Lunch with lydia

The sweet taste of success

Marc De Kuyper, 11th generation of the Dutch family that produces a rainbow of popular hard-partying liqueurs, didn’t exactly have a free ride into the business. He had to get the right degrees and succeed at several other jobs first. Finally, with an impressive resume in hand, he had to go through a series of formal interviews, business exams and psychological and IQ testing at De Kuyper Royal Distillers, which was founded in 1695 and has always been run by the family.

Wine

Matches for Super Bowl chow, from chili to Cheetos

Wow. The street price for a ticket to Super Bowl XLV is reportedly $2,000 and up. Way up. And an RV parking space for tailgating at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, where the average February high is 40 degrees, is $900.

Wine

Grapes: The more the merrier in white blends

Ask any good cook: When you make a complex dish such as curry chicken, you’re blending a dozen or more flavors — cardamom, turmeric, cumin, chilies, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, mustard, garlic, fennel, black pepper and others. Oh, and chicken.

Wine

Zinfandel: comfort wine for cold weather

Snow and cold weather blanket the Midwest and Northeast, and Miami is having its version of a cold snap, with daily highs barely in the mid-70s. It’s time for comfort foods – beef stews, macaroni and cheese, tuna casserole, chili.

Wine

Too many grapes don’t spoil these wines: 6 red blends, one just $10

It used to be that when winemakers blended two or more grapes into a wine, it was so the strengths of one could make up for the weaknesses of the others. France’s Bordeaux red had cabernet sauvignon for flavor and structure, malbec for its inky color, merlot for sweet and fleshy fruit.

Wine

Sicily: Old wines are new again

It’s not easy being Alessio Planeta, traveling the world to sell the wines of his native Sicily.

Wine

The best wines of 2011

It’s been a fabulous year for wine. Fans of the grape, whether Tea Party types or Occupy Wall Streeters, revolted and demanded cheaper wines. Sellers cut $90 wines to $50.

Beer

Seasonal beers are festive for the holidays

Beer for the holidays? Why not? It’s certainly in the right spirit. Kindly old Ben Franklin once said: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Shop local

Wines and beers with South Florida ties make great gifts

Wines and beers with South Florida ties make gifts in good taste

wine

Bubbly is at home for the holidays

As New Year’s Eve approaches, the question arises: Where do the bubbles in bubbly come from?

Wine

Private wine label reflects distinct vision of its creator

Alex Elman cried every night.

Wine

Wine a welcome holiday gift

Wine’s a great holiday gift. Most people appreciate it, for their future guests if not for themselves. At worse, it’ll be an elegant re-gift next season. You can bet your giftee will not be taking it back to the return counter.

Wine

Wine books are great for holiday gifting

Your friend/lover/colleague/boss is seriously into wine. He/she has so many bottles there’s no point in giving another. So what do you give this holiday season? A book about wine. There are lots of good ones out there. Here are a few I’ve come across:

Wine

Only the best wines are fit for Thanksgiving leftovers

What’s the most important thing about the day after Thanksgiving?

Wine

Malbec: Soft, sweet and user-friendly

Take a chocolate-covered cherry candy, turn it somehow into a red wine, and you’d have malbec — maybe the world’s most user-friendly red wine.

Miami lawyer makes wine on Long Island

Miami trial lawyer Mark Tobin is a weekend winemaker with a growing reputation

Wine

Moscato wines reap sweet success

Suddenly, moscato is hot. Young wine fans who didn’t get the memo that sweet wines are uncool are drinking it as an aperitif and with mild cheeses, fruit and fruity desserts, even with spicy Thai, Szechuan and other Asian dishes.

Wine

So many wines, so little time: Judging the Sonoma Harvest Fair

Over three busy days last month, I was one of 25 judges from around the country who tasted more than 1,000 wines from more than 150 vineyards at the Sonoma Harvest Fair Wine Competition in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Wine

Loire valley wines winning new fans

France’s Loire Valley is its own little 300-square-mile wine country, going its own way and doing very well at it.

Spirits

Bittersweet surrender: Try these over ice and soda or in a cocktail

It’s a bitter world out there judging from the growing tide of cocktail bitters, digestifs and aperitifs.

Wine

Austrian wine becomes hip in America

Austrian wines have had their ups and downs. Grapes were planted there in 500 B.C. by Celtish invaders, destroyed in 300 A.D. by barbarian hordes who didn’t appreciate a good glass of wine and restored in 700 by Charlemagne, who did. Then, in 1985, production dropped by 80 percent after a scandal in which a few winemakers illegally sweetened their wares with an illegal additive.

Wine

School’s in; let’s throw a wine tasting

Labor Day’s over. The kids are off to school or college. Suddenly we’re empty-nesters — at least for part of the day. It’s time for some mommy-and-daddy fun.

Wine

Wine fans tout their fave sweet wines

Revenge is sweet. In the past few weeks I’ve written about sweet white wines and sweet red wines — not supersweet dessert wines, but semisweet table wines to have with lunch or dinner.

Wine

FIU fall wine class to begin

Florida International University’s Wine Masters Certificate Program will hold its Fall Semester 2011 wine course from 6 . to 8:30 p.m. Mondays from Sept. 12-Dec. 5. Instructors Chip Cassidy, Bill Hebrank and Eric Hemer will teach the course for wine buyers or managers on the economics of buying and selling alcoholic beverages.

Wine

Life’s short; try a different wine today

If life’s too short to drink bad wine, it’s also too precious to drink the same wine day in and out. Even if you like it.

Wine

Sweet white wines — everybody loves them

Last week I wrote about sweet red table wines, then cringed awaiting the disapprobation of discriminating wine fans who find them not up to the fine standards of dry wines.

Washington State: The nation's other wine country

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.

Hip sips: A guide to South Florida wine tastings

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.

Castles of Tuscany now welcome (tourist) invaders

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.

Cuisine mirrors savory Thai culture

"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?

Stunning wines, rich and opulent, emerge from Priorato

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.

For richer or for poorer, New Orleans won't lighten up

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.

Vegas cuisine: New restaurants advance the city's reputation

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.

New York's wine country

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.

The wines of Chile

After stumbling starts, Chile stands ready to make major splash in the world of top-value wines

Taking a South Africa dining safari

Flamingo, hippo among rare dishes

Snapshots of South Africa

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.

Winning the peace in Russia

My Russian opponent became Nikita Khrushchev. I was Sylvester Stallone. Or maybe Chuck Norris. Things weren't all that clear at the moment.

Green flash or no, Michigan's dune country is cool and homey

Geologists say the Sleeping Bear dune that towers 300 feet above Lake Michigan's blue-green waters here is simply a few billion tons of sand ground fine by glaciers, tugged down by gravity and piled back up by wind and waves.