Features

Home
Features
Pogo Nugget - 68, courtesy chrstphre ㋛ campbell

Mousiness: a primer

Simon J Woolf
Feature Stories
4 min read
I admit it, I've become obsessed by mouse taint. If that seems strange or perverse, let me expand. Most wine faults in this day and age are pretty well understood. We know a fair bit about Brettanomyces, volatile acidity, reduction and many other common complaints. Not so with the stray rodent

Bitters and the mystery of blending

Erika Szymanski
Features
5 min read
I had expected great things from my first experiences with cocktail bitters. Bitter flavors are great, and so are condiments. Make me a kale and radicchio salad spiked with anchovies, garlic, and mustard and I'll nosh contentedly. So I was surprised, when I splashed some of the classic Angostura on

Vintage Ports for the 21st Century

Roger Morris
Feature Stories
4 min read
Unless you hold a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, chances are your university drinking experiences did not extend to the consumption of vintage Ports sipped on fire-lit winter’s evenings as you pored over reference texts.  Fine Ports, like youth, shouldn’t be wasted on the young getting wasted. But a word

Trending: What to drink from Italy

Becky Sue Epstein
Features
2 min read
We are seduced by the Italian lifestyle – which is one of the main reasons we in the U.S. import the most Italian wine of any country in the world. And because of this, I got to hang out with a lot of Italian winemakers during VINO 2016 (aka “Italian

Beyond Bordeaux in Hong Kong

David Rogers
Features
5 min read
Hong Kong. A city of more than 7 million people shoehorned into a small parcel of land on China’s southeastern coast. This is an Asian city with a growing Western influence, with food and drink a central cultural tenet. Despite a rapid growth in middle-class incomes since the mid-1990s, the

Undiscovered Uruguay

Michelle Locke
Feature Stories
4 min read
Harvest is under way and internationally known enologist Alberto Antonini is giving a master class on the coming vintage. Behind him, framed in the large windows of the new winery, a landscape of terraced vineyards unfolds under a lacy blue sky, a view reminiscent of his native Italy. But these

The world’s most pathetic wine grape

W. Blake Gray
Features
6 min read
This story is about the world's most pathetic wine grape. Its history is exaggerated. It was used for a few decades to play one role that is no longer needed, yet still people grow it – though even its proponents don't think it has much virtue. It reminds me of the