“Now ladies and gentlemen, if you will each raise your wine glass to your nose I’m sure that you will agree that the scent of black cherry, cinnamon, truffle and the slightest hint of wet stone quite typically displays the varietal character of this wine.” What the hell!  Am I the only person in [...]

A small child was being admonished by his piano teacher, who asked, “Why is it you always forget your homework? I never forget to correct it and bring it to class.” The boy looked the teacher straight in the eye and with a certain amount of awe in his voice replied,”You must have a mind [...]

In the new decade, we’ll know much more about what we eat The 10 years just past could have been dubbed the “foodie decade” – when “artisan” was attached to everything from bread to chocolates, when cupcakes went gourmet and food blogs gained big fan bases. It also was a decade of peanut butter recalls, [...]

How did you become such an authority on wine? It must truly be your passion. Lots of drinking! You learn over time … As they say, there’s no substitute for pulling corks. I let my curiosity guide me. I will always be an enthusiastic amateur, never an “expert.” I love your purple prose – especially [...]

Natalie MacLean first had the idea to write about wine on a seemingly innocuous trip to the grocery store back in 1999. Groggy and sleep-deprived — she was on maternity leave at the time — she picked up a local food magazine and started flipping through it. That’s when it hit her. “They had all [...]

Excerpted from The Oregonian Uncork these wine Web sites for fun, useful info I recently received a press release extolling the new wine-matching function at Epicurious.com, the culinary Web portal for magazines such as Bon Appétit and Gourmet. Intrigued, I checked out the site. Lo and behold, there they were: long lists of specific wine [...]

Updated with more lists from you, our dear readers! We got a deluge of entries for our summer giveaway and as promised we’re posting some of our favorite entries. We’re hoping that some of these entries spark you to add a few more books to your summer reading list. We’ll add a few more of [...]

OK, so you don’t know a box wine from a baby brunello and that big dinner with colleagues/clients/current object of obsession is just a day away. You want to be dining and wining but will likely be dining and whining … especially if all you can say to the waiter is, “Got any wine coolers?” [...]

Several years ago I organized a wine tasting night, hoping to take advantage of my neighbor’s expertise in that area. Everyone brought a bottle of red wine, each one wrapped in a brown paper bag so we could taste without being influenced by the label or price. The least expensive bottle on the table, a [...]

As my close friends know painfully well, I’m not exactly good at making decisions. At the wine store, I’m the customer who gets asked “Can I help you?” twice by the same salesperson because I’ve meandered between shelves for so long that they have forgotten our first encounter. Then I usually say something brilliant like, [...]