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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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