Category Archives: Wine

I have fondest memories of drinking Sturm at  Raschhofer Rossbräu, a bar/restaurant I frequented while living in Austria a decade ago, give or take a month.  It’s an effervescent,  not fully fermented red wine, which is cloudy and available only in the autumn.  Federweisser is the general term for this category of quick-fermented grape juice, […]

Wine snobs incense me, and when they ask what flavors and smells I detect in a glass, I often opt to tell them I get a lot of dead yeast on the nose, distinct hints of vine fruit, and fermented grape at the finish. This Wall Street Journal article features a study confirming that wine […]

We’ve all been there, at a picnic or on a train, you remembered the bottle of wine, but not the corkscrew.  If you’re at a construction site, the simple solution is to drive a screw into the cork and lever it out with the claw of a hammer, but in a pinch, here are a […]

My darkest secret: I’m not great at picking out wine. Like a chump, I never turn down waiters’ recommendations, because I figure they know better. Invite me to dinner and I’ll happily bring wine, but suffer while surfing the web from my iPhone at the liquor store.

Just because you are on a budget, doesn’t mean you need to drink bad wine. OK, that was tacky.  If I ever write  like Rachel Ray again, please find me and slit my throat.  I’m not a connoisseur, but my pedestrian palate knows what I like and what I don’t and generally, people agree, so […]