A Year in Wine

We're packing up, anticipating the long drive home. It's 1,500 miles of desert, most of it on the Baja California peninsula. To judge by past experience, however, it won't be dull. There's the subtle yet surprising shifts in geology and flora. There's ...

After 278 pages, Eric Asimov's advice to nascent wine enthusiasts in his book "How to Love Wine" can be summed up in one word: Relax. Don't get hung up on wines with high scores from this or that critic, don't get sidetracked by attempts for the perfec...

"Meme," I just learned, is only a fashionable synonym for "idea" and the various ways by which an idea is shared. For the longest time I thought it a bit of intellectual jargon meant to remind me of how out of touch I am. Was it descended from Greek my...

How big a story is it that The Wine Advocate is suing one of its former correspondents, Antonio Galloni, for fraud? It's this big: The Wine Cellar Insider broke the story with an opening sentence that ended with an exclamation point: "The Wine Advocate...

After two days and 192 wines tasted blind at the Dallas Morning News and TexSom Wine Competition earlier this week, here are a few notes squeezed from my scoresheets:- For character and value, is there another varietal more consistently rewarding these...

Matt Kramer (Alder Yarrow photo)Bless him, Matt Kramer has the wine community buzzing about something other than the pairing of food and wine, the alcohol content of wines, or Robert M. Parker Jr.In a speech at the New Zealand Pinot Noir 2013 conf...

Virtually every wine region in the country got something to brag about at the 2013 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, spread over four days in the northern Sonoma County hamlet of Cloverdale last week. Sorelle Winery's winning ro...

Back in the day when I was a restaurant critic, I occasionally devoted an early column of the new year to an explanation of how I went about my job. The format typically was in reply to questions I'd get from readers via phone calls, letters (yes, this...

The first obligation of wine bloggers is to keep an eye on Robert M. Parker Jr. He's the Pope of wine criticism, after all, and if he as much as hiccups some members of the wine-blogging community, not quite interpreting the data correctly, jump up to ...

Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti has been spending so much time jetting to Santa Monica to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the long-acclaimed Italian restaurant Valentino that he's almost overlooked an even more significant milestone - the 65th a...