Compare French and California wines, and see what you learn
Back a few months ago, at the suggestion of a friend, I conducted a four-session seminar and tasting that set the red wines of Bordeaux alongside similarly constituted reds of...
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Two Italian wine regions you need to learn
Our visitors to the tasting room today are a couple of winemaking regions from Italy's South: Abruzzo and Campania. Abruzzo Halfway up the eastern side of the peninsula, behind the...
Olive-pesto pasta with plenty of wine pairings
Acidity is the key to wine matches with this dish, because it's about the only wine component that can pair favorably with any acidity in the food (and we have...
How to decipher a wine label
Trumping whatever aesthetic value a wine label may have, its main function is to impart legal information to the consumer. As such, the bottler, winery or winemaker, as well as...
Eating spinach? Break out the bubbly
You know how a tiny patch of spinach will adhere to one of your incisors after you've finished that delicious baby spinach salad with warm bacon dressing? So that when...
Hungarian winemaking blends traditions
If one good thing came from the years of Communist control in Hungary, it was to hew Hungarian winemaking to its traditions. For the most part, Hungary's wine is still...
Crisp, high-acid whites bring out the beauty of asparagus
Eating asparagus is about as close as we get to dining as most hoofed animals do, including that great natural lawn mower, the sheep. Asparagus is a grass, after all;...
Fickle but fundamental sangiovese
No one whosoever could dispute that sangiovese possesses the single greatest name among all red wine grapes. It is likely that the name "sangiovese" comes from sanguis jovis, Latin for...
Cool wines match fresh dinner for warm night
Well, this sure appears to be a delicious kickoff to summer alfresco eats. It's as if the citrus, chili heat, sweet-and-sour and fresh vegetables conspire alone to cool you down....
How to pair fish and wine swimmingly
Last in a four-part series on pairing food and wine. In the world of matching wine with food, little else is fishier than the hackneyed advice, "White wine with fish."...