A friend and winemaker once convinced me that certain kinds of wines taste better with certain kinds of music, and that the wrong pairing makes for dis-chord. I thought of that years ago when I attended a small dinner for lovers of Chablis. I refer to that utterly sublime white wine from the French district…

I suggested in a column some years ago that in general most white wines are best consumed young, after which a reader chastised me for ignoring what he said was my naivete. He said great white Burgundies, great German rieslings and some Australian semillons were best after a decade or two. “I’m sure you have…

One of the world’s greatest grapes, sauvignon blanc, has suffered enough indignities over the years to qualify as a survivor—though the accolades it has received recently make it seem as if it’s always been a star. In fact, the history of this variety is so checkered that most of today’s younger wine buyers would never…

Fourth of July recipes can be so fussy, instructing you to carve watermelon baskets, make precise stripes of fruit on flag-shaped desserts, and whip up elaborate, food coloring-tinted layer cakes. Yeah, definitely not my thing! Enter these spritzers…er, sparklers. (See what I did there?) A cocktail with two ingredients, made right in the serving pitcher,…

I believe far too much is made of the “proper” wine and food pairings. I realize that many people have made their life’s work all about telling others which wines go best with which foods, but there are rarely perfect answers here, and even though certain basic guidelines are applicable, even the most authoritative experts…

In early June, I will be a speaker at an industry technical conference in Geneva, New York, on a grape variety that, chances are, you have never heard of before, though it’s one that makes extremely nice red wines. Bryan Ulbrich, winemaker at his excellent winery Left Foot Charley, and I will explore the grape…

The old saying, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” may apply in many areas of our 2022 daily lives, but I realized recently by walking through my wine cellar how it didn’t really apply to wine. The saying may have been prophetic a while back for things like political or economic…