Excruciating pain has a way of giving you additional focus. I’m learning this the hard way, courtesy of a degenerated L5-S1 lumbar disk which is causing a bulge that my spinal cord finds disagreeable (“disagreeable” as in “excruciating sciatica that is more painful than when I broke a bone in my hand and is now…
Category: kick-ass wines
Who’s Buying Ultra Premium Wines? Not Millionaires (Tasting The 2011 Cloudburst Chardonnay)
I was recently contacted by a PR person who didn’t want to send me samples, but instead wanted to interview me about a wine. That probably sounds odd (it certainly feels odd to type it). I suppose that it is kind of odd. But it’s not freakishly walk-away-and-phone-the-authorities-because-this-person-is-totally-psycho odd, when you consider what the PR…
Brett May Not Be The Enemy (Talking Brett With MW Christy Canterbury, And Tasting WineSmith’s Crucible)
I’ve long waged a sort of mini-war (no height jokes!) on brettanomyces. Equating it to barnyard, horse sweat, and Band-Aid stinkiness in vino, as someone who’d personally rather go for the naked, unabashed, nowhere-to-hide purity of wines like Mosel Riesling over the bombast of overdone modern red wines, I hated how Brett buried wines in…
(Surprising) Results Of The 2013 Critics Challenge
Late last month, I wrapped up a stint at the fourth and final wine competition in which I’d be judging in 2013, the 10th Annual Critics Challenge in (Stay Classy) San Diego. The results of that comp. have been announced. Following are some thoughts on the Critics Challenge itself, and notes on some of the…