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The Winemaker Dinner from Hell
It was April 2006. I’d been in Portugal for a week with good friend and fellow MS, Keith Goldston. We were guests of AMORIM, Portugal’s largest cork producer, and had toured cork factories, seen cork...
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Tasting at Georg Breuer
In all the years of countless winery visits, it had to be a first—at least in regard to how I showed up at the winery’s front door. Usually, the process involved either driving somewhere or riding in...
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Pale Fire Part II – Riesling
My previous post from April 23rd was the first of two about a recent trip to Austria. In it, I focused on Grüner Veltliner and favorite wines tasted during the trip. In this second and concluding...
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Butterscotch on a picnic table
The other night with dinner we enjoyed the first bottle out of my cellar in over seven years. Allow me to explain—and full disclosure here. When we moved from San Francisco back to New Mexico in...
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Pale Fire: Part I
I remember when I first got into wine eons ago. I had just moved to San Francisco, so was only an hour and change from Napa and Sonoma. No surprise that I initially cut my teeth on California wine,...
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Gin and beef
I’m not a big gin drinker. But my wife Carla likes the occasional Martini. I made one for her the other night using Plymouth 80-proof. Plymouth is also my go-to gin for Negronis with Carpano Antica...
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Personal Tasting Strategies Part III: Palate
In the last post I detailed my internal strategies for smelling a glass of wine. As I mentioned, I think smell is by far the most important aspect of tasting. So I do most of the work assessing a wine...
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Personal Tasting Strategies Part II: Smell
In the last post I explained my internal strategies for looking at a glass of wine in the context of using the deductive tasting grid. At one point I mentioned I thought that the nose of a wine—or...
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Personal Tasting Strategies Part I: Sight
In the fall of 2009, I worked with good friends Taryn Voget and Tim Hallbom on their project called “Everyday Genius.” Their goal was to deconstruct and model what I do internally when I smell and...
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Parts is parts
The image in the middle of this post is decidedly out of focus. I took it in Hong Kong in February of 2013 when I was there to do an MS class and exam. Tommy Lam, our local contact, insisted on taking...
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The Aromatics
I call them the aromatics, the most floral and flamboyant of all white wines. If they lived in a visual world, it would be somewhere between the saturated Peter Max-like design of the Beatle’s Yellow...
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Tasting fortified wines
Tasting fortified wines in a double blind scenario for an exam presents its own unique set of challenges. But as with tasting still table wines, focusing on color, age and/or the level of oxidation,...
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Why is this wine so expensive?
*Photo by Peter Granoff, MS Wine, as with love, is a many splintered thing. Or at least that’s what a daytime soap from back in the day told me. But wine is complicated, also like love. Take price,...
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My doppio at Café Sant Eustachio
The experience was like boarding a plane in China or riding the 30 Stockton on Muni in San Francisco. Both require the tenacity of a Blue Heeler, complete disrespect for social distancing, and the use...
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Vinous interruptus
This post is another chapter from my new book Strong Water: Tales of a Master Sommelier’s Life in Food and Wine. One of the sections of the book is about stories from my days as a sommelier. This one...
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A return to the golden arches
I didn’t have much of a choice. Actually, given the location of my event that day in Chicago’s West Loop, I had no other option for early morning sustenance aside from the lowest common food...
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Cover Reveal — “Strong Water: Tales of a Master Sommelier’s Life in Food,...
Drum Roll, Please… Behold the cover of my new book “Strong Water: Tales of a Master Sommelier’s Life in Food, Wine, and Restaurants.” I’m pleased to announce that the “Strong Water” will be released...
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Quello perfetto (the perfect one)
Stanley Tucci was a guest on The Late Show recently with Stephen Colbert. Tucci was his usual dazzling urbanite self. Colbert, in trying to be the Perle Mesta of talk show hosts (look it up),...
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Terroir redefined
This post is another chapter from my new book, Strong Water: Tales of a Master Sommelier’s Life in Food, Wine, and Restaurants. It’s a collection of essays written over the last ten-plus years that...
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Eggs
This post is another chapter from my new book, Strong Water: Tales of a Master Sommelier’s Life in Food, Wine, and Restaurants. It’s a collection of essays written over the last ten-plus years that...
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