Homage to Catalonia: Join Us for Saturday Sips to Celebrate “La Diada de Sant Jordi’ ‘La Diada de Sant Jordi’ falls on April 23 in the Catalan holiday calendar, a day of books and roses, and it is a great reason…
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Posted on 2025.04.22 in Spain DO, Penedes, Wine-Aid Packages, Cava  | Read more...
There are no philosophical mandates in winemaking, but there are certain truisms that seem to arise regardless of appellation and country of origin. That is, low-end wines tend to emphasize immediacy; they display linear, fresh fruit notes unhindered by the…
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Posted on 2025.04.07 in Spain DO, Wine-Aid Packages, Rioja DOC  | Read more...
Saturday Sips: In-Store Tasting: Bubbles (What Else?) to Ring In the New Year It’s easy to think of Champagne as a spiritual substance; after all, it was created by monks and the very airiness of its identity seems celestial. The cornerstone of…
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Posted on 2024.12.27 in Saturday Sips Wines, France, Spain DO, Wine-Aid Packages, Champagne, Cava  | Read more...
A true masterpiece is composed of many elements, and all the details must be in precise balance: The forearm musculature on Michelangelo’s ‘David’ for example—the intake of breath in the nostril of Sanmartino’s ‘Veiled Christ.’ This is as true for…
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Posted on 2024.11.21 in Fleurie, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Vosne-Romanée, Gevrey-Chambertin, Hautes-Côtes de Nuits, Cidre, France, Wine-Aid Packages, Cava  | Read more...
Given a coloring book, Michelangelo would probably have stayed within the heavy black lines and Picasso would have redrawn all the images and colored them with the blunt end of the crayon. The charm in either approach depends on the…
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Posted on 2024.11.14 in France, Misc Spanish, Wine-Aid Packages, Ribeira Sacra  | Read more...
Priorat has been making serious wine since Roman ‘vinitors’ started carving terraces into the Spanish landscape, but its history as a DOQ (DOC) is much shorter. To be precise, Priorat only received this status in 2000. The advantage to being…
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Posted on 2024.10.17 in France, Priorat DOQ, Wine-Aid Packages  | Read more...
There’s no reason why the term ‘minerality’ should be controversial in wine descriptions, but since it is, maybe it’s better to think of it like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did pornography: “I may not be able to define it,…
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Posted on 2024.06.27 in France, Wine-Aid Packages, Alsace, Costers del Segre  | Read more...
Contrast has always animated the soul of wine; the subtle way that sugar plays against acid while fruit notes wrangle savory undercurrents. Wine is about transformation—fermentation is a pretty radical transmutation, after all—a metamorphosis of grape juice from the plebian…
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Posted on 2024.05.16 in Spain DO, Wine-Aid Packages, Ribeiro, Ribeira Sacra, Rias Biaxas  | Read more...
All Things Catalunyan: Join Us for Saturday Sips To Usher In “La Diada de Sant Jordi’ ‘La Diada de Sant Jordi’ falls on April 23 in the Catalan holiday calendar, a day of books and roses, and it is a great…
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Posted on 2024.04.23 in France, Saturday Sips Wines, Penedes, Priorat DOQ, Wine-Aid Packages, Catalunya, Costers del Segre  | Read more...
The wine world’s equivalent to the dinosaur-destroying Chicxulub meteor is a microscopic louse called phylloxera. By the end of the nineteenth century, the bug had killed most of the vines in Europe, and when they were replanted (often using louse-resistant…
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Posted on 2023.09.08 in La Tierra de Castilla, France, Spain DO, Penedes, Wine-Aid Packages, Catalunya, Cava, Arribes, Tierra de Leon, Ribeiro, Ribeira Sacra  | Read more...