Tom Shelton, president of Joseph Phelps Vineyards from 1995 to 2007, passed away Saturday night. I only had the chance to meet Tom once, but I remember him being very friendly and accommodating towards me. Given that the event we were attending was hosted by him and was filled with lots of important [...]
CC licensed image courtesy of Flickr user thomwatson
Just in time for restaurant week in Baltimore and Washington DC, Wine Spectator pushed aside their vintage charts for a moment and released their list of the most triumphant wine lists in the country.
The only two-glass “Best of Award of Excellence” in Maryland went to Lewnes’ [...]
Continue reading about Fondue? Fondont! Wine Spectator on Maryland and Virginia Wine Lists
Red, White, and Drunk All Over is a print version of wine writer Natalie MacLean’s jaunt through the wine world. Written as if the reader is riding shotgun through MacLean’s own experiences, the book cruises through the famous places, characters, and occupations in the wine without missing a beat.
The appeal of this book is [...]
Continue reading about Review Week: Red, White, and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean
This month’s issue (July 2008) of Decanter magazine ran an article from Margaret Rand on Wine Dynasties in Australian Wineries. The first paragraph laments the typical family life cycle of an American winery, concluding:
There you are, needing a winemaker or a vineyard manager, and all your children want to do is make up rhymes [...]
Continue reading about Review Week: The House of Mondavi by Julia Flynn Siler
Wine and commercialism. Art and profit. Mondovino, a 2004 documentary shot through shaky hand held cameras led by Jonathan Nossiter examines the two sides of the wine coin and ends of as you would expect, leaning far away from globalization in the wine industry.
The documentary leads off in France just as Robert Mondavi Winery is [...]
I can go on with a flowery book review telling you how lovely it is to read Kermit Lynch’s seminal book on French wine in the 1970s. But that’s not really the style of this blog. The style of the blog is to get right to the point:
If you’re starting to get serious about wine, [...]
Continue reading about Review Week: Adventures On The Wine Route
Saturday night, The Wife was out of town visiting friends and left me all alone to fend for myself for the night. In the early days, this would have turned into a savage situation involving beer, pizza, and an XBOX 360 marathon. But now, the worldly and civilized wine blogger that I am prevailed and [...]
Okay, so maybe not those last three items. But the first, oh how it will help with the first!
I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it here, but my day job is working as a Software Engineer for Vinfolio, the San Francisco based wine retailer and collector services company (Full disclosure: I work for Vinfolio). I [...]
My brain couldn’t keep up with the simple five option tasting menu at St. Michael’s Winery. They were doing a brisk business: every seat in the tasting room was taken, every seat on the deck was taken, and every neuron in my brain was taken trying to decide which flight I was going with.
Shall [...]
Continue reading about St. Michaels Winery: Wines Wines Everywhere
The Wife and I ate at Junior’s Wine Bar in Federal Hill a few months back and the experience was mediocre and fell short of the snoty-tooty blogworthy standards of this Blog. Nothing was bad, but nothing blew me out of my chair and into my Merlot.
Things changed last week when I got a call [...]
Continue reading about The Resurrection: Junior’s Wine Bar in Baltimore
