They say a well-turned phrase doesn't become a cliché unless it's true, and in that case, California chardonnay is America's biggest wine cliché. Doesn't matter if we tire of it. Doesn't matter if we rail against it and start ABC movements, vowing ''anything but chardonnay.''
Down along France's Rhône River, south of the region where the pricey Burgundy wines are made, is the Rhône Valley. Many a time when I was put off by the prices of Burgundy on a restaurant wine list, I have turned to Rhône wines to save my daughter's inheritance.
Cabernet sauvignon may have been born in France, but today it's the quintessential American wine -- big and brash, supremely self-confident, a little loud, even rude at times.
I once visited Italy for a wine competition. In preparation, I read a 300-page book on Italian wines and wrote down the name of every one of them -- only to find a dozen wines I'd never heard of once I arrived.
Remember merlot? Remember how good it was -- soft, smooth and creamy, redolent of black cherries, mint and spice? Remember how it was a hedonistic haven for those who loved red wine but found cabernet sauvignon a bit too muscular?
Marcelo Papa has an enviable job. He's winemaker for several of the lines at Concha y Toro, Chile's biggest wine company. Its portfolio stretches from Frontera, whose chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon and merlot sell on supermarket shelves for $9 per magnum, to the august Don Melchor, perhaps Chile's best cabernet sauvignon, at $50 a bottle.
Still America's favorite white wine, chardonnay continues to evolve, always seeking that sweet spot of consumer satisfaction.
Wine is like revenge. Both are best served cold. But just how cold the wine should be depends on type -- red, white or pink -- plus grape variety, flavor profile, quality level and even where it was made.
Chris Hancock has been watching you eat and says he has you figured out. When you're dining, you don't bother with the sniff-sip-and-slosh method of drinking wine, he says. You just drink it.
No matter how long they argue, winemakers never will agree on how to make sauvignon blanc. One camp believes it should be sweet and full of pineapples, like chardonnay. Another contingent seeks the green, feline flavors of France's Loire Valley. There's the grassy style, the flinty style and so on.
If Alice (in Wonderland) can believe in six impossible things before breakfast, I can appreciate six improbable tipples by happy hour. Some of the following are rarer than others, but all are items you don't come across in your average supermarket (you gotta go to a wine shop).
Looking to make a big splash at your next party? Consider the spaceship-like Soiree, a globular glass aerator that lets your wine breathe while you're pouring.
Bertrand de Fleurian, U.S. president of Laurent-Perrier Champagne, has three definitions of luxury. First is drinking Laurent-Perrier. Second is having the time to do what one pleases. Third is having someone you want to please.
Here's one for you: What kind of wine goes with sauerkraut? Easy. It's riesling. Not just any riesling, but the powerful, aromatic riesling from the French region of Alsace.
Here are some wines you don't see every day. But they can be delightful, so I want to tell you about them. These aren't supermarket wines, for the most part. You'll have to visit your local wine shop -- which is a nice idea anyway on a hot and steamy Saturday in the doggiest days of summer.
Quick, what's America's biggest wine region? If you answered California's Napa Valley, you're way off thanks to a federal ruling that has just created a new one. It's the Upper Mississippi River Valley, covering a whopping 29,914 square miles and encompassing portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. That's 39 times the Napa Valley's 759 or so square miles.
The French have an advantage over Americans in making pinot noir -- a 1,000-year head start. The hallowed 4 1/2-acre plot in Burgundy where the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti makes its $1,000-a-bottle pinot noir wines was first planted in 1040. California didn't get into the grape in a big way until the 1970s and '80s
If wine doesn't sit around long in your house, you don't worry about storing it. But maybe you want to take advantage of your wine shop's cheaper-by-the-case policy, or you've come into a few bottles of good wine that need aging. If so, it's time to make some decisions about storing your wine.
When wineries are owned by families rather than big corporations, they have greater latitude to make changes, and often the ability to make better wines.
Wineries get it. They understand that readers send me angry e-mails when I write about $40 wines and tell me I'm a fine fella when I describe the joys of more frugal libations. So those wineries are putting out a great variety of good value wines at $15 and under.
Life goes on despite the economy. Graduations, weddings, anniversaries are rites of passage that call for celebratory meals with fine, congratulatory wines. This can be hard with money tight.
If you were going to create a winery, wouldn't it be nice to start from scratch? You could if you were a multimillionaire businessman like Jerry Brassfield. The son of a Fresno, Calif., rancher, he left home at 19 to found his own empire -- direct sales of vitamins and nutritional supplements in 50 countries, half a dozen car dealerships, restaurant stock.
Grass, sagebrush and herbs. Slate, wet stones and mouth-puckering citrus. Mango, kiwi and ruby-red grapefruit. Flavorless viscosity, like vodka without the fun.
Here's a sign of the times: The new website gobyo.com has easy-to-use listings of restaurants in 10 U.S. metropolitan areas -- including South Florida -- that welcome diners who tote their own wine.
You're headed to the beach this summer and, as light reading, you're going to polish off War and Peace. Right. Let me suggest something more realistic: nice summer reading about wine, beer and booze. Here are some good new offerings:
In 1992, Kim and Mark Longbottom started a winery in Australia's Padthaway district in the country's cool southern region, a three-hour drive from the chilly Antarctic Sea.
It's a little like the auto industry. Winemakers, understanding our sour economic mood, are scrambling to please us. They're not always lowering prices on existing products; instead, they're creating new blends, even new wines, at lower prices. And if they already have popular wines at popular prices, they're taking them off the lower shelves and placing them at eye-level so we will notice them.
``Drink champagne for no reason at all.'' That's one of Life's Little Instructions, from the chirpy little list by H. Jackson Brown that's on the wall in my dentist's office. It comes after ''Call your mother'' and before ``Always wear polished shoes.''
Bobby Flay, the native New Yorker who champions Southwestern cuisine and made his name by elevating chile peppers, cilantro and corn, may put his culinary career on the back burner one of these days, he says.
When hard-charging former Texas Instruments exec Kathy Charlton offered Bordeaux winemaker Benoit Murat a job in her new winery on the Pacific Ocean side of Seattle in 1999, he wondered if she was serious.
Listen carefully. That slurping sound you hear is from all the wine tastings -- a score or more -- happening at shops, restaurants and hotels around South Florida each week.
In the rolling hills of Tuscany, where the sun casts a yellow-green glow over the landscape, causing the grape vines and olive trees to vibrate with color, every good-sized hilltop sports an ancient rock castle. In the Middle Ages they were fortresses, grim redoubts from which warriors under siege poured cauldrons of boiling oil down onto enemy soldiers trying to top the walls with scaling ladders.
"You can eat spicy, sir?" Every time I order in a restaurant in this noisy, steamy, teeming, traffic-clogged, friendly and fascinating city, they ask me that. With the sweetest of smiles. But I'm worried. What are they preparing me for? Warning me against? Is there some hidden national conspiracy to fry the foreigner's palate, then protest that they tried to warn me?
High in the Serra de Montsant mountains 100 miles southwest of Barcelona, an intrepid group of winemakers has banded together to take an ancient, fallen wine area and restore it to past glories. It's called Priorato.
New Orleans, "The City That Care Forgot," clings proudly to the cuisine that time forgot, its huge portions, rich sauces and decadent desserts, be they in the Creole tradition of the seafood gumbo at Arnaud's, the Cajun "paneed" (breaded) rabbit at Brigtsen's or the traditional French Poulet Rochambeau at Galatoire's.
A waiter at Picasso, the elegant restaurant in the Bellagio Hotel whose walls boast eight real (if minor) paintings by that fabled artist, reports that one diner recently ordered six $19 servings of foie gras with pear butter and pomegranate -- all for himself. As long as this gambling city attracts high-living high rollers like him, its boom in fine restaurants seems likely to continue.
It's a cool, sunny morning, and the wineries of the Finger Lakes Wine Trail, in the rolling, vine-covered hills that slope down to deep blue Keuka, Seneca and Cayuga lakes in central New York, are pouring samples of their wares for visiting tourists. The wines are surprisingly varied -- both familiar and little-known, tracing the whole history of the American vine: chardonnay and riesling and merlot; baco noir and seyval blanc; catawba, elvira and Delaware.
After stumbling starts, Chile stands ready to make major splash in the world of top-value wines
How could I absorb a country in a week? Especially one as complex and contradictory as this? I couldn't. Dashing frantically from sensation to exotic sensation, at the peak of endurance every 18-hour day, I experienced the trip as a blur.
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