95 Dalla Valle Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Rarely, words are inadequate to convey a wine's sublime & heavenly balancing act. $350 A+ # 81 Trefethen Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Spice & barnyard suggest its previous potential, now thoroughly dead. (Price N/A) C # 07 William Hill Chardonnay (Napa Valley): A deftly balanced take on the…
The 2010 Wine Writers Symposium in 10 Easily Digestible & Tasty Morsels
Alternative title: “What I Learned (So Far) At the 2010 Professional Wine Writers Symposium in Napa” Symposium Chairperson and Wines & Vines editor Jim Gordon, may, in fact, be the sweetest and most patient person on the planet (there remains one more day of symposium activities in which to properly test this theory). The amount…
The Best Wine $1 You’ll Ever Spend
This blog probably doesn’t attract as many newbie wine lovers these days as it does ‘intermediate’ wine lovers, other wine bloggers, and wine industry folk. Well, this is a post for those intrepid wine newbies, and the people who love them (or, the people who feel obligated to buy them wine-related gifts, anyway). Because I…
You Can Keep Your Varietal and Shove It Up Your Variety
I am giving up on what has become a totally fruitless quest ending in a miasma of heartbreak and despair; I hereby renounce my Sisyphusian efforts, and will no longer roll this impossibly heavy boulder of writing wisdom up the mountain of populist adversity, only to have it come heaving down to crush the vulnerable…