All wines are appropriate for all seasons. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a simple white or crisp rosé in the winter, and big reds work all year long. But our diets change with the weather. Just as we look forward to watermelon and fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes in the summer, we crave
Sharpen your poison pens, sommeliers, because you're going to hate this column. When I'm dining in one of the trendy restaurants I love, I often think about how impenetrable the wine list must look to the uninitiated. But all of us reading this, we know what Quincy and Alicante Bouschet
Congratulations to Palate Press' own W. Blake Gray, winner of the prestigious Ramos Pinto Online Wine Columnist of the Year, in the 2013 Louis Roederer Wine Writers' Awards. Blake, a Columnist for Palate Press since 2010, was nominated for stories like Darth Vader is My Lover: Revalations about Brettanomyces in
This month we have the premiere of a movie that walks the taut line between wine porn and edutainment -- starting with its opening scenes. Any serious wine lover, such as myself, is going to be adding Saint Estephe’s Cos d’Estournel’s barrel room to their must-see list. The idea for
The last time wine safety really made the news was when, in 1985, some Austrian winemakers were found bulking up their wine with diethylene glycol. Used as an ingredient in some kinds of antifreeze, it added sweetness and body to wine, along with the potential for liver, kidney, and brain
For those of us who were writing about wine at the time, it was a surprising, even humorous-sounding, development. The Italians were coming to Virginia to make wine. The year was 1976, and we had already been shocked once that season. Napa Valley (with some help from Sonoma grapes) had
Wine enthusiasts are always looking for an experience that’s completely arresting -- a wine that stops you in your tracks, makes the room go silent, and just pulls you into the glass. Sometimes, those wines are expensive -- perhaps opened at an extravagant wine dinner where everyone brings a bottle
There's been a bit of a furore about wild yeast fermentation over the past month. The fires were stoked by new research published by scientists at the University of British Columbia and authored by graduate student Jessica M. Lange, summarized in Wine Business Monthly: “Regardless of which yeast started the