Category Archives: Articles

Louis Latour’s Corton-Charlemagne: An Age-Worthy White Burgundy

Maison Louis Latour’s Corton-Charlemagne is the benchmark wine for that grand cru vineyard.  Always tightly wound when young, its remarkable character opens and expands with years-even decades-of age.

The conventional wisdom holds that white wines don’t benefit from aging and often loses something, but this does not apply to most grand cru white Burgundies and certainly not to Latour’s Corton-Charlemagne.… Read more

Australia’s western frontier: Maverick vintners make sophisticated, well-priced wines on the other side of the Outback

Everyone knows about Australia’s inexpensive, fruit-driven, mass-produced wines — think Yellow Tail, the largest-selling wine brand in U.S. food stores by dollar volume, according to ACNielsen.

But there is a wine-producing part of the country that shatters just about every aspect of that image.… Read more

Prosecco: Sparkling Summer Sipping

Prosecco, Italy’s unique and stellar contribution to the world of sparkling wine, must have been invented for summertime.  Although the Italians drink it year round as an aperitif (consuming over two-thirds of the region’s 3 million case annual production), summer is the perfect discovery time for those unfamiliar with the joys of this light and “friendly” wine. … Read more

Special Report: Bordeaux 2005, A Vintage to Cellar

After a week in Bordeaux, where I tasted more than 400 wines from the 2005 vintage, there is no question that this is a great vintage for red, dry white and sweet white wines. Although nature was equally benevolent across the regions, winemaking techniques (how long to macerate, how much new wood) and decisions (when to pick) resulted in dramatically different styles of wine, especially in Saint-Emilion.… Read more

Refined Reds from the Wild West

The labels say “product of Australia,” but red wines from Western Australia are about as un-Australian as you can get. Those expecting super ripe flavors and 15 percent alcohol so common in Australian wines are in for a major–and pleasant–surprise. These wines, whether made from Cabernet or Shiraz, have elegance, finesse and complexity.… Read more

Vintage New York

The current fashion in wine, certainly in New World wines, is for ripe, fruity flavors and the massive alcohol that invariably accompanies them. Consumers looking for alternatives need to look outside the mainstream. Wines from New York State, which certainly qualify as “outside the mainstream,” offer an extra touch of ripeness that is the New World’s signature, while retaining vibrancy that a cool climate imparts.… Read more

This poor man’s Barolo is surprisingly rich

Barolo is the king of Italian wines. Made from the nebbiolo grape grown in a small, sharply delimited area surrounding the village of Barolo, near Alba in Piedmont, it requires a king’s ransom to put some in your cellar. Even after paying $50 to $100 a bottle and often more, you need plenty of patience because it’s a wine that needs many years of bottle aging before its complex glories emerge.… Read more

Enjoy a vintage Port without the waiting

Vintage Port, though one of the world’s great wines, is made the same way as all Port. The grapes are harvested, crushed, and fermented for only three days, instead of the usual 7-10 days for red table wine. At that point, the winemaker adds brandy, which raises the alcohol to 20 percent and kills the yeast, stopping fermentation before all the grape sugar has been converted to alcohol.… Read more

2001 Io has plumlike and peppery contrast

Back in the ’80s, when syrah, grenache, and mourvèdre were hardly known outside their traditional home in France’s Rhône Valley, a group of winemakers advocated growing them in California.

One of these Rhône Rangers was Byron ”Ken” Brown, who introduced Rhône varieties into the Santa Ynez Valley of Santa Barbara County while working at Zaca Mesa Winery.… Read more

A vintage champagne that’s affordable

Like other fine wine, champagne can improve with age, as Duval-Leroy’s nearly 10-year-old vintage champagne demonstrates. Although 1996 produced excellent wines throughout France, no region did better than Champagne, where it will rank as one of the greatest vintages ever.

Most champagne is nonvintage; a blend of wine from several years’ harvests aimed at producing a consistent house style year after year.… Read more

New Zealand Bubbly Deserves A Toast

Champagne, without doubt the world’s best bubbly, is a good but pricey way to alleviate end-of-summer blues. Often, we must make do with a less-expensive alternative, sparkling wine.

Notwithstanding the label of some California sparkling wines, true champagne comes only from a specified method using chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier grown in the Champagne region of France, about 100 miles east of Paris.… Read more

Let Your Palate Pick What’s Fit to Savor

It’s important to trust your palate when it comes to wine. Recommendations from so-called experts and friends are helpful, of course, but should never be the final word because sometimes reviewers disagree. Take, for example, Grgich’s 2002 Chardonnay. A national specialized wine magazine gave it an average score, 76, earlier in the year, but I’ve tasted it twice recently and thought it was terrific.… Read more

A wine blend from quality grapes

In 1395, Phillip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, banned what he called the ”très mauvais” (very bad) gamay grape from Burgundy, relegating it to Beaujolais, a less prestigious area further south. But as with many royal decrees, not everybody listened. So there is still plenty of gamay planted in Burgundy, even though pinot noir is considered the red grape of that region.… Read more