ShareAll wine is sexy. The history, the culture — even the aesthetics, what with sleek bottles, arty labels, and delicate stemware — perk any drinker’s interest, stimulate her senses, open her to adventure.
Yes, but which is the sexiest wine of them all? To that question, among wine lovers, there is but one answer: pinot noir.
Pinot [...]

ShareLots of people ask me, “how do I choose the perfect bottle of wine?” I tell them the trick, actually, is first to pick the perfect wine store.
It’s unfortunate that many people feel anxiety around going to the store to buy a bottle of wine. That the stereotypical wine merchant is grey-haired, obtuse, and male [...]

ShareIn the case of my tasting group the Ladies Tasting Society, our next chardonnay is usually, well, another chardonnay.
But for many wine drinkers, chardonnay is oh, so yesterday. A victim of its own success — Americans drink more of it than all red varieties combined — chardonnay has become too obvious a selection for wine [...]

ShareAlthough Wine Girl knows better, whenever she sees bubbles she says, “Champagne, please.” I use the C-word even though I’m aware that only a fraction of the fizzy wines we drink is really Champagne, that is, produced in the region of France called Champagne; blended from chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier; and protected by [...]

Share(“What’s in Wine Girl’s Glass?” is a weekly quiz featuring a description of one of the wines she is currently enjoying. From the details of her tasting notes, readers can try to guess what sort of wine it is. The winners, if they like, will be named and quoted in the next instalment.)
Hedonistic is first [...]

ShareSniff at this: French gourmets have their apron ties in a twist over news that the mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë is selling off half of the wines in the cellar of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, housed in a vault beneath Paris’s landmark Hotel de Ville (pictured here). It’s not that Delanoë, like our head [...]

SharePerfect Pumpkin Pairing Tip Ahead: Wine Girl sincerely hopes that she is unlike many of our readers in that she had, until recently, only a casual acquaintance with Port. I blame my inexperience on Port’s hyper-masculine associations. (Think men in leather armchairs, smoking cigars, their wives tucked away in another room). There’s the myth, too, [...]

ShareThe label and slander department: Somewhere in wine country, a winemaker is lamenting the truth: he or she shed blood, sweat, and tears crafting a delicious merlot from a difficult vintage, but it was passed over by a customer in favor of a bottle with a wallaby on the label.
Wine Girl is dedicated to putting [...]

Share Few expected that one of Europe’s most Catholic countries, Spain, would enact the world’s most liberal gay marriage legislation in July. And fewer, perhaps, expected Spain to be the source of some of this century’s most exciting wines.
But my tasting group, The Ladies Tasting Society, has been following both Spanish politics and enology for [...]

Share(“What’s in Wine Girl’s Glass?” is a weekly quiz featuring a description of one of the wines she is currently enjoying. From the details of her tasting notes, readers can try to guess what sort of wine it is. The winners, if they like, will be named and quoted in the next instalment.)
Today I drank [...]