ShareI learned this Easter that, when it comes to pairing with honey-baked ham, there is only one wine better than gewürztraminer — and perhaps only one that is more obscure and challenging. (“Oh, I don’t like gewürz-whatever,” I always hear, “too sweet.” Just you wait…)
 
I learned my lesson thanks to the beauty of the leftover. [...]

ShareI confess that gewürztraminer is not a go-to white wine for me. It’s not because of its reputation for being sweet; there are plenty of dry gewürztraminers out there that are fresh and non-cloying, but still pack the grape’s trademark, tropical fruit punch. Nor is it because gewürztraminer is hard to pronounce (just belt out, [...]

ShareI love this wine because it reminds me of the sea. Indeed, the part of the world it comes from enjoys a strong maritime influence: warm summer days, but cool nights, with lots of fog and rain. (This region gets so much precipitation, actually, that in many of its older vineyards the vines are supported [...]

ShareMy wife likes to tease me by saying that I “woefully under-decant.” I don’t think so. But it is true that I rarely decant. And I admit that a few times I’ve been burned by not decanting — take the example of the Glen Carlou 2005 Grand Classique I wrote about recently. In fact, the [...]

Share“Weird.” That’s what I thought when I first tasted Glen Carlou’s 2005 Grand Classique, a Bordeaux-style red blend from South Africa. It displayed such strong notes of game, doused campfire, and rusty iron, it made me think of an old farm. So I had a glass, vacuum-stopped the bottle, then revisted the next day — [...]

ShareI’m still scratching my head over the 2005 Orin Swift “Papillon” we ordered at Elway’s Steak House in Denver — and almost rejected because the bottle is so repulsive! It would have been the first time I’d sent a wine back because the label made my stomach turn.
Good thing we tamped down our revulsion, because [...]

ShareA bottle of 2001 Cornas from August Clape got me wondering recently about a thing called bottle variation. You see, the Cornas was a show stopper. My notes read: “Mouth-watering aromas of green olives and black fruit. A huge syrah, rich, maybe a little monolithic, but with loads of ripe plum and distinct olive and [...]

ShareAlthough it’s the most widely-planted red wine grape in Italy and serves as the main ingredient in Chianti, sangiovese is a really misunderstood piece of fruit. Part of it is the fault of Chianti, actually, since many people think it’s a varietal made of the chianti grapes. Actually, there’s no such thing: Chianti is not [...]

ShareWhy, oh, why didn’t I buy two bottles? I took a 2003 Sesti Brunello di Montalcino for a test run (in preparation for our all-sangiovese tasting tonight at the Ladies Tasting Society), loved every drop, and then didn’t have enough time to zip back to Berkeley to get another. If I had one to bring [...]

ShareOur latest assignment at the Ladies Tasting Society is to blind-taste a selection of wines from Italy that are pure sangiovese — that is, 100 percent, virgin sangiovese, the native (and woefully underappreciated) grape variety of Tuscany. It’s as if sangiovese were the first love and first wife of Tuscan winemakers, to whom she bore [...]