email newsletters or recommended by the staff. Why this predilection for French wine? One lingering reason may be that it’s hard to beat a millennium of savvy marketing, a branding campaign so st...
by C. L.'lee' Corpening
The Okanagan Canadian Wine Region on the Rise!! Be Among the First!! Where There have been countless articles about the traditional wine regions of the world – Napa, Tuscany, Rioja, Bordeaux and Burgundy to name just a few. But, if you want to experience a wine region in its infancy, then you need to consider the Okanagan!! The Okanagan is a region located in the Canadian province of British Columbia about 200 miles from the Pacific Ocean. The long narrow Okanagan Valley runs from the 49th Parallel – its southernmost border with the state of Washington – north for about a hundred miles to roughly the 50th parallel. The region takes its name from the aboriginal people, known as the Okanagan Nation, which lived off the land for thousands of years before the first settlers arriv...
by Steve Dryden
Guadalupe Valley is located about fifteen miles north-east of Ensenada on the Tecate-Ensenada Highway 3. As you drop over the coastal foothills and arrive in the village of San Antonio de las Minas on the west end of the valley you might think you’ve arrived in Napa Valley in 1960. This “garden of Eden” is the home to about nighty percent of all grape growing and winemaking in Mexico. Valle de Guadalupe’s climate combined with it’s creative and innovative residents is leading the renaissance driving Mexican wines into notable arrival upon the tables of connoisseurs worldwide. And this is just the beginning..... Commercial grape growing began here in the early 1900’s with the arrival of the Russian (Molokan) farmers and has slowly progressed into a region that produces exc...
by Gabrio Tosti
Last time I wrote about integrity in wine production, I concentrated on what happens during the winemaking process. But integrity doesn't begin with the decision not to add chemicals to the final product, A healthy wine begins in the vineyard. Wines is a natural, agricultural product and when it’s treated lovingly start to finish in a healthy, natural, nurturing environment it repays us with an emotional experience, each glass is a journey across time and space, a communion between mother nature and human nature. However, some wine these days are produced in an industrial, antiseptic, profit driven environment that strips the nature from the product and, as often as not, leaves us unsatisfied, disappointed, and with a headache! A well tended, healthy grapevine at a high quality vin...
by Alder Yarrow
Over dinner last night, an old, dear friend asked me when it was that I became a wine lover. He then proceeded to tell me, in not so many words, that when we knew each other in college, I was the last person he would have expected to turn into a wine critic and gourmand. We had a good laugh and kept drinking, but his question got me thinking about how it was that I, or anyone for that matter, could go from a simple drinker to a devoted disciple. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had one of those moments that some people describe, where I take a sip from a glass, my head snaps up, and I say to myself something along the lines of “Wow, so this is what the fuss is all about.” Of course there have been dozens of small epiphanies over time, like the first time I really smelled and tasted ch...
by Alder Yarrow
This afternoon I poured myself the last of a bottle that had been opened earlier in the week, and wandered to the back yard to relax a little. I must not have slept well the night before, because after a few sips and a few moments in the sun, my eyes became heavy, and their lids fell. I awoke with a start, and found myself alone on a level plain of grey concrete stretching far and away into the distance. Alarmed, I gulped what was left of my tepid wine, presumably warmed by the sun which now seemed to recede high beyond a veil of haze. I rubbed my eyes. I stood in a massive empty parking lot, hemmed in on all its distant sides by featureless buildings leaning at crazy angles away from the grainy expanse. When I finally managed to turn away from this terrifying vista, I found mysel...
by Alder Yarrow
What did you think the first time you heard Mozart? Perhaps like me, you had a mother who would play classical music throughout the house on Sunday mornings –- and smile knowingly when you squirmed your way off the couch rather than sit for another minute listening to that stuff. To your eight-year-old ears, it was boring, complicated and inaccessible: You lacked the context in which to appreciate it. Perhaps as you grew up, though, you started to appreciate Mozart, if not enjoy it; perhaps because you learned more about how to listen to his music. You gained an understanding of its context. Most wine drinkers, no matter their level of knowledge and sophistication, are on a similar path of evolving understanding. Each mouthful whose flavors and aromas we drink, each bottle label we...
by Alder Yarrow
They say that bees and dogs can smell fear. Those with good noses in the wine world can smell it too; the ground that used to be so firm under our feet is starting to shift and shake. Like the enraptured leader of some doomsday cult predicting the coming apocalypse, I tell you truly: Look carefully, the signs of a wine revolution are all around us! In the past few months, I’ve had a good Chenin Blanc from India and a nice Cabernet from China. The entry of these wines into the international scene is interesting enough for its proof of the broadening scope of decent winemaking around the world, not to mention the loosening of the grip that some American and Australian wine companies have on the market for low-budget wine. Its real significance, however, has to do with why someone has bo...
