If you want to join the ranks of wine collectors who put bottles away for the future, you’ll need to provide your selections with the optimum conditions for aging. Proper storage improves the chances that your wines will delight, not disappoint, when you open them.
Like many of the top wine regions in Europe, the 2005 vintage has worked its magic on the wines of the Loire Valley, and there are more outstanding vinous choices currently available from this bucolic region than has been the case for a generation.
In keeping with this issue’s theme, the decision before me was how to prepare a meal of authentic French provincial cuisine with which to pair appropriate French regional wines.
Provence. The name itself conjures up images of azure blue skies, golden fields of sunflowers, gnarled cypress trees reaching for the heavens, a seascape dotted with fishing vessels, and the pervasive bouquet of lavender, roses, and the sea.
The warmth and comfort we find so desirable in our cuisine during those cold, stern months contrasts sharply with what we find splendid in the summer.
Champagne holds a timeless and special place in the universe of wine, and it is a wine with which so many milestones in life are shared and measured. For hundreds of years the unique sparkling wines of these rolling hills east of Paris have captured the imaginations of artists and courtiers, and the world has been a richer place for the addition of a bit of bubbly.
California cabernet sauvignon has never been more popular than it is in the first decade of the twenty-first century. But has it ever been better than it is today?
Melbourne, Australia, 1870 AD. Despite the fact that you drink wine regularly at your large and stately home and that wine grapes had been planted here since the arrival of the first European settlers in 1788, none of what you drink is Australian.
In 1973, while writing the wine column for the Washington Post, I received a phone call from James Bear, then Curator of Thomas Jefferson’s restored home at Monticello.
The Mediterranean diet has long been hailed as a model for how to eat for healthy living. One of the pillars of the Mediterranean diet is olive oil, and often it’s the only fat present in the diets of people described as healthy for how they eat.