So. How’s lockdown been treating you? Personally, I’m struggling with the cognitive dissonance wrought by (on the one hand) friends moaning about boredom, blithely sharing quizzes and sourdough diaries to fill the time and (on the other hand) my own sodding lack of any time whatsoever. The smallest lockdown violin, I’m aware, plays for those [&hell

Burgundy time, and we found a new one that looks interesting. A Beaune 1er Cru at Costco for $42.99 and we scooped it up right away. There’s not much information online about this bottle. Turns out, the Costco placard hit the nail right on the head saying “a little muted at first but opening w/ […]

View from the Winery, Looking Northeast In 1977, Dr. Thomas Fogarty, a noted heart surgeon, inventor of medical devices, and home winemaker, began planting his vineyard at the north end of the Santa Cruz Mountains with the aid of grape grower Michael Martella.  The vineyard was the first to be planted on Skyline Ridge.  Over […]

I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format. They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read […]

Quickly, today, while the sun shines, let me talk to you about a fabulous white Rhône to brighten and enliven your lockdown with its circus antics: Lirac Blanc La Fermade from Domaine Maby. This wine put me in a good mood before I’d even opened it: any booze that makes me think of Arrested Development […]

What an interesting find this turned out to be. We were going to buy it anyway just because the two varietal blend included Caladoc, which is something you don’t see that often. Caladoc is a crossing of Grenache and Malbec primarily found in Southern France. But the real kicker was when we turned the bottle […]

Andrea and Echalas Trained Bush Vines Andrea and Chris Mullineux are fascinated with how the diverse soils of the Swartland are expressed in wine.  They make Chenin Blanc and Syrah from soils derived from granite, schist, and iron.  Since I focused on Chenin Blanc on this year’s visit to the Western Cape, I traveled to […]

[ Editor’s note: This is an April Fool’s Day post. It is intentionally cynical, acerbic, and satirical to the extreme. I do NOT actually feel this way about these publications. I have plenty of friends who work for these publications (all of which, I sincerely hope, take this in the humorous way it’s intended and […]

Here we are again (after a lockdown-enforced hiatus) with a few of the Wine Society’s offerings I’ve particularly enjoyed lately: a garden-party stunner of a white, a crisp, delicious rosé and a bloody brilliant Beaujolais. So, now that The Wine Society is delivering again (Christ be thanked; it was tough going for a while…), let’s […]

Here’s a great Italian wine find right now in the aisles at Costco. Right away, we see that price ending in .49, which we’ve written about several times before. That indicates a special Costco price, and that’s indeed what we have here. This bottle is $19.99 at Wine.com, and hovers around $16-$17 most other places […]

Beka Jimsheladze Young Beka Jimsheladze had a promising career at international consulting firm KMPG, but in 2015 his home village called him to take over the family’s small dry-farmed vineyard on limestone soils in Kakabeti, located 72 km east of Tbilisi in Georgia. He started with 7 ha of vines and just 8 small qvevri, […]

I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes in a “mini-review” format. They are meant to be quirky, fun, and (mostly) easily-digestible reviews of (mostly) currently available wines (click here for the skinny on how to read […]

So East London Liquor Dry Gin is apparently made somewhere near Victoria Park, which is not so far from where Amy used to frolic and kick her heels until I gentrified her with my ludicrous Putney ways. Yes, Amy used to be cool until I appeared in her life, like a branch of Jojo Maman […]

What a surprise seeing this bottle show up at Costco. This is from Duckhorn’s WA state property at Red Mountain, and long time readers will know we love these wines. Bang for the buck they are blazing a new path forward for great juice in the US right now. We’re getting a pretty buy on […]

Misha Dolidze, Winemaker Founded in 2014, Marani Casreli is located in Village Vachnadziani on the right bank of the Alazani River not far from Telavi, Georgia’s “Napa”. Casreli has 8 ha of vineyards and grows all its own fruit using organic practices.  All wines are fermented and matured in qvevri.  It is a project of […]

Virginia is a challenging spot in which to make fine wines. Yes, that’s despite global warming trends. In fact, those trends might even make it a bit more challenging. No one knows the challenges impacting that promising little corner of eastern U.S. wine making like the folks with whom I had a recent Zoom tasting: […]